Xie's method

Guest   Tue Dec 04, 2007 2:18 am GMT
Good Day Xie,
I was interested in what is your method for "effective 1 hour a day" learning of German? Do you mind to elaborate briefly?

Thank you.
Xie   Tue Dec 04, 2007 2:38 am GMT
That is NOT my method. You may have probably read about one of my old posts about that. Just check the link I have posted.

Basically, it means that you collect bunches of texts with translations and high quality audios, listen while trying to figure out the meanings, pronunciation... within 1 week (not 1 day). If you have a lot of free time daily, it would be possible. A vivid example might be to finish an Assimil "With ease" course for any sort of language within 1 week.

Personally, I've never experimented with this method, and have since been doubtful whether I could try it at all. It's just too rigid for most people (me included). There are too many conditions of making the method work, which render it implausible. For example, you must have many hours of free time in a row within 7 days (or 8; many theories about this method, imo, have been very loosely formed), you must be a native/very advanced speaker of a frequently translated-into language (like English) to enjoy the benefits of this method (I'm NOT), you must be learning a language that is "easy" enough, such that the method could conceivably work in 7 days, not 8 days or one month (Chinese and Japanese would be, imo, very difficult; the best choices would only be West Eu. languages), etc.

While there are so many "musts" that make me doubt the point of using the method, I speculate that if, at least, you have "enough free time", it may be possible to do an Assimil course in 7 days - around 14 lessons each day, not just one...
Xie   Tue Dec 04, 2007 2:45 am GMT
Supplements: besides the rigidity of those conditions, in practice, the method is simply hard to realize. First, you need audiobooks (or anything similar) as the only learning materials. There are too few audiobooks translated from or into Chinese (for me), English ones are still too advanced (for me), and objectively most texts are hardly matching.

There are also some more issues. People have to do some phonetic practice to get familiar with the foreign sounds, so... even Esperanto could be difficult for Chinese speakers, for example. (And the sounds of English? German? Russian? The list could be inexhaustive!) If you want to see how it works under control, one must learn language X completely from scratch. In view of the rigid conditions, I couldn't help suspecting the ultimate practicality of this method.
Guest   Tue Dec 04, 2007 4:39 am GMT
Xie,

It can work even for Chinese: It's been mentioned in other threads before, but there have been a number of Westerners who learned Mandarin precisely by this method: listening to a dialogue many, many times (20-50), until it was "assimilated." See Mike's response in the following thread:

http://www.antimoon.com/forum/t5606.htm

I personally knew a guy who did that in Taiwan, and have read of others who did that without leaving their country (e.g., a guy in Sweden). It is obviously easier with a related language, and with a language for which there are lots of materials, and for one that has easier phonetics--but it CAN be done--IF you have the time, patience, and motivatation.
Guest   Tue Dec 04, 2007 5:00 am GMT
One more supporting note: Vera Birkenbihl, a well-known learning expert, used a similar method. See:

http://www.ludwiglingg.ch/MethodEnglish.pdf
Xie   Tue Dec 04, 2007 5:31 am GMT
Actually, I'm aspiring to use this method exclusively for further language acquisition. We can see a lot of examples of comp. input - memorizing chess patterns (Chinese chess books, as I've briefly glanced at, contain a lot of such stuff for people to memorize and master), memorizing poems of, for Russian children, Pushkin, and for me, works of Tang/Song Dynasties.

That's not really rote memorizing; it's necessarily reading, and reading doesn't mean you only "read", but you are to understand it. Textbooks of course contain a lot of understandable stuff (it's not nonsense). While being comprehensible, it's not very meaningful - full of artificial texts (*but Assimil is, imo, almost miraculous for being artificial as well as meaningful). Only through reading novels, watching news reports/films, reciting poems, etc, would you find meaningful stuff to "memorize" unconsciously.

What Mike did is what I've been doing for every of my mature (Chinese), teenage (English) and baby (German) languages. I've been focusing on German (for it is the weakest) when I read about the principles of comp. input. So, I started to listen a lot and tried to memorize spoken dialogs (of Assimil; and others when I see fit later), and now those dialogs often pop up in my mind suddenly. My mind rejects recalling which lesson or which paragraph a particular sentence appears; rather, my mind is kind of intaking nutrients (audio-textual materials) and grows quickly to form my own idiolect.

However, the problem of the method I have described is rather about the time needed. Surely, you would want to make the learning process meaningful and enjoyable, and factors to success you can name are all Krashen has explained about (like "low anxiety", that sort of highly theoretical but practically applicable principles). The method I have written about here has put, imo, an unreasonable time limit - only 7 days, literally!

For example, suppose I'm Christian and want to learn Chinese for some religious reasons, and objectively I can obtain a bible in Chinese with Chinese audios (whichever spoken language). So, I'm perfectly familiar with the bible, and I can start using the bible in Chinese to learn Chinese. My doubts are about whether I could finish that bible in 7 days, e.g. for 12 hours in a row each day, i.e. 84 hours, regardless of the writing system(s). First, you need a lot of time; second, you need enough materials (audios) to run for 84 hours (plus some revision, I guess); third, you need to know the content of the materials perfectly before you start. If you haven't read any bible (like me), you can't use a bible to learn a completely new language.

I believe, nevertheless, that even a "difficult" language like Chinese could be learnt very well after MONTHS, but not just 7 days. Even with a standard 100-lesson Assimil with ease course, if you follow its instructions faithfully, you would need 100 days to finish lessons 1-100 for the first time plus lessons 1-50 for the second, and another 50 days to finish 50-100 for the second. Given perfect translations and you are a native speaker of the teaching language, it would be 150 x 30 mins = 4500 = 75 hours. (Ah, indeed, one week would really do! But could you spend a whole week on the course as though you were working full-time with it?)
Guest   Tue Dec 04, 2007 6:27 am GMT
Interesting info Xie. Is English your native language or did you learn it to such a high level?