Monday, January 21, 2008

Vary your resources for more effective learning

This week, via Amazon, I got Colloquial Breton. A lot of the material in the opening chapters is familiar from my reading of the Assimil Breton sans peine. But I'm a little clearer on what's going on with the language.

When I took French in high school, the course was very much grammar-translation, and as a result, my speech was far from fluid when I hit university. But I had a core knowledge of French just waiting to be activated, and between university courses and living in France, the French language became a part of me.

With Breton, I've sort of been doing it the other way around - I've seen a bit of what the language looks like on the surface, but with only a limited view of the structure underneath. This works for some people and some languages. It doesn't work so well for me. I've learned a tremendous amount from the Assimil and from working through poems I've found online. Leafing through the dialogs in my new book, I'm astonished at how much is familiar. But I haven't known what to do with that knowledge.

Working in a language school, I often run into people who think they know more than they do. Because they recognize most of the words, they think they are ready to study something else - that they need more challenging comprehensible input. But comprehension doesn't rest in words alone. Knowing what's going on at the structural level (is the verb indicative or subjunctive, past or present, eg) conveys a lot of information about how to evaluate what's going on with the vocabulary elements. And that's been lacking - I've known what was being talked about, but not how it was being talked about. While the Colloquial Breton course is far from perfect, it gives me another window on the language, so that I can see it at another angle.

I might have said this before (eye roll) but... Whatever language you're learning, it's a good idea to have multiple resources, that way when something is giving you trouble, you can go back to something easier with another book, or learn about the concept that's giving you trouble from another perspective. To this longstanding suggestion, I would add that it's a good idea to have at least one grammar focused resource and one everyday usage resource, if possible, so that you can get a sense for how the language is supposed to work, as well as a feel for how it works in practice.

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Josh said...

I've also found it helpful to have multiple approaches of a attack. In regards to Russian, for example, I switch back and forth between Brown's "New Penguin Russian Course" and Duff's "Russian for Beginners". Sometimes the way something is presented is pretty much the same in both; other times, they're drastically different. Duff's book had a good summary of the present tense conjugations that helped me remember them, whereas Brown's was mostly just table information - this ending for this person and number, etc.

5:36 AM  
Blogger gbarto said...

Years ago, I tried Duff's course, alone. I didn't get too far. I can see where adding the Penguin would be useful for it's grammar info. Just as I find the Colloquial Breton to be good for making sure I learned what I thought I was supposed to from the Assimil.

Best of luck with the Russian. I've always had a hard time with languages with a "rich morphology." I realize that for natives, all those endings are great clues as to how the sentence goes together. But I've never been able to internalize them the way that I've come to automatically see, eg, the relationship between noun and adjective by gender marking in French.

2:19 PM  

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