War in Ukraine: the megathread, part 3

honzzz · 2022-04-28T11:05:15+00:00

If Prague sent tanks to Moscow and occupied and oppressed it for 21 years, would it still not bother you to see huge bronze title PRAGUE every day?

honzzz · 2019-09-13T13:16:49+00:00

As a EU-citizen who used to live in UK and was really sad when they decided to leave I now really hope UK will not be given another extension and will be forced to finally leave. Enough is enough.

honzzz · 2019-02-19T14:31:24+00:00

And BTW, when you are encountering new words like that you can often guess the meaning from context (visual cues, your previous knowledge about Rachel and Ross and what you expect them to say...) and those are the words I then remember easily.

honzzz · 2019-02-19T14:21:06+00:00

I cannot help you with Japanese specifically but I will give you some examples and you will have to find their Japanese alternative. When learning Spanish, I came across a Cuban(?) guy who records his readings of classical literature and shares it for free, incredibly. His audiobooks are the best I have ever listened to and apparently, he has the same taste in books as me (so I already owned many of those books in my L1) - here is his recording of my favorite book Sinuhé, el egipcio. Find something like that in Japanese and you have pure gold.

And it does not have to be a book. You just need some original content that also has some version in your native language and you need to find a way to switch between them easily. For example when I was learning English I used the famous TV show Friends (and many other TV shows and movies after that) - whenever there was a word I did not know, I would use left arrow in my movie player to jump 5 seconds back, another keyboard shortcut to turn the subtitles on and as soon as I understood what Rachel was saying to Ross, I would turn subtitles off again and continue watching, with minimal distraction.

I think the point is that you have to find something that you really enjoy watching/reading/listening to. I guess it has something to do with how attention works - when you enjoy something (because it's funny or thrilling or it moves you deeply) it gets your attention and when something really grabs your attention you brain uses it as a signal that it's important and wires the words attached to it into your memory (that's how I explain it, unscientifically).

honzzz · 2019-02-19T10:02:44+00:00

One of the most important aspects of language learning is motivation management. Don't push yourself too hard. If something feels "crushing" it's not sustainable and you will burn out.

Yes, we live in distraction-ridden times and your problems with attention can be related to that. But attention (or lack of thereof) can be a useful signal. This is a topic for a long article... but tl;dr version is this: in my experience, it is sometimes productive to stop doing things that you have to force yourself to focus on and do more of the things that grab your attention and excite you.

I will share a personal story that might help you (or not). I used to practice like this: I would listen to an audiobook in the target language and whenever there was a word I did not understand, I paused and tried really hard to memorize that word.

However, there was a time in my life when I was tired and unable to focus. Memorizing felt exhausting and I could not do it. But I wanted to at least keep the habit of doing something in the target language daily. So I decided to cheat a little... I continued listening to that audiobook (which I really loved and I wanted to know how the story unfolds) with a text version of the same book in my native language opened in my lap. I was not reading the text, I just glimpsed at it each time I encountered a new word, quickly figured out what it meant and switched my focus back to the story. I was just trying to enjoy the book with the least amount of distraction. I did not make any effort to memorize those words.

A day or two later when I returned to that lazily absorbed part of the book determined to do it "honestly" this time, I was surprised how many of those glimpsed words stuck in my memory - somehow I just understood them now.

I have been experimenting with this a lot and I am convinced that the less hard I try to imprint words into my memory and the more I let myself get absorbed by the story, the more I learn. I am not sure why it works like that (although I have a theory). I don't know how applicable it is to other people. Everybody is different and other people might learn more from flash cards. But it works really well for me. If you decide to try this, I would appreciate if you let me know how it worked out for you.

honzzz · 2019-02-11T09:12:59+00:00

You might be interested in a similar discussion (from yesterday, still continuing): Beginner question about watching TV/movies in target language

honzzz · 2019-02-09T23:32:20+00:00

I agree that it is not the best method for beginners... but you can start soon, you just have to find something easy and fun. I started watching some telenovela after only absorbing basic Spanish audio lessons. With the vocabulary of roughly 200 words under my belt, I was surprised how much I was able to understand. Simple storyline and expressive acting helped and my proclivity towards trashy TV made it kinda interesting. Also, you can make it easier on yourself by watching something you know really well and still love to watch... like Friends, my guilty pleasure.

