Survey on language learning beliefs

[Åge Kruger]

I hate memorizing vocabulary, I see it only as a painful thing you do when starting to learn a language where most roots are alien (e.g. Chinese). And even then that's only for familiarization purposes with the words, using a single simple translation. (Unless you want to spend a huge amount of time adding comprehensive translations to the flashcards, you generally just use a single simple equivalent to another language, which teaches you little anyway (two words between two languages aren't often equivalent to each other, having various usages, and then you have to consider collocation, such as what verbs you use with what nouns). Other than that, I just learn new words in context by guessing what they mean or actually looking them up in a dictionary.

Did you input the whole 1500 entries yourself? I for once can't stand spending time on that either, but on the other hand I can't find made sets that I like for my languages.

I think once you get up to a certain level, you don't need the SRS anymore, for sure.

My cards are a combination of pre-made decks and decks I've entered myself. I only learn ten new words a day, so it's not such a big bother for me. I get my words from comics and tv shows, so it's actually kind of enjoyable

[Gojera]

My tips were to learn the native script first, learn the sounds of the language, and use SRS, IIRC.

SRS is mostly used by people studying Japanese, especially for studying the 2000 kanji. I learned about 300 kanji from placenames and such when I lived there, but it's really difficult to push to 1000+ kanji without at least some rote memorization. (Another option is Heisig's method, but I'm skeptical that that actually works for very many people).

Anki makes rote memorization into something like a game, which is nice. I've been using it for a year or more, but somewhat haphazardly. The nice thing about Anki is that once you've marked a card as "easy" a couple of times, it won't show it to you again for years.

[Simmalti]

Done. Interesting survey.

Studying word lists doesn't work for me,

I use Anki, and what I do is first start with single words, and as I progress I enter either small phrases or even whole sentences into the software. This has helped me a lot with Icelandic, since you have to remember the different declensions when translating whole sentences

[Trailsend]

My three tips:

1) Never translate or get translations from the target language into your native language, and never explain or get explanations in your native language

2) Learn to design simple, obvious, replicable situations/conversations with a native speaker so that you'll understand what is being said despite not knowing the words or grammar

3) Focus on maximum-mileage language; learn the stuff that you can use every day to do actually useful stuff. ("Hi my name is and I'm from" is one-time use, and unless you also have the language to talk about what you like about your hometown it's not a very good conversation starter. "When are we going to eat lunch," "What do you want to do today," "Where is the party tonight?" will get you conversing much faster.)

[Jipí]

1) Never translate or get translations from the target language into your native language, and never explain or get explanations in your native language

That's learning it the hard way I mean, you should be aware that certain constructions just don't have an equivalent in your native language or other languages you may speak already and that the semantics of words may be differently divided, especially if the language you're learning is from another language family. However, never get explanations? I guess you'll need to spend a few years in a country and have constant contact to natives who don't share a common language with you to learn a language that way. Um, OK, if you learn a language in a classic teacher-student situation with translations and stuff, you also need several years to become fluent.

[Qwynegold]

@Qwynegold: No.

Whoops. Could someone post the results here then because I didn't give them my e-mail address?

[Trailsend]

1) Never translate or get translations from the target language into your native language, and never explain or get explanations in your native language

That's learning it the hard way I mean, you should be aware that certain constructions just don't have an equivalent in your native language or other languages you may speak already and that the semantics of words may be differently divided, especially if the language you're learning is from another language family. However, never get explanations? I guess you'll need to spend a few years in a country and have constant contact to natives who don't share a common language with you to learn a language that way.

Not necessarily--you just need a few tricks. I learned Chinuk Wawa this way to advanced fluency (by the ACTFL scale, which looks to be between B2 and C1 depending on whose analysis you look at), and it took a couple of months, not years. I had access to two speakers who both spoke English, they taught me in our spare time when we got home from work, and they never translated or explained things in English--instead, they translated into stuff, and explained by setting up carefully-designed situations.

I do the same thing when I teach people Chinese--I never speak a word of English, but I rig the setup so that it's so obvious, I don't have to. That way, people start thinking in the language from the start, rather than trying to translate in their heads. (Sometimes people try anyway. There's this really funny phenomenon where people will say, a few minutes in, "I get it, you're saying [English]." To which the response is, "Look what just happened: you understood what I was saying, even though I never translated it for you. You understood it before you said it in English. You don't need to translate it to me to prove you know what's going on--you can say it in Chinese!")

There's a community of people figuring out all kinds of tricks for this. In my experience, it works fantastically well.

[Shm Jay]

Shouldn't we warn the survey author that his survey is being invested by language geeks, and his results may be a bit skewed?

No, because I got the survey link from another board that is devoted to learning foreign languages (how to learn a language . com, or something like that.)

