February 10, 2009
Attentiveness and language learning
Attentiveness, the ability to notice what is happening in a language, is essential to language learning success. How much of what is done in language teaching and learning is directed towards increasing the learner's attentiveness. If we are serious about sports we spend time on our conditioning, strength, flexibility etc. What about our language learning fitness? Attentiveness is a large part of that fitness.
I notice that learning any language increases my general level of attentiveness to other languages. I am not sure which learning activities stimulate my attentiveness the most.
Certainly concentrated listening helps my listening. I have been doing a lot of listening since I discovered Echo Moskvi. I decided to do a little Portuguese today. (There is a chance that I will travel to Brazil next January for the wedding of the daughter of a friend. So I decided that I should really put more effort into Portuguese) .
What do you know? After a long absence, my ability to understand Portuguese had improved. I felt that I was in a state of alertness listening to the Portuguese content that I had downloaded from LingQ. I felt that the state of alertness was similar to alertness that I feel when I listen to Russian. My Russian listening is conditioning me to listen to other languages.
I feel that my attention to examples of the different words and phrases that I have saved and tagged and edit and looked at, is making me more alert when I hear these cases in Russian. I am starting to feel the inevitability of the connection between a particular ending and a particular meaning. Yet when I go to speak, I am under more pressure and cannot easily produced these endings. If I were not so lazy I would write, where I could refer to the declension table while writing. That would also make me more attentive and more alert and might help the transition to speaking correctly.
We will see. I may write more. I may speak more. I may just keep on doing what I am doing.
My goal, however, is to speak Russian with the cases 75-80% correct within 3 months without sacrificing confidence and comfort level when speaking. I suspect that my attention to the cases will make more alert and attentive over all and help me remember words in general.
February 10, 2009
How many words do you know? How many have you looked up in a dictionary?
I think that I might know 50,000 or so words of English. That is what a college educated person is supposed to know in English. How often have I looked up a word in the dictionary? Not often, other then when playing scrabble and trying some word that just may be in the dictionary.
Apparently I only knew 7,000 words when I was seven and 14,000 when I was fourteen. I learned from exposure. Now things are not that easy in a second language, but it just shows that the brain can absorb information from sheer input.