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+--- Thread: Help with production (/thread-13676.html)
Help with production - cophnia61 - 2016-04-04
So, in the last couple of days I've opened three new theads and I feel sorry for this
Now that I know how to increase my listening comprehension and my pronounciation, I need some advices for production. I know the best way is to actually speak/write (lang8 etc..) but beside this what can I do to became better, especially at grammar and related things.
I was thinking about doing a cloze-deletion deck for verb conjugations, particles, and all those words that I've still not mastered, like それでも、けれども、にしても and so on, which I don't know if they are considered strictly grammar points but anyway...
Someone here does this and find it useful?
Also what do you think about the Assimil "active wave" (go from english to japanese in their dialogues)? Someone does this? I know that Luca Lampariello does this and he find it useful, what do you think about it?
RE: Help with production - nightbreak - 2016-04-07
I used assimil as my first text book for several languages. I really like the way they teach languages, but i always found the active phase to be too difficult/early and skipped it all the times...
For production, i use regular skype chat with people i found on http://www.conversationexchange.com
RE: Help with production - cophnia61 - 2016-04-07
(2016-04-07, 6:59 am)nightbreak Wrote: I used assimil as my first text book for several languages. I really like the way they teach languages, but i always found the active phase to be too difficult/early and skipped it all the times...
For production, i use regular skype chat with people i found on http://www.conversationexchange.com
Culd i ask you how do you use Assimil? Do you just listen and read, and then do you listen only, until you understand it? Do you shadow it too?
How do you go about speking with native speakers in the early stages? i've found a suggestion here made by Luca Lampariello:
Quote:It also dawned on me that the reason why I was constantly tired during the conversations and the reason I struggled so much was because I didn’t prepare for my sessions at all except for choosing a topic. I presumed I would jump in a convesation on ANY topic and the conversation would flow because I would keep it simple. Instead, I realized that in order to make the conversations flow more smoothly, I need to:
- Imagine a possible conversation in my L1
- Think about words and expressions I would use if I were having a conversation in my native tongue.
- Jot them down on a piece of paper in my L1
- Search in a dictionary for the meaning in my L2
Doing this makes conversations flow much more smoothly!
- Keep that piece of paper next to me during the conversation
Prepare beforehand! It makes things easier!
Do you do something like this? ask because it's all easy as long as we keep things simple, like "what kind of music you like". Problem is when want to convey more in depth ideas, most of the time have no idea which is the right word to use, or how to put together long and articulated sentences. I don't mean to prepare a full conversation beforehand but at least to keep a list of useful words for the topic I want to approach.
I've seen that even Moses does it, as he use to practise with native speakers on walmarts he studies beforehand the questions and answers that will come out most likely (things like "why you study language x", "who teached you" etc nd possible answers to those)
RE: Help with production - nightbreak - 2016-04-07
I use assimil to get a first contact with the language. I read one lesson a day, and listen to the audio mp3 of the lessons i already know in loop when i m at home (i work from home, so i spend a lot of time passively listening to audio) .
I aslo re read the lessons, quite a lot, until my brain process the data automatically.
I think i had one of the japanese assimil books with me (at the time it was in 2 books) nearly all the time for two year before i stopped digging in it whenever i had some spare time (waiting at the restaurant or travelling).
I dont shadow lesson, i focus on understanding.
For my skype session, i do zero preparation
Usually we talk about whatever comes to our mind, trying to keep it basic (food is a really handy topic for basic chit chat). The only preparation i do is, when i find a difficult sentence i dont understand in nhk easy or some other source i was exposed to recently , i write it down, and ask some help about it when it is skype time.
It is probably more effective to plan and prepare stuff, but i never was in a hurry with language.
RE: Help with production - mc962 - 2016-04-07
As far as having issues with finding the right words to use, most advice I have gotten in that area is to talk around it/ describe the missing word with the words that you do know. While it still requires enough of a vocabulary to describe the thing, chances are you can still (if somewhat inefficiently) describe it with what you've already learned (like for example, let's say you want to talk about business cards for some reason, but you forgot 名刺, you can describe it as "the thing you give to other people in a business meeting that has your name/contact info. on it", or some thing like that).
The exception to this is when I want to use more abstract words/phrases that are difficult to describe well
As far as learning which word/phrase is most appropriate in the context (what is spoken vs. only written, word choice in a particular situation, etc.), that I only really ever managed to improve through practice. Like when I first learned 都市, I figured that word should apply to everything considered a city, but I seem to hear 街 used more often than not in the situations I found myself in. There's probably a better example but that's the only one that comes to mind
RE: Help with production - yogert909 - 2016-04-07
I'm not quite to the point you are, but the Luca Lampariello quote you posted makes perfect sense and is roughly the way I plan on proceeding next year.
