Language immersion without travelling - resources

[Lemur]

Kato Lomb's book Polyglot:
http://www.tesl-ej.org/books/lomb-2nd-Ed.pdf

About the Author:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kat%C3%B3_Lomb

Reading her book now. Interesting stuff. Krashen sourced her as a form of inspiration for some of his language learning theories.

Speaking of Chat GPT. It is useful in one aspect. I don't have to dictionary search each word (and this is not too efficient to be honest - we learn best through complete context like a sentence). Instead of taking an English sentence and having it translated, I am asking Chat GPT to instead translate from a Tagalog book I am reading and asking it to further breakdown how it came to that conclusion.

Example:

The Filipino phrase "Laging kapos para sa nais maabot" translates to "Always lacking to achieve what is desired" or "Always falling short of what is desired" in English.

Here's the breakdown:

"Laging" - This word means "always" or "constantly."
"kapos" - "Kapos" translates to "lacking" or "falling short."
"para sa" - "Para sa" means "for" or "to."
"nais" - "Nais" refers to "desire" or "wish."
"maabot" - "Maabot" means "to achieve" or "to reach."

So, when you put it all together:

"Laging kapos para sa nais maabot" means "Always lacking to achieve what is desired" or "Always falling short of what is desired," indicating a continuous struggle or shortfall in attaining one's desires or goals.

So inspired by Krashen and Lomb I am going to read a fiction story that seems compelling and what I'm thinking is, sentence by sentence, I will be in debt to Chat GPT as I make out the words and meaning but what I am hoping is that after a while, I can start figuring stuff out on my own after learning words and concepts. Also studying the common 2000 words separately in an Anki Deck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Cl ... Brightness

So my learning looks like this roughly:

1.) I read a sentence in the book and figure out its meaning as best as I can.
2.) If I have it mostly figured out, I can simply move on to the next sentence. If not, ask Chat GPT to translate and breakdown.
3.) Continue until the book is finished. At this point, I'll decide if I should pick up another book or actually attempt to re-read this one. Have not decided yet.

Seems like insanity but also after enough repetition and exposure to the same words over and over again and varying contexts...
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1044345.pdf

That could provide the input needed to learn a second language (reading roughly 3,000,000 words). I'm unsure if this is the best way to do this. Think I'll give it a month try though. 45 minutes in and I'm only like 2 paragraphs in....

[Western Red Cedar]

So inspired by Krashen and Lomb I am going to read a fiction story that seems compelling and what I'm thinking is, sentence by sentence, I will be in debt to Chat GPT as I make out the words and meaning but what I am hoping is that after a while, I can start figuring stuff out on my own after learning words and concepts. Also studying the common 2000 words separately in an Anki Deck.

One of my friends who was in the Peace Corps and fluent in Spanish recommended this approach to me, but with a simple dictionary. She advised starting with an engaging book I'd read in English with writing the wasn't too complicated. She suggested Harry Potter, though this was well before Chat GPT.

This method also seemed to work well for vocabulary and comprehension with my intermediate or advanced ESL students in Korea.

[clark]

I'm surprised no one's mentioned the obvious method: find someone with weak English but who's fluent in the language you want to learn - and then marry them! Your language skills will get whipped into shape in no time! Of course, once you've learned that language and want to move onto another you may have a problem....

Other than that, the best language-learning tool is software that you can paste text into, and whenever you bring your mouse over a word, the English translation of that word shows up, hopefully with grammar and sentence examples of that word provided (sometimes this software can be a bit pricey). You then take simple books and paste them in the text, and then go over them slowly. It takes a while to even get through a paragraph at first, but your vocab grows quite quickly. You need some basic grammar background first but you don't have to be too advanced in your language skills to do this.

After learning multiple languages, I've found that going abroad to study is kind of overrated. You can definitely get good at a language at home.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@Lemur - Thanks for the book suggestion. I've been skimming through it and there's some very useful stuff in there.

I'd say my biggest challenge right now with learning Russian is the sheer volume of vocabulary I need to learn. Spanish, German, and Latin were the three languages I've tried to learn before, and I never realized how spoiled I was by the amount of Latin (or Germanic) words in all those languages and therefore they were way less difficult to learn as a native English speaker. But Russian is a Slavic language, so there is far less overlap. It makes starting from scratch more challenging because I may only understand 10% of a sentence instead of the 50% I might with Spanish or German.

I've been going back and forth between watching comprehensible input videos on YouTube then doing internet app exercises, which is helping with the vocab retention. I notice it's easier to remember things the more interactive the experience is. The in-person classes are easiest because of the talking and playing games with other people whereas reading a book without audio is the hardest. I'm assuming that once I get a better level of basic vocab, reading will be a lot easier because I will understand more without having to look everything up.

I did pay for one of those programs that take inputted text and translate the words for you (as well as read them out loud). I have found it worth the money. I think I'm going to try an experiment with it where I read a Wikipedia article on a simple topic in English then put the Russian article into the app and try to read/translate it. Reading the English article first should hopefully make it easier to guess what it's about.

[AnalyticalEngine]

I wanted to update this topic with a few lessons I learned from the language classes.

One, the instructor mixed in physical movement and jestures when she introduced vocab, and then had us repeat the movement. This was surprisingly helpful. Getting up and doing a silly gesture while repeating the word involves more of one's mental and physical attention, which I think helped make the vocab stick easier.

Two, she also made some card games with this vocab, and then we'd play the games. This was also great because one feature of comprehensible input is that it needs to be engaging, and trying to win a mini game is good engagement.

Three, I know the comprehensible input method says you can ignore trying to memorize grammar, but actually I don't find that advice useful. I started to learn a lot faster when I just deliberately tried to learn grammar then tried to spot that grammar in material I was reading. Admittedly, I already know a lot about grammar as a general rule due to my writing experience, and Russian grammar is very complicated, so it could be that I'm just used to already thinking in these terms and so it feels natural.

However, I do think it's a mistake to ONLY learn grammar. I just find grammar makes input more comprehensible, so a mix of grammar + input is probably the fastest.

Now one of the challenges I'm having currently is that Russian vocab is so different from English, so there's just this giant heap of unrelated sounds to memorize. It helps to pretty much just do whatever you can to use this as much as possible to learn it. For example, I labeled everything in my pantry in Russian and stare at it every morning when I make breakfast, which did help with cooking terms. Then I tried writing my to do list or meal tracking in Russian, which also helped.

My ability to read has outpaced my ability to listen or speak, which leads me to sometimes pronounce things incorrectly when the pronunciation is different than the spelling. The text-to-speech app is a little helpful but should not be relied on because it tends to pronounce closer to the spelling than actual speech, and this problem is made worse when I stare at the word while listening to the app.

[shaz]

@AnalyticalEngine when I studied Russian in college, our instructor had us watch Russian soap operas. I found that to be very helpful for building listening comprehension. The plots were the usual soap opera ridiculousness but it was interesting to see clothes, cars, etc. in addition to the language.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@shaz - That's an interesting approach. I'll have to give it a try. Do you remember the titles of any that you'd recommend?

[shaz]

@AnalyticalEngine unfortunately I don't remember titles. It was a very long time ago. I had forgotten all about it until this thread prompted the memory.