[Cathbad]

In my own experience, flashcards are useful for being able to recall the meaning of words if you see them on a flashcard, but not for much else. I quite enjoyed Anki for a while, but later I realized that I didn't remember most of the words outside of seeing them in Anki... which makes them completely useless. Can't argue that they aren't good for visual-minded people, or for recognizing shapes (as with kanji, indeed), but for actually learning words... nuh. Hearing, seeing, and using them in context is much more valuable, IME at least, not least because seeing them used helps you to gain the feeling for the semantic range of a word... which can hardly be gleaned from any vocabulary list such as provided by flashcards.

I do the same thing when I teach people Chinese--I never speak a word of English, but I rig the setup so that it's so obvious, I don't have to. That way, people start thinking in the language from the start, rather than trying to translate in their heads. (Sometimes people try anyway. There's this really funny phenomenon where people will say, a few minutes in, "I get it, you're saying [English]." To which the response is, "Look what just happened: you understood what I was saying, even though I never translated it for you. You understood it before you said it in English. You don't need to translate it to me to prove you know what's going on--you can say it in Chinese!")

could not agree with this more

[finlay]

TEFL is often/usually done in English-speaking classrooms rather than teaching in the students' L1. This is particularly useful when they come over here to learn because they will usually be in a class with students who have a different L1, and teaching them in their L1s would be impractical. Even when there was a class of all Spanish students, I don't speak Spanish, so they couldn't fall back on that completely, although occasionally one student would "get it" and explain it to everyone else.

It's one of the things that got me annoyed about my Japanese lessons that I took a few months ago. The main one was that we weren't actually learning to read, because there was no kanji content to the course... but also, my teacher was a bit annoying to me, and wasn't a native speaker – which'd be fine if I actually thought she knew any of the grammar. And she said at one point that she didn't "believe" in teaching in the target language, which I almost felt insulted by, having trained up to do exactly that. The problem with teaching us in English is that we just ended up chatting to her in English.

It's also worth noting that I think it's a sort of standard practice on TEFL courses for one of the first lessons to be teaching the entire class a beginner's lesson in a language we don't know, to give us a flavour of how it feels to be taught in a language we don't know. We got Lao as our one, because one of our trainers was based in Vietnam and was only over here to sort out some family stuff for a few months. We got taught how to order a meal in Lao and how to say hello, yes and no. All I can remember now, a year almost to the day later, is those three words ([sabaidiː], [di] and [bo di]) and the word for chicken ([pɪŋpaː]) and a vague sense that each word was probably meant to have a characteristic contour tone.

[jal]

[sabaidiː]

That sounds Thai.


JAL

[finlay]

[sabaidiː]

That sounds Thai.


JAL

It ought to, they're related languages.

[jal]

It ought to, they're related languages

Yeah, I know, but, say, "Good afternoon" doesn't quite sound like "Goeiemiddag", even though the languages are related.


JAL

[ronp]

I see that you have come across the survey I made.

@ Shm Jay: thanks for posting the link to my survey here.
@ Jal: yes, as expected, it’s not your ‘normal distribution’
@ Radius Solus: Sorry to hear about that. However, I should still have all the replies you did give, so none of your answers should be lost. If you would still like to complete it, let me know, send me a PM with your ID code (initials and date of birth) as well as country where you are from and country where you are now, and I’ll get back in touch with you. If not, then thank you for your help so far.
@ everyone: thanks for all your help, much appreciated. I’ll report back on the survey findings in due time.

Best wishes,

Ron

[jal]

I see that you have come across the survey I made

Hi Ron, great you stopped by. I'm sure I speak for most in this thread if I say I'd love to hear the results.


JAL

[Gojera]

I’ll report back on the survey findings in due time.

Please do!

[Qwynegold]

Scary! How did he find us?

[Ser]

Scary! How did he find us?

Somebody just contacted him? (not me tho)

[ronp]

@ Qwynegold / Serafín: Google.

[Qwynegold]

Eek! He heard us!

[ronp]

Hi,

In 2011-2012, I held the Language Learning Beliefs Survey (LLBS) and mentioned I would report back on the results here.

My research has progressed slowly (lots of data!), but I wanted to let you know that a first publication on some of the data has now appeared as a peer-reviewed article in the International Journal of Multilingualism: 'Exploring learner autonomy: language learning locus of control in multilinguals': http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2015.1090991.

I have also uploaded a shorter (and earlier), pre-print version to my Academia profile, if you are unable to access the full version above: http://birkbeck.academia.edu/RonPeek.

Thank you once again for your participation and happy reading! Feel free to share.

Best wishes,

Ron Peek

http://www.ronpeek.blogspot.com