The main reason why most apps and methods don't work efficiently - the trap of recognizing and no output
Even if you are at the most basic level in French, you can already understand and translate words like Au revoir, un, Je t'aime, Mademoiselle, bon voyage, excuzes-moi, monsieur, S’il vous plaît,etc. from the very first day, you'd also likely score very well on Duo or any other app you are using, answering them instantly. With just these few basic words, you can already string useful sentences like:
"good bye, miss", "excuse me, sir" or "a baguette, please"
You will also start noticing those words in shows/podcasts you are listening to, however, what if a friend asked you on the spot how to say these exact words or sentences in French and didn't give you more than a second or two to answer? You would probably freeze up and only remember when it's way too late.
But why?
Almost all apps teach you primarily (or only) how to recognize and translate words from TL to your native language, but unlike a computer which can translate words equally well from one language to the other, and to whom it doesn't matter whether it learns a word from TL to N or vice versa, humans don't work like that.
Producing,recalling or outputing a word, or especially an entire sentence (like you would in the real world), requires insanely more effort than simply seeing a familiar word and recognizing it. It requires knowing the word actively, understanding relevant grammar rules, remembering other words you learned and deciding which fit in the sentence, how to conjugate words, the pronounciation,etc.
Even if you are using Anki like me, if you don't use output as part of your learning, you aren't going to achieve any more than people that use Duolingo, in fact they might even progress faster because they might have more content.
As a personal example, some 2 years ago I had two TL to N decks in Hungarian and German, the Hungarian deck had only 100 basic words and the German deck had sentences, but I struggled with both decks for months and in total I maybe learned some 60 words passively in Hungarian and around the same in German, when I gave up due to such a depressing progress.
Now I have my own N to TL sentence deck for Greek, and just in the last 3 days I learned 70 words actively, not just passively. I can remember them on the spot and I can form sentences with not all, but most of them...after just three days! Plus I only mined and created sentences for one day and reviewed lazily the other two days, if I put effort daily, the result would be even better.
That's the power of output. It is like language learning on steroids, but the catch is that it does take a lot of effort and it might make your brain hurt, but the progress can't even be compared to the pathetic results I had when I relied on recognition only and zero output. Most importantly, it prepares you for the real world, in the real conversations you won't see a sentence in TL and select one of the options, but you will have to translate a word or sentence from your native language to the target language with zero help from anyone.
[link] [comments]
from Language Learning https://ift.tt/2hE0c4p
via Learn Online English Speaking
Comments
Post a Comment