I "Blitzed" 50 Books in 50 Days – My Experiment in Language Learning(buttondown.email) |
I "Blitzed" 50 Books in 50 Days – My Experiment in Language Learning(buttondown.email) |
What I have done is listen to a foreign language audiobook while having the text in English, which I find extraordinarily helpful at an intermediate level where you understand most of the words but may not catch the full meaning.
disagree. from what i experience, some of the most helpful parts of reading are when you stop and take a minute to ponder the words, or write it in the side column. Thats the main downside to audiobooks imo, you dont have time to stop and think. That applies whether you just use audiobook or audiobook + reading text, but not in the caze of just reading.
One thing what helps a lot is .. turning the subtitles off. Or just make the video run at the background, where you can occasionally glimpse it, but it's not your primary activity.
It’s the same when watching foreign TV. Having subtitles on in the same language that is spoken is really useful, you learn more than only reading or only listening.
The key to learning is comprehensible input. You want to understand 98% of what you're reading. You can get that through repeatedly reading the same things, through graded readers, and through the use of bilingual dictionaries. Once you get to the point when you can make a switch to interesting arbitrary target language reading using only a target language dictionary, it becomes a virtuous circle and simply a matter of time.
If the orthography of a language is weird, I could see this being useful to get to the next step, but as far as I know Polish orthography is straightforward (unlike English, French, or Chinese for example.)
edit: on second thought, it might help with acquiring the prosody of Polish even if you're just listening (and hopefully reading along out loud) to the sounds like a dog would. Prosody is half the battle.
edit2: also translations are a pretty bad idea. You're trying to pick up the prosody of Polish, but you're reading people trying to imitate English in Polish. Unless it's a very free translation to the point that it distorts the original work. Just find out what Polish people are doing; their cultural references are part of the language anyway.
> To translate, you'll rely on your existing knowledge, quick look-ups, context clues, and the audiobook's narration (inflection, pacing, etc.).
What the author is basically describing is a poor approximation of an Assimil course -- listening to the audio while hoping some ML translations give them the gist of what's going on. It's probably fine, but it just seems like a lot of wasted effort. With Assimil I've gotten to B1 reading/listening (but not speaking) in a little over 3 months with 30-40 minutes a day, and that's because it's designed to build you up from complete beginner. I'd be curious to know where they're at after 50 days and how many hours they've put in for comparison.
You already know the context so can fill in the gaps. Something about this process felt closer to the natural way you learn language growing up and helped develop my intuition for the languages grammar and vocab. I quickly found myself saying words I didn’t know I knew and using tenses I hadn’t yet started actively learning.
Reading aloud was also great for pronunciation as your mouth/tongue is effectively doing “reps” for kind of sound combinations of the language (which are often different to the sound combinations of your own language)
I am not quite at the level of full reading books in Polish but am about to take a full-time summer course in Krakow and I'm really hoping to come out of it a couple levels higer.
Also what is the author's first language? Polish seems like a weird fit for a method like this if you were a native English speaker.
All-in-all a bit strange. Feels like picking up a conversation half-way through, but it's the only post on the site.