I probably would dispense with the L1 steps and simply have an idea what I planned to talk about in the conversation. If I know the topic in advance, I could think of ideas I wanted to get across and think of the various ways I could say it. thinking through things in advance would make m aware of some words that I don't know the Japanese word for, so I would look them up in advance and write them down. Perhaps I would write down a few sentences, phrases or words that I suspected I would want to slip into the conversation at some point.
This reminds me of a related production technique(self-talk) that i read about a few years ago, but haven't heard people talking about lately. Self-talk in a nutshell, is just having monologues and dialogues with yourself. You could do as the linked article suggests and give yourself a talk on a certain topic. But you could also prepare for your skype calls by essentially having the conversation with yourself before you have the actual conversation.
Like I said, I haven't done this much, but it seems to make sense to me and it's what I'm planning on doing when I get a little more advanced.
RE: Help with production - cophnia61 - 2016-04-09
thank both for your reply!
mc962: your suggestion is very valuable but I'm still in a phase were talking around it would be more difficult than using the word itself.
Even in english I often don't know what word to use. Then I check a dictionary and from that moment on I usually will remember the word.
I find this process of "mh... how do I say that? (check dictionary) Ah right!" very useful to make a word stick and to make that word active. Even for grammar, if I don't know how to build a certain kind of sentence structure and I check it, usually the processof checking it make it sticks. But I know it's very important to know how to say things like "how do ypu say that in japanese?"
yogert909: in assimil there is a thing called "active wave" where you try to produce the japanese dialog using the english traslation as a help.
If I remember right you are going to use jpod101. Well, I find this very useful, especially to learn how to use collocations (and to learn to recognize them better, as a consequence). As stanford123 (sorry if I mispelled your name ._. ) said in another thread, in everyday anguage 90% of the time they use the same limited number of words, collocations and sentence structures. I find jpod101 very good at this. Once in a while they put unusual words or way of sayings or slang just because this is what happens in real conversations too. But 99% of the time they use common words and construct.
So, I was thinking that the "active wave" method could be applied to jpod101 too. Consider that when you listen to a lesson multiple times, you will end up knowing it by heart, especially if you shadows it. So you won't even need to reffer to the english translation. But the fact to reproduce the dialogue by memory as if it was a movie script, I find it very useful. For example if I listen to the sentence "I live in Italy" my brain will understand it, but it doesn't mean I will be able to rember to use "in" instead of "at" when I want to say a similar sentence. The same goes for things like "are you tired?" instead of "you are tired?", "she loves" instead of "she love" and so on. One can hear "he plays football" hundred of times and then when he findsan occasion to talk with a native he will say "it plays football. Happened to me lol obviously I alrwady had a lot of input at the time and I knew the rule, so I knew the right word was "he". The fact is that our brain gliss over the details and just remember the main keywords of a sentence, if all you have is input. But if" after reading andlistening to a dialogue you try to actively reprouce it using, trying to rproduce the exact words, particles and words order, your brain is trying hard to remember for example what particle to use with that verb. Is it "wo" or "ni"?
I find this related to the monologue technics and I find jpod101 perfect for this!
ps: sorry for the long reply!
RE: Help with production - cophnia61 - 2016-04-11
About what Stansfield123 said here and here, what he said is all true and I think it applies to production too.
I keep hearing things about exposure and the importance of reading and listening, and how much formal study is useless, grammar study is useless and so on.
I respect and have gread admiration toward people like Steve Kouffman but if I listen to his word what I understand is that once you had enough input, your output cames out easily and naturally after a little struggle the first days/weeks.
I'm not sure about this. I've read thousand of pages of english and I feel my output still sucks at things which could be easily solved by doing some quality study instead of just quantity. And my L1 is very similar to english. So this is even more true for japanese.
There is a video on his channel, where Luca Lampariello talks exactly about the same things Stansfield123 said, but unfortunately I don't remember what video is. But he says something like "ok for quantity, it's very important to lister a lot. But hey, wait a moment! there is even quality. And I think sometimes we need to do quality listening".
What I think is that apart from this, we sometime need to do quality speaking/writing too. We could speak 10 hours a day for 10 year and still do the same mistakes. This happens in our first language too.
For example I've read and listen hundred of times to the pattern:
教育はすべての業務に優先すると私は思います
教育はすべての業務より優先すると私は思います
I even have multiple sentences into Anki with this pattern, but this didn't make me able to use it.
What I did was to check how to say it, and then I tried to costruct my sentence using the pattern, as a sort of grammatical exercise. Then I checked in the textbook to see if I got it right. So this is not "just keep trying and someday you'll be able to say it correctly... eventually". It was a deliberate exercize to learn that patterns.
So I wonder what do you Stanfield123, and the other users, think about this. I've tried to just write at Lang-8 but it takes too much time to write even the simplest of things. Maybe trying to learn to use those patterns in advance is helpful as a shortcut, at least in the beginning. What do you think? Also, do you think there is a way to use Anki to do this sort of things?
