Things you love or hate in language textbooks

[Ser]

I dunno about that, I must say I haven't had a good experience with such books myself. What do you exactly have in mind for how to present new vocab? (Like what kind of context or style or what.)

Sentences where you already know the rest of the words.

"I live in a vaskwipst. There's only 100 people in my vaskwipst. The vaskwipst is 20 kilometres from the city. In the vaskwipst everybody sasamana's eating vegetables, but not me. I kiwipini eating vegetables. I kiwipini them because they aren't tasty. I don't kiwipini fruit, fruit is tasty. I sasamana fruit. Near my vaskwipst there was a very tall popolog. The popolog had tasty fruit. One day a man from the vaskwipst cut down the popolog. I kiwipinimi men that cut down popologs. So I told him to gagabugu a new popolog that will grow and have more tasty fruit. It's important to gagabugu new popologs after you cut one down."

Nice example. Now that's one paragraph where the approach does work.

It works for the very beginning too:

"Yoyo John aba. John Sabagada aba. Yoyi Mary aba. Mary wiwi Sabagada aba. John obo Mary Sabagadagi abagi. Yoyo Hokitokipoki aba. Hokitokipoki Sabagada giga aba. Hokitokipoki Banana aba. Yoyi Sikiwikiliki aba. Sikiwikiliki wiwi Banana aba. Hokitokipoki obo Sikiwikiliki Sabagadagi giga abagi. Bananagi abagi."

And here's one where it doesn't. Really, it's quite hard to follow, there's just too many words that you (generic) don't know. Maybe, it isn't obvious to you (Astraios) because you wrote the exercise.

Learning doesn't have to be "fun", it doesn't have to be "interactive", it doesn't have to be "innovative", it doesn't have to be "a game". Learning has to be effective, and effective learning is hard and repetitive.

It doesn't have to, though I do appreciate humour in a textbook, as opposed to dry "Who's at the phone?" "Mr. Jones is at the phone." "Ask him if he has good cameras." "He does say he has good cameras for today." sort of things. Talking about a general audience, "hard and repetitive" could put off a very large number of learners. (I do think textbooks generally don't include enough exercises though, let alone proper exercises that review everything shown in that lesson/unit.)

I generally hate games in textbooks, but that might be because authors only seem to know games that would amuse pre-schoolers.

What you propose is a load of crap and if you ever get involved with the creation of a language textbook, I'll hire a hitman to hunt you down. You're as bad as Viktor.

Oh Legion, toi et ton childish hasteposting. Can't you just make a point without threatening to kill somebody because of how much you hate them?

[hwhatting]

I've never quite understood the use of paragraphs or dialogues at the beginning of a lesson in some courses either, followed by a list of glosses for all new words. Shouldn't they go the other way, the vocab list first and then the paragraphs? It's not like you can always guess the meanings of those words, since the paragraphs are often loaded with new words, having been consciously written that way in fact. I guess it could work best if it's like Portuguese for Spanish speakers—a situation where a learner will recognize tons of words he doesn't know anyway, but it won't for many other situations.

In that case I'd go down to the text, trying to figure it out, and would then go back to the start looking up the words. I wouldn't first learn a list of words and then see where they may be applied in the lesson. So for me, the "traditional" order works better.
I can also live with a glossary at the back. What I really hate is when there is no glossary and the vocabulary lists in the lessons do not contain all the newly introduced words. My (late Soviet era) Kazakh textbook is that way - it has a glossary, but the lessons and exercises contain words that are neither in the vocabulary lists nor in the glossary. WTF?
On your other points, the more info, the better. On lesson lay-out, I like it when lessons give you full paradigms (say, of a tense or mood for a certain verb class) or mini-overviews of a topic (e.g. how to form conditional clauses), instead of introducing them in too small bits and pieces. In that way, a textbook with a good index can double as a beginner's reference grammar. This, together with a two-way glossary, is especially important for languages where there are not a lot of good reference material (or only monolingual references, which aren't very helpful for a beginner).

[Ser]

Huh. According to the L&L forum, the last post in this thread was made by hwhatting. I can see it below the comment field, but I can't see it when looking at the thread instead. I even reloaded the cache, but that doesn't help. Maybe if I make an extra post...