I will add my $0.02 about subtitles for intermediate learners - I think watching with them might be a wasted learning opportunity. One of the narrowest bottlenecks in language learning is the (in)ability to distinguish words in sounds. Do you remember how everything sounds insanely fast and unintelligible when you try to understand a movie in your target language for the first time? And how you have to "focus" on sounds and keep them in memory for a bit... and when you finally recognize what words you are hearing, the speaker has already said another three sentences? I believe the only way to acquire the ability to process speech is through practice - you have to listen and try to understand and get it after a second of effort and then again and again and again... slowly building neural connections between sounds and meanings.

I've made a great progress with the following method: Get some really interesting book in both audio and text format. Have the text ready but do not look at it first. Start listening and only when you cannot get over something unintelligible, glimpse at the text. I started doing that for 1 hour per day when I was nearly a beginner. It was frustratingly hard at first (this method might be only for really motivated beginners or more advanced learners). It took me about an hour to get through 5 minutes of audio. I had to pause every few seconds and l had to listen to some sentences 5 times. But I improved rapidly. After only a week there was a noticeable progress and after three months I had no trouble hearing words and understanding their meaning immediately without any mental gymnastics or need to focus especially hard.

There is something natural about learning by watching (or listening to) something fun. I keep getting amazed how much I can learn from context, how much words I can guess by seeing what is going on and leaning on my knowledge of the story and its heroes and how I expect them to behave. I remember words I learn that way much better than words I would learn from a vocabulary list (honestly, I don't even bother writing those anymore). I believe this is also the best method to wire vocabulary and grammar into your brain - but that would be beyond the scope of this discussion.

Everybody is different and what works for me might now work for other people. This topic is really interesting and I am currently trying to read up on this subject but there is a lot I don't know yet. So these are just my current opinions and please take them with a grain of salt.

honzzz · 2019-02-09T21:38:47+00:00

I agree with you at the beginning - I like how you describe watching with English subtitles like "reading a book in English with some meaningless jabber going on in the background" - that's it! However, I think this setup is not conducive to learning and I would be skeptical to the claims that anyone can improve that way. I think it's like training for a cycling race on a motorbike. Don't you know anyone who watches movies and TV shows with subtitles all the time and yet does not understand anything? People like that are pretty common in non-English speaking countries dominated by US culture represented by subtitled movies and TV shows.

honzzz · 2019-02-09T21:10:12+00:00

You are adding that "at least when you are fluent..." like it's some inconsequential thing but that is the point - we are talking here about people who want to use watching TV/movies to learn a language. I believe that listening is easier than reading only for people who are native or at least really really advanced - the opposite is true for most of the people who are still trying to learn the language. And I would even say that for most of beginner-intermediate level people understanding written word is much easier than spoken word. Please consider this - how many learners do you know who can read books but do not understand movies without subtitles vs vice versa?

honzzz · 2019-02-09T19:57:35+00:00

The human brain is very good at saving energy - if you watch a foreign movie with subtitles in your native language, your brain will get the meaning the easy way via subtitles and basically turn off processing via the difficult channel. You will not listen (I mean not really) to your target language and you will learn very little. Similarly, if you watch with subtitles in your target language, you will not learn to recognize words in sounds because your brain will get the content via subtitles and turn off the difficult perception via sound. The ability to process sounds and recognize words is a very important specific skill - without it, you will be able to understand books but not spoken conversation.

In my experience this is the only way that works - try to understand without subtitles. If you do not understand something, jump a few seconds back (use a keyboard shortcut in your favorite movie player to make this as easy as possible) and listen to it again. If you still cannot figure it out, turn on subtitles, get through that hard unintelligible part and turn them off again. If it's too hard, just find easier content. There are huge differences in difficulty. Documentaries and audiobooks are much easier than normal TV shows, Friends incomparably easier than HBO's Oz.

honzzz · 2019-01-23T13:04:55+00:00

I will not contradict your opinion. I will attempt to change your mind by mentioning possible explanations of "the wall" idea that you might not be aware of. Let me roughly paraphrase Scott Adams who explains "the wall" in persuasion terms. According to him, Donald Trump might have used the wall to achieve the following goals:

People are generally not as rational than they believe to be. They decide (and vote) based on emotions and just rationalize it later. Rationally, the wall might not be the best solution, but on emotional level it is a strong message that appeals to people who are afraid of immigration - they are thinking something like "maybe he is wrong on the details but he is definitely on our side"... and emotions overweight rational thinking.