(SORRY FOR THE LONG POST!)
RE: Help with production - Stansfield123 - 2016-04-11
I think going out into the world and talking to people (or even just chatting/posting on a forum, in writing) definitely helps. I don't like doing it, myself, early on (it makes me uncomfortable to suck at something in front of people, outside a classroom situation), but if you can handle it, it definitely helps. If you have access to a personal tutor, or a class, or even just a study-group or study partner, to converse with...that's brilliant. Having a competent tutor, to be your conversation partner, correct your errors, and provide you with custom made, up to date input (in the form of a personalized Anki deck, made just for you, for instance), would be the fastest way to learn a language...and, in that scenario, production would play a huge part in your learning process. But that's also prohibitively expensive for everyone not at least a millionaire.
What I don't think helps is doing production by trying to learn and apply grammar rules...in other words, doing production by composing your own sentences. That's not gonna work, because language isn't a structure built on grammar. It's the other way around: grammar is built on language. You can't construct a natural language based on grammar rules, you can only construct grammar rules based on a language (and even then, the rules are gonna be approximate at best).
So, sure, do production, but stick to saying things you've heard said before (producing collocations you know). Just to clarify, a collocation can be different things: it can be an exact cluster of words, like "to make an exception", or it can be the kind where some of the words are interchangeable, like "to enjoy a good book", "to enjoy a nice meal", etc. Once it becomes obvious that you can enjoy a wide variety of things, you don't need to have heard that verb used with every single thing. So it's not entirely as simple as "only say what you have heard said before". But you should stick pretty close to that, don't waste your time trying to infer your own version of Japanese from grammar rules you've studied, or patterns you've "noticed". Even in the examples above, you can enjoy a good book or a nice meal, but you can't enjoy a nice book, or a good meal, without sounding like a weirdo. Just let the patterns become internalized subconsciously, don't try to help the process along by learning or "noticing" them (I'm putting "notice" in quotes because you're not really noticing as much as guessing that there's a pattern there...when you're a beginner, you might think there's a pattern somewhere, only to run into half a dozen "exceptions" to your "pattern" in the next two days). So, when it comes to production, stick with what you know...you can guess from time to time (and, inevitably, make mistakes), that's fine, but once in a while, not every other word. You want to produce Japanese, not gibberish. Producing Japanese helps you get better at Japanese. Producing gibberish doesn't help you get better at anything.
As for doing exercises/Anki drills, I wouldn't do them for production too much. Maybe at the beginning, for really basic stuff, just to get you started with having basic conversations. But after that, I wouldn't bother. They help, sure, but the question is, how much do they help, compared to using Anki for input. I think that when you're using Anki for input (audio, or audio AND Kanji both in the question), you get through far more material. And that's the most important thing: to get through as much material as you can, as fast as you can, with the help of Anki (or textbooks, or whatever, I'm not saying SRS is the only valid language learning method), to then be able to let immersion solidify that knowledge.
There's a long road to listening comprehension, but there's an even longer road to fluency (the ability to fluently say the stuff you know). You want to use boring drills and exercises to get to listening comprehension, and then let immersion help you master the language. Because, if you want to drill your way to mastery, it's going to take thousands of hours of sitting in front of Anki. It's virtually impossible to do. On the other hand, spending those thousands of hours on immersion: very doable, and fun.
[disclaimer: a lot of the stuff I wrote about the importance of collocations, in the other thread, is the result of scientific research...most of the stuff I wrote in this post, on the other hand, is just my opinion, based on my own experiences...so it could definitely be wrong, personal experiences can be distorted].
RE: Help with production - cophnia61 - 2016-04-11
Stanfield123 I think you're right both in the other thread and here.
What you say made me think about the fact that maybe my struggling with production is that I haven't had enough exposure, especially aural input.
I see that people like Steve Kaufmann are able to speak and they don't do any grammar drill. They don't even use Anki to begin with (I don't know how they are capable of retaining words ._. ). So maybe the secret is to spend more time on input.
When we think what to say, we formulate our thoughts in our mind, as an inner monologue. Even when we are fluent I think our brain is "thinking" in form of an inner voice, which in this case is immediately translated in the outer spoken words.
So we don't think in written form, and massive reading helps only until a certain point. To be able to speak in a language we must be able to think in that language, and spoken input does a better job here than written input (isn't the written input an approximation of the sound we produce when we talk?). Also Japanese is written in kanji, so there isn't the same "reinforcement" that you get when you read in english. The words I can recollect better from mind are the one I've actually heard a lot. I've read "keisatsu" more than "kawaii" but I can remember better how to say the latter, because I've heard it more times xD
So maybe listening plays a big role, bigger than reading?