Also: what do you guys think about naturalness of dialogues? Years ago I read some rant by some blogger saying that he hated how textbooks' dialogues were a lot more intended to teaching vocabulary than to recreate real conversation, that the register used was often too formal or unnatural for the context the language was supposed to be used in.

[hwhatting]

Same here - I can only see my post (and your post where you state that you cannot see mine) when I use the "post reply" window. This doesn't seem to affect other threads.

[Ser]

HEY LOOK! I can see your post now. Guitarplayer says he can't see our posts either, so I'll repost both:

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MY POST:

I dunno about that, I must say I haven't had a good experience with such books myself. What do you exactly have in mind for how to present new vocab? (Like what kind of context or style or what.)

Sentences where you already know the rest of the words.

"I live in a vaskwipst. There's only 100 people in my vaskwipst. The vaskwipst is 20 kilometres from the city. In the vaskwipst everybody sasamana's eating vegetables, but not me. I kiwipini eating vegetables. I kiwipini them because they aren't tasty. I don't kiwipini fruit, fruit is tasty. I sasamana fruit. Near my vaskwipst there was a very tall popolog. The popolog had tasty fruit. One day a man from the vaskwipst cut down the popolog. I kiwipinimi men that cut down popologs. So I told him to gagabugu a new popolog that will grow and have more tasty fruit. It's important to gagabugu new popologs after you cut one down."

Nice example. Now that's one paragraph where the approach does work.

It works for the very beginning too:

"Yoyo John aba. John Sabagada aba. Yoyi Mary aba. Mary wiwi Sabagada aba. John obo Mary Sabagadagi abagi. Yoyo Hokitokipoki aba. Hokitokipoki Sabagada giga aba. Hokitokipoki Banana aba. Yoyi Sikiwikiliki aba. Sikiwikiliki wiwi Banana aba. Hokitokipoki obo Sikiwikiliki Sabagadagi giga abagi. Bananagi abagi."

And here's one where it doesn't. Really, it's quite hard to follow, there's just too many words that you (generic) don't know. Maybe, it isn't obvious to you (Astraios) because you wrote the exercise.

Learning doesn't have to be "fun", it doesn't have to be "interactive", it doesn't have to be "innovative", it doesn't have to be "a game". Learning has to be effective, and effective learning is hard and repetitive.

It doesn't have to, though I do appreciate humour in a textbook, as opposed to dry "Who's at the phone?" "Mr. Jones is at the phone." "Ask him if he has good cameras." "He does say he has good cameras for today." sort of things. Talking about a general audience, "hard and repetitive" could put off a very large number of learners. (I do think textbooks generally don't include enough exercises though, let alone proper exercises that review everything shown in that lesson/unit.)

I generally hate games in textbooks, but that might be because authors only seem to know games that would amuse pre-schoolers.

What you propose is a load of crap and if you ever get involved with the creation of a language textbook, I'll hire a hitman to hunt you down. You're as bad as Viktor.

Oh Legion, toi et ton childish hateposting. Can't you just make a point without threatening to kill somebody because of how much you hate them?

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HWHATTING'S POST

I've never quite understood the use of paragraphs or dialogues at the beginning of a lesson in some courses either, followed by a list of glosses for all new words. Shouldn't they go the other way, the vocab list first and then the paragraphs? It's not like you can always guess the meanings of those words, since the paragraphs are often loaded with new words, having been consciously written that way in fact. I guess it could work best if it's like Portuguese for Spanish speakers—a situation where a learner will recognize tons of words he doesn't know anyway, but it won't for many other situations.