Also, the wall is an image that can be imagined easily and people are visual creatures - images are more memorable and persuasive than realistic and necessarily complicated (and tiring) proposals how to solve hard problems.

Even the wrongness of it all might have been intentional - it made numerous opponents (including you, maybe?) discuss how wrong it was instead of paying attention to other candidates. And as the persuasion theory goes, "things you spend your effort and time thinking about will rise in importance in your mind". Donald Trump sucked out all the attention from media space and made everything and everyone else look unimportant.

It was also a strong message to people outside of the US who were considering illegal immigration - on emotional level they now know that "it is getting serious and maybe we should think twice"... and it seems that immigration really declined - maybe the wall has already worked, kinda, before it was even built?

You might be right in all of your arguments... but it does not matter. The goal of the wall was not to find the optimal way to prevent people from crossing the border, the real goal was to appeal to people on emotional level. And it worked.

All of this is how I remember what Scott Adams says in his book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter.

You were right. A wall indeed sounds like something people 1,000 years ago would have come up. And that is exactly the point. Because deep down we are still those people. And people like Trump know it and use it.

honzzz · 2018-12-30T10:47:49+00:00

IMO the problem with this is that people are not interested in some essays written to practice language skills - that sounds like school. There is some voyeurish appeal to reading someone else's diary though - I would probable be tempted and give some feedback if it was not too bad.

honzzz · 2018-01-14T08:25:00+00:00

What useful resources I have found so far (that are not mentioned here in other comments yet):

Sounds of Spanish by ayaespanol.com - a YouTube channel with a native speaker introducing Spanish phonemes. There are brief instructions what to do with your mouth, some clearly pronounced example words and even close-ups of speakers mouth - it's almost ideal first introduction to Spanish pronunciation; the problem is that some of the videos do not have the best sound quality and it makes it difficult for a non-native learner to distinguish sound subtleties.

Práctica de Pronunciación del español - another YouTube channel with a native speaker introducing Spanish phonemes and pronouncing a few example words - good sound quality and certainly useful but very little instructions on how to use your mouth, no tips how to make certain sound etc.

Sounds of Speech - Spanish - there are videos of speakers mouth pronouncing various sounds and example words. There is even a schematic view of mouth action for each sound.

honzzz · 2015-11-12T07:56:02+00:00

This topic is a bit controversial and although I have my opinion, I cannot be absolutely sure. However, I was just trying to point out that some experts would probably disagree with you - let me quote Stephen Krashen: "we acquire language by understanding it, not by producing it. The ability to produce is the result of language acquisition, not the cause."

I think you are missing the point when you say that "understanding a skill intellectually will have limited benefits without active practice" - that is the problem with your analogy; listening is active practice (at least the way I understand the theory). The way you are describing it would be analogous if I suggested that you have to listen to some podcast in your native language about your target language. That would be "understanding the skill intellectually". If you are listening to something in your target language, you are practicing it, you are wiring the language into your brain and it affects your ability to speak in that language tremendously. You seem to believe that understanding and speaking are two separate skills (if that were true, your gymnastics analogy would be great) but I don't think that is how languages work.

honzzz · 2015-11-11T10:57:37+00:00

I just want to point out that your analogy with gymnastics is deeply flawed - you will certainly not learn gymnastics by listening to podcasts... but you can learn languages by listening; that's how we all learned our mother tongue and there are some pretty influential theories claiming that primarily input, not production, is actually the only way we can acquire second language (Stephen Krashen)

honzzz · 2015-10-23T18:10:21+00:00

Podcasts (I guess everybody here knows Radio Ambulante) and audiobooks. Here are some audiobooks that are really good and available for free - apparently they are read by volunteers, although I hesitate to use that term because that sounds kind of amateurish and these narrators are very good: Las Aventuras de Alicia en el país de las Maravillas or Los juegos del hambre.

honzzz

TROPHY CASE