The Linguist On Language - Having Fun Learning Languages

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I've redesigned my blog and moved it over to Posterous. To visit my new blog, click the link below:

 

The Linguist on Language

 

I look forward to seeing you all there!

Melbourne and Brisbane meet ups.

I suggest we meet at my hotel and then proceed to a pub or small restaurant. Is 7 pm convenient?

Melbourne March 9

Lygon Lodge Comfort Inn Studio Apartments 
Address 220 Lygon Street, Carlton, Carlton 
Melbourne, 3053 

Sydney  March 16

AEA Bridgeport Apartments 
38 Bridge Street, Sydney 2000 NSW 
Ph: 02 9315 8066 

 

Auckland meet up now March 3.

Please note date change.

Auckland meet up is now March 3 at 6.30 pm.

Aristotles North Shore 
Address 20C Link Drive, North Shore 
Auckland, 0627 
New Zealand 

Meet up in Australia and New Zealand in March.

Just a reminder that I will be in Australia and New Zealand in March. Anyone interested in a meet up?

Proposed dates for meet ups:

Auckland Mar 2
Melbourne Mar 9
Sydney Mar 15
Brisbane Mar 21

I hope to meet some LingQers , language enthusiasts and their friends. Anyone available?

Adults can learn languages better than children?

A recent study shows that adults can learn languages better than children. There are other studies that show children as better at learning languages, and point to a critical period after which it is more difficult to learn languages. We know empirically that children, especially children under 10 or 12, become fluent in a new language more quickly than adults, with better pronunciation although often with a more limited vocabulary.

In fact it is motivation and attitude, not age, that determines our ability to learn languages. Most, if not all, polyglots, learn most of their languages as adults. Adults are often more inhibited or self-conscious, and have less opportunity, or are less willing, to socialize with people of another language group, whereas children just blend in to their new environment.

The only thing that matters is that we can learn at any age. If we are 50 there is no point in wondering if we were able to learn better when we were 5. If you can motivate a child to learn a language when young, great. Otherwise it is never too late to start.

Age and language learning

Does age affect language learning? I am sure it does for young children, but beyond that I think we can learn languages at any age. Here is a video I did in response to a request from Stefan.

Evgueny talks to Steve about Russia. (in Russian)

Evgueny, one of my Russian tutors at LingQ, and I, have started a series of discussions on Russia, in Russian. This material is for our Library at LingQ, and so I try to keep my comments (full of errors) to a minimum, mostly a few questions here and there. Evgueny is knowledgeable and most interesting to listen to. The audio and text of this series are available in our Library, of course. Here is the most recent episode where we talk of Russia today and yesterday.

Lingosteve_2012-01-31_22-01-31_LWEV

The name of the Collection in the Lingq Library is:

НОВЫЙ РУССКИЙ ПОДКАСТ

 

Active vocabulary and passive vocabulary.

What do we mean by knowing a word. Here is a video on the subject.

Can we learn 100 words a day?

In a comment to a previous post, Stefan asked me how many words I thought I could learn in a day. We had quite a discussion on this, and I have given it some more thought.

If I take my own Czech studies, I have been at it about 6 months.  It is all part time, one hour a day most of the time, some days much more, and for stretches of time, nothing. The main activity is listening, then comes reading, and saving words at LingQ, (LingQing). A smaller amount of time is spent on reviewing words in flash cards, and just recently I have started talking to a tutor online at LingQ.

So if we call this period of time 180 days, and if we use the statistics generated by LingQ, the numbers look like this.

"Known words" by this I mean only my ability to recognise the meaning, or a meaning: 25,260.

This includes non-words, numbers, names etc. How many I don't know but let's say 10%. So the number is really  probably 23,000

Stefan made the point that Czech is very inflected and therefore this inflates this number compared to English. At first I agreed that this is relevant but now I am not so convinced. In fact we need to learn the different forms of the words, for tenses or cases, or person, whether in Czech or French, so each of these words does count, in my view.

"LingQs created" or saved in the system: 20,600

 of which 7,425 have been moved up in status towards varying degrees of"known". Note that I do not do a lot of flash carding and only move words up in status sporadically.

When I look at lists of these words in the vocab section, I know most of them, but certainly not all.This number includes 1725 phrases. So perhaps I should count this as 5,000 words. Even among the other so-called status "1" words, roughly 13,000 or so, there will be words that I know. but never mind.

So maybe I know, albeit passively, 28,000 words.Maybe. And I have been at it, although not every day, for 180 days. This means that I may have learned words at the rate of 155 words a day. Who knows? Maybe it is a lower number, but I believe it is at least 100 words a day. Most words are learned incidentally through reading, and especially through seeing the yellow saved LingQs highlighted in our texts at LingQ.

Note that I have read over 250,000 words at LingQ in Czech, often more than once. This is the equivalent of 3 average length novels.

I can read the newspaper fairly well.

Apparently Czech shares 40% vocabulary with Russian,(which I have studied, also in the same way at LingQ). By that I mean this is the number of words that are the same or recognizable, like zitra/ zavtra for tomorrow. English has 60% Latin based words, so I think that an English person who put the same effort into French or Spanish, could learn the same number of words in those languages.

100 words a day, if you are willing to put in the time.

 

Learn the basics in the language first? Really?

Can we even learn the basics first? I find that I cannot do it. I just forge ahead and learn words and get used to the language? I think we need to cover a lot of ground, some new, some old. We need to explore new things, pushing the boundaries, while regularly reviewing the basics, many times during the learning process. The basics take a long time to learn. We need to go back to them over and over. I do not think they can be learned up front. I think trying to force learners to learn the basics first discourages many learners, since it is very hard to do, and for most people very boring.