In that case I'd go down to the text, trying to figure it out, and would then go back to the start looking up the words. I wouldn't first learn a list of words and then see where they may be applied in the lesson. So for me, the "traditional" order works better.
I can also live with a glossary at the back. What I really hate is when there is no glossary and the vocabulary lists in the lessons do not contain all the newly introduced words. My (late Soviet era) Kazakh textbook is that way - it has a glossary, but the lessons and exercises contain words that are neither in the vocabulary lists nor in the glossary. WTF?
On your other points, the more info, the better. On lesson lay-out, I like it when lessons give you full paradigms (say, of a tense or mood for a certain verb class) or mini-overviews of a topic (e.g. how to form conditional clauses), instead of introducing them in too small bits and pieces. In that way, a textbook with a good index can double as a beginner's reference grammar. This, together with a two-way glossary, is especially important for languages where there are not a lot of good reference material (or only monolingual references, which aren't very helpful for a beginner).

[Jipí]

HEY LOOK! I can see your post now. Guitarplayer says he can't see our posts either, so I'll repost both:

For some reason, I can see both your and Hans-Werner's post now, after you posted that. PHPBB is doing shenanigans!

Sometimes, there's also a bug where if a person you've foed makes the last post on a page and you click "Show", the next page of the thread will be loaded instead of showing the post of the foed person.

[Astraios]

And here's one where it doesn't. Really, it's quite hard to follow, there's just too many words that you (generic) don't know. Maybe, it isn't obvious to you (Astraios) because you wrote the exercise.

There's only like 10.5 words, and six of them are obvious (to a reader from a world where that language is real...). :\ I guess I should have given it with realworld context instead, so:

Yoyo John aba. John Amerikani aba. Yoyi Mary aba. Mary wiwi Amerikani aba. John obo Mary Amerikanigi abagi. Yoyo Juan aba. Juan Amerikani giga aba. Juan Meksikani aba. Yoyi Maria aba. Maria wiwi Meksikani aba. Juan obo Maria Amerikanigi giga abagi. Meksikanigi abagi.

Learning doesn't have to be "fun", it doesn't have to be "interactive", it doesn't have to be "innovative", it doesn't have to be "a game". Learning has to be effective, and effective learning is hard and repetitive. What you propose is a load of crap and if you ever get involved with the creation of a language textbook, I'll hire a hitman to hunt you down. You're as bad as Viktor.

Actually, I didn't propose anything. I was saying how I would like a textbook to be. I don't care how you think learning should be (and I actually agree with the first sentence you wrote, so there), that wasn't any part of what I said. Also, I'm gonna start creating a language book right now, just to spite you.

[Maulrus]

I hate them. Hate. All vocab should be introduced in context so you have at least some chance of getting the right answer yourself (which makes you remember it better). What do you need vocab lists for anyway, when like every textbook I've ever seen also has a glossary/dictionary section at the back? If you didn't get the word after seeing it used in a few example sentences, then just turn to the back of the book.

Agree completely. The best language textbook in my (tiny) library is Lingua Latina, which either shows words in context, provides an illustration, or defines them in Latin you already know - no English. Now, for an English speaker, it's a bit easier thanks to the recognizability of many Latin words; still, for me, a step-up over long English wordlists.

It works for the very beginning too:

"Yoyo John aba. John Sabagada aba. Yoyi Mary aba. Mary wiwi Sabagada aba. John obo Mary Sabagadagi abagi. Yoyo Hokitokipoki aba. Hokitokipoki Sabagada giga aba. Hokitokipoki Banana aba. Yoyi Sikiwikiliki aba. Sikiwikiliki wiwi Banana aba. Hokitokipoki obo Sikiwikiliki Sabagadagi giga abagi. Bananagi abagi.".

In defense of Astraios' example, I found this understandable with a bit of backtracking. Lingua Latina starts similarly: Roma in Europa est, Graecia et Roma in Europa sunt, etc.

[Legion]

You people are insane.

How is "Yoyo John aba"any more likely to say "this is John" (how do you even know such a structure exists in the first place?) than "I am John" or even "Hello John", or "John is a boy" or...

No, this excerpt is gibberish and anyone arguing otherwise ought to be lapidated with dictionaries.

[Melteor]

1. The usual: a detailed description of pronunciation using IPA, that includes a fair description of allophones, even across words.

2. Some discussion about stress. Any good English textbook should have something to say about "hót dóg" versus "hótdog", about "I lóve you" and "I gáve it to yóu", about "thánk you" (which you can reply to with a "thánk yóu").

