Comments on: Le scaphandre and the diving bell

By: Ken Allan

Ken Allan — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 05:10:10 +0000

TÄ“nÄ? koe Dave.

Robert Frost said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”
I suspect that the scope for what can get lost may be much wider than that!

Ka kite
from Middle-earth

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 01:11:09 +0000

John, I would tend to agree — I’ve spent an hour or two at a time, listening to people talking in French and only catching, say, 25%. But the high frequency stuff, as you say, comes out. What’s more, when I start making connections — e.g., recognizing that XXX is pronounced this way, and YYY is pronounced that way — they’re my connections.

A different kind of learning from the abstract in grammar. Not that that’s to be dismissed — I was in my 50s before someone pointed out that almost all French nouns ending in -ion are feminine (la nation, la coopÃ©ration, la question). I like having a broad class of words I don’t need to think about.

Most of the time, though, I do the kind of ear training you talk about. A friend recommended the songs of Georges Brassens. At first I had to have both the text and an translation; then, just the text; now, for a few songs, I can sing along with Georges in the car.

By: John B

John B — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:50:58 +0000

For me, the biggest benefit of consuming media in the L2, even when you don’t understand all (or most) of it, is that it lets the brain’s natural pattern recognition abilities do their magic. It takes a while — I’ve listened to The Incredibles probably a dozen times on my walks in the last week — but high frequency things start to leak out.

People talk a lot about how children learn, and this is basically it. I suppose, if I was willing to spend the sort of time that a child puts in (tens of thousands of hours before they’re five), I could pick up the language in this way basically without any reference to L1. As I’m on a schedule, I use media saturation to train my ear and pick items that are worth learning, and then look them up, drill them, etc. It’s very satisfying to listen to a movie that you’ve listened to so many times before and come away understanding more of it each time.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:56:26 +0000

Guy, thank you for letting me know.

This is truly a loss.

By: Guy W. Wallace

Guy W. Wallace — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:42:10 +0000

Dave,

FYI- Dr. Rummler passed away last night of an apparent heart attack.

Guy

Sorry- This is the quickest way for me to inform you.