You could almost say, this is the pitfalls of book learning, and thus an inherent problem in conlanging, although if people used more audio samples in their online grammars I would be very happy e.g. John Quijada, Ifkuil. But if we're talking about books, I too agree about the usefulness of fillers, texting, etc.

One way to do this is to go the way of lojban which tries to match up what's spoken with what's written. If only the designers understood spoken language better I think they could've avoided much redundancy. For instance, they perceive certain problems with grammar where there aren't any, but are only in written language e.g. noun compound ambiguity, they have a whole chapter on their solutions for ambiguity in phrases like 'pretty little girls' school', when in fact there isn't much ambiguity when it's said out loud; it just depends on stress, like your 'hotdog' example. So basically, they just need to punctuate it properly, and that comes down to an issue of broad versus narrow transcription. Good punctuation could also serve people well in a simultaneous live chat context, and then comes the issue of potentially designing a typed shorthand for communication. Japanese shorthand only needs 10 keyboard keys, but this is another tangent. Lojban does have a whole chapter on interjections, which are schematic kind of like japanese onomatopoeia, & which function like spoken emoticoms. I've designed my language with an eye towards prosody, stress, ToBI, and punctuation.

I would also like to mention I'm a big fan of modularity in grammar and language e.g. isolating & phrasal predicates, but I'll write a 2nd post about that later because I'm busy now.

[Maulrus]

How is "Yoyo John aba"any more likely to say "this is John" (how do you even know such a structure exists in the first place?) than "I am John" or even "Hello John", or "John is a boy" or...

Context? It's easy to come to the conclusion that "aba" serves as a copular. The other ambiguities resolve by the end as well. We get, throughout, "Yoyo John aba ... Yoyi Mary aba ... Yoyo Hokitokipoki aba ... Yoyi Sikiwikiliki aba". From the first pair, "yoyo" might mean "I" and "yoyi" might mean you; however, by the end, we've seen it with multiple names, so that's out. Based on sentences like "John Sabagada aba", we guess at a subject - predicate - verb order. That leaves, with reasonable confidence, "This is John".

Of course, there are myriad other options, but the key point here is the context it's read in. "Yoyo" could mean "he", but it would be strange to start off with a sentence like "He is John" - much more logical that it's a demonstrative. Perhaps "yoyo" does mean "boy", and the language puts adjectival predicates after the subject but nominal subjects before - but why would the textbook be trying to trip us up on page one? etc.

Also, note that my independent reading was "This is John", exactly as Astraios intended. That indicates at least to some degree that it's not unparsable garbage.

[Ser]

Of course, there are myriad other options, but the key point here is the context it's read in. "Yoyo" could mean "he", but it would be strange to start off with a sentence like "He is John" - much more logical that it's a demonstrative. Perhaps "yoyo" does mean "boy", and the language puts adjectival predicates after the subject but nominal subjects before - but why would the textbook be trying to trip us up on page one? etc.

Also, note that my independent reading was "This is John", exactly as Astraios intended. That indicates at least to some degree that it's not unparsable garbage.

But you're assuming the language is a lot like English. And it is a lot like English. This is of course a lot harder to pull off with a real language. (My first guess was that yoyo was a verb meaning 'their name is', similar to Mandarin/Cantonese 叫 jiào/giu—or a better example: English "to hight", agreeing in gender with its subject like Hebrew and Arabic (feminine: yoyi), and that aba was a word that doubled up as a demonstrative and a copula depending on this or that condition—plenty of languages use demonstratives as copulae.)

That'd be basically my main criticism: 10.5 words with 12 sentences is wayyyy too high a load. Concentrating on a few at a time would be better.

Also, I was originally asking about how to teach vocabulary, not the whole language. This would obviously be coupled with explicit grammar teaching, even Ørberg does that (though in Latin as well).

How is "Yoyo John aba"any more likely to say "this is John" (how do you even know such a structure exists in the first place?) than "I am John" or even "Hello John", or "John is a boy" or...

No, this excerpt is gibberish and anyone arguing otherwise ought to be lapidated with dictionaries.

There's a reason why Hans Ørberg also published Latin-Spanish and Latin-English vocabularies for his LINGVA LATINA series as well.

You could almost say, this is the pitfalls of book learning, and thus an inherent problem in conlanging, although if people used more audio samples in their online grammars I would be very happy e.g. John Quijada, Ifkuil.

Every language textbook should have audio too, of course.

As for the rest of what you wrote, this thread isn't about phonetics in conlanging, so I'd like to ask you to open a new thread on that if you want to discuss that.

Also, I'm not sure if you're read Lojban's grammar, but the authors say they're skeptical that people could learn to speak in Lojban unambiguously because of the nature of spoken language (proneness to errors and self-corrections in the middle of sentences and stuff). Lojban is very much consciously geared as a written language, and one that *should* be carefully written at all times at that.

[Chagen]

1. The usual: a detailed description of pronunciation using IPA, that includes a fair description of allophones, even across words.

Holy shit, this. Why more textbooks don't do this is insane to me. I'm sick of having to look up the language on Wikipedia to check out what its phonology actually is.

[Vuvuzela]

Code: Select all

(Picture of a boy)
John uts u
(picture of apple)
Uts fuguk u.
(picture of boy smiling, holding bitten-out-of apple)
Fagua fugud John.
(Picture of boy holding apple core)
Fogua fugud John.
(Picture of twenty apples)
Uts  fuguk tibiji u
(Picture of three apples)
Uts fuguk mogon u.
Fagua fugud tibej John.
Fagua jalgad mogop John.
(picture of boy smiling, looking at an apple)
Dorua fugud John.
(Picture of boy frowning, looking at pear)
Jahoa jalgad John.

So, it's possible, if cumbersome, to have a language textbook with none of the reader's language in it, even if the languages have rather large differences. But 'straio's way is weird.

[Xephyr]

Oh come on, that text is easy peasy. Just go through it methodically and it's obvious:

No. It's not easy peasy, and it's not obvious.

I (like Legion) at first thought that "Yoyo John aba" was "I am John". So the next sentence said "John is a Sabagada"... ok what is a Sabagada? Then the next sentence had "Yoyi" which looks like "Yoyo" so I thought that was a third person pronoun: "She is Mary. Mary is a wiwi Sabagada." Still no idea what wiwi or Sabagada are, and as it turns out my hypotheses on "yoyo" and "yoyi" were wrong because, as Legion, pointed out, "this is John" is most certainly not the most logical initial sentence. Like Serafin said, maybe it isn't as obvious to you because you're the one who wrote the sentence, but starting from the very beginning there are a dozen directions in which it could go... and each wrong turn take leads to more wrong turns, and it just gets worse and worse. And THAT is assuming that your average language learner will even THINK that the verb would go last in the sentence! An awful lot of people have never even heard of such a thing--- to them, it is much much much less logical than assuming the first sentence says "This is John". All of this would have been avoided by just giving a few fucking definitions!!

In defense of Astraios' example, I found this understandable with a bit of backtracking. Lingua Latina starts similarly: Roma in Europa est, Graecia et Roma in Europa sunt, etc.

And I don't suppose that was made any easier at all by the fact that it's mostly recognizable proper names and obvious cognates, do you?

Context? It's easy to come to the conclusion that "aba" serves as a copular. The other ambiguities resolve by the end as well. We get, throughout, "Yoyo John aba ... Yoyi Mary aba ... Yoyo Hokitokipoki aba ... Yoyi Sikiwikiliki aba". From the first pair, "yoyo" might mean "I" and "yoyi" might mean you; however, by the end, we've seen it with multiple names, so that's out. Based on sentences like "John Sabagada aba", we guess at a subject - predicate - verb order. That leaves, with reasonable confidence, "This is John".

No it doesn't, good god. And even if it does, how long will it take your average person to figure it out? How sick of it will they be after a couple sentences? Why must learning a language be a PUZZLE? If they wanted a book of puzzles, they would've bought a book of crosswords or something.

[Maulrus]

Of course, there are myriad other options, but the key point here is the context it's read in. "Yoyo" could mean "he", but it would be strange to start off with a sentence like "He is John" - much more logical that it's a demonstrative. Perhaps "yoyo" does mean "boy", and the language puts adjectival predicates after the subject but nominal subjects before - but why would the textbook be trying to trip us up on page one? etc.

Also, note that my independent reading was "This is John", exactly as Astraios intended. That indicates at least to some degree that it's not unparsable garbage.

But you're assuming the language is a lot like English. And it is a lot like English. This is of course a lot harder to pull off with a real language. (My first guess was that yoyo was a verb meaning 'their name is', similar to Mandarin/Cantonese 叫 jiào/giu—or a better example: English "to hight", agreeing in gender with its subject like Hebrew and Arabic (feminine: yoyi), and that aba was a word that doubled up as a demonstrative and a copula depending on this or that condition—plenty of languages use demonstratives as copulae.)

That'd be basically my main criticism: 10.5 words with 12 sentences is wayyyy too high a load. Concentrating on a few at a time would be better.

Very true, and the method would probably crumble with a language like Inuktitut. Still, it works reasonably for Latin (I know he published vocab books, but it's fully understandable without them), and it could probably work at least with other SAE languages which do have those similarities to English.

In defense of Astraios' example, I found this understandable with a bit of backtracking. Lingua Latina starts similarly: Roma in Europa est, Graecia et Roma in Europa sunt, etc.

And I don't suppose that was made any easier at all by the fact that it's mostly recognizable proper names and obvious cognates, do you?

I do, which is why I said exactly that in the part of the post you edited out.

Context? It's easy to come to the conclusion that "aba" serves as a copular. The other ambiguities resolve by the end as well. We get, throughout, "Yoyo John aba ... Yoyi Mary aba ... Yoyo Hokitokipoki aba ... Yoyi Sikiwikiliki aba". From the first pair, "yoyo" might mean "I" and "yoyi" might mean you; however, by the end, we've seen it with multiple names, so that's out. Based on sentences like "John Sabagada aba", we guess at a subject - predicate - verb order. That leaves, with reasonable confidence, "This is John".

No it doesn't, good god. And even if it does, how long will it take your average person to figure it out? How sick of it will they be after a couple sentences? Why must learning a language be a PUZZLE? If they wanted a book of puzzles, they would've bought a book of crosswords or something.

Where did I ever say "must"? Pretty sure there's a certain amount of subjectivity built into "things you love or hate in language textbooks", and all I'm saying is that this is a viable (if not universally applicable) method that some people might prefer. Nobody is proposing we burn all the language texbooks and force the average person to struggle through volumes of "Hokitokipoki obo Sikiwikiliki Sabagadagi giga abagi".

[finlay]

Casual reminder that if you're in a language class, it can be made very obvious indeed whether you're saying "this is John" or "I am John". Like the others, I did initially assume "I am John" here, though. That's because we have here a contextless sentence.

A standard part of any language teaching course is to have an early session involving a lesson where you are the beginners in a language. When I did my CELTA course, on the first day we were taught a beginner's lesson in Lao, and by the end of it we were able to order something from a restaurant. This was two years ago, so I've forgotten most of it now, although I remember pingpaa, chicken, di, yes, and bo di, no (although I suspect that those are actually a verb since the negative is the positive with a prefix). It involved a lot of picture explanations – most of the food vocabulary was introduced through flashcards. For names of people it was fairly obvious because we already half-knew each others' names. In January when I came here, we did a practical example of a kids' lesson with games and flashcards, but in Japanese. A couple of us already kind of knew it, though, and to that end, the other trainer said that she'd normally do it in Welsh so that everyone is at the same level.

[clawgrip]

It may be unrelated, but I know that in Khmer, the word for no ("day") is sometimes preceded by the word for yes ("baat"), resulting in baat day ("yes no"). This still means no; the only use of baat in this expression is to soften the negative.

[tezcatlip0ca]

And here's one where it doesn't. Really, it's quite hard to follow, there's just too many words that you (generic) don't know. Maybe, it isn't obvious to you (Astraios) because you wrote the exercise.

There's only like 10.5 words, and six of them are obvious (to a reader from a world where that language is real...). :\ I guess I should have given it with realworld context instead, so:

Yoyo John aba. John Amerikani aba. Yoyi Mary aba. Mary wiwi Amerikani aba. John obo Mary Amerikanigi abagi. Yoyo Juan aba. Juan Amerikani giga aba. Juan Meksikani aba. Yoyi Maria aba. Maria wiwi Meksikani aba. Juan obo Maria Amerikanigi giga abagi. Meksikanigi abagi.

Eyo Teskaliboka aben. Eyo tentewie yoyoe giga wetole. Yoyo wibiketagi, Astewayose!

[Gulliver]

Learning doesn't have to be "fun", it doesn't have to be "interactive", it doesn't have to be "innovative", it doesn't have to be "a game". Learning has to be effective, and effective learning is hard and repetitive. What you propose is a load of crap and if you ever get involved with the creation of a language textbook, I'll hire a hitman to hunt you down. You're as bad as Viktor.

Actually, I didn't propose anything. I was saying how I would like a textbook to be. I don't care how you think learning should be (and I actually agree with the first sentence you wrote, so there), that wasn't any part of what I said. Also, I'm gonna start creating a language book right now, just to spite you.

Yes, there is value in rote-learning and repetition. However, it's more fun if it's fun. You can present the same information in different ways... and, in most learning environments, the most fun one is probably the most motivating. Studies have shown that motivated learners learn better, and doing something fun is more motivating.

"Interactive" is a dubious one, as it means very little really. Use of language is an interactive act (being a form of communication), and some use of new media can be beneficial. It can be a hit and miss, affair, though.

[Chagen]

Speaking of IPA in textbooks, I saw a Mandarin textbook that flat-out used IPA and explained it in the beginning of the section on phonology. Hell, it straight-up used terms like "aspirated velar stop". I wish more textbooks did that.

[marconatrix]

"I live in a vaskwipst. There's only 100 people in my vaskwipst. The vaskwipst is 20 kilometres from the city. In the vaskwipst everybody sasamana's eating vegetables, but not me. I kiwipini eating vegetables. I kiwipini them because they aren't tasty. I don't kiwipini fruit, fruit is tasty. I sasamana fruit. Near my vaskwipst there was a very tall popolog. The popolog had tasty fruit. One day a man from the vaskwipst cut down the popolog. I kiwipinimi men that cut down popologs. So I told him to gagabugu a new popolog that will grow and have more tasty fruit. It's important to gagabugu new popologs after you cut one down."

vaskwipst - village
sasamana - to like
kiwipini - to dislike
popolog - tree
gagabugu - to plant
Pretty easy.

Not just easy but FUN Nor is it anything special, since even in our L1 we come across new words and usages all the time: new slang, technical terms, fancy artsy words in 'literature', and mostly figure them out (rightly or wrongly!) from context.

[marconatrix]

It's relatively late into the language learning process before you know enough prerequisites to use context clues to figure out a new word-- ie, context clues are no help when the context is completely incomprehensible.

Agree. At the very beginning the best thing IMO is simply to give simple short sentences with the translation right there on the page. You can always cover it up when you want to test yourself. Of course I realise the limitations of literal translation, but it's good enough for the first steps. You can only get the feel for subtleties once you have enough understanding to follow connected texts. Why have the vocab before/after the text, or worst of all have to waste time scrabbling through a glossary at the back of the book ... by which time you've forgotten the context. Progress is *so* slow like that, and the whole thing is a chore.

[Izambri]

I love when a text(book) represents correctly the ela geminada. That is ŀl (el + middle dot + el; two spaces), not l·l (el + middle dot + el, three spaces).

[GrinningManiac]

I wish they would include IPA somewhere in there - even at the back or something. I'm fed up of reading my Scottish Gaelic phrasebook and having

"P is pronounced "p" at the start but "b" elsewhere"
"Dh is not in English"
"aoi is like au-uh but does not appear in English"

The vowels are particularly infuriating because it lists vague, instantly-contradicted "rules" for pronouncing them and then says it's all an approximation and there are examples contrary to the rule from the offset.

Speaking of good textbooks - are there any reccomendations for Mandarin? Any particularly good ones held in high regard around here?