What results are you expecting after you finish this method?

Quote:My goal is to achieve natural listening and hopefully a decent ability to read. As far as speaking goes, well, I don't expect much at all, since I'm not going to be focusing at all on speaking, beside shadowing the text, that is.

This isn't really related to L-R but thought it was interesting nevertheless : http://www.apronus.com/norsk/index.htm

digitlhand, thanks for the your thoughtful reply - I think your more nuanced info is helpful for people considering this approach. I don't want you to feel pressured to reply, though - your time is precious! I was trying to condense certain info from the other site for others here to 'show' (rather than then just 'tell') that there is some confusion about what the method is actually supposed to be doing. I realize that you are wanting to test the results of pure LR exposure.

The Creator revising her own method is great. [edit:though it's a fairly fundamental change of the underlying principle.] People using her as an example of successful application of a pure exposure method with Japanese, however, is not so cool. I was poking fun at the Creator with the Harry Potter comment. She likes projecting a "Literature Snob" image. After reading too many pages, I would not put much faith in anything she says. (pls read b/w the lines - I'm trying to be tactful/sensitive here.)

I'd say portions of Tae Kim's grammar might be a nice simple primer in advance which would improve what people will get out of the L2 reading part. A good grammar reference, on the other hand, might be the Dictionaries of B, I, A Grammar. The explanations are key - example sentences alone are not enough for certain points. Tae Kim's explanations (and examples) are inadequate.

The Creator believes shadowing is useless unless one completely understands the sentence (which doesn't occur until "natural listening"). Is this true? I agree that shadowing can help pronunciation, but perhaps it has other indirect comprehension benefits? Does "the more hours the better" apply to shadowing, too? If I were starting the method, I'd want to find out more before spending much time shadowing incomprehensible prose material. (Shadowing plays slightly a different role in speech training, as far as I know.)

[coffee break over]

digitlhand Wrote:

Quote:My goal is to achieve natural listening and hopefully a decent ability to read. As far as speaking goes, well, I don't expect much at all, since I'm not going to be focusing at all on speaking, beside shadowing the text, that is.

What do you mean by natural listening, though?

digitlhand Wrote:

Quote:Can you define what "natural listening" is? I have an idea, but I would like you hear what you consider it to be.

I'm sure we all have our own individual meanings for it, my own experience with L-R has been that once I pass a certain number of hours, I stop translating words and sentences in my head and I understand what is being said... Besides that, I can obviously hear individual words in real time, I'm not trying to listen closely to what is being said (at first this was really hard for me in Swedish).

I don't mean to say I understand everything I hear, by no means can I do that with German even now, I still learn new words everyday and every hour; however, the best way I can put it is, I feel like I'm listening to a conversation in which if it were in English I understand what is being said most of the time, but new words that I don't know pop in all the time.
Does that help?

Hi All,

Just as an update: I started reading Harry Potter #1 a few days ago. After trying a few different approaches out I've settled on this protocol:
1) Read a chapter of HP while listening to the Japanese
2) Read the same chapter in Japanese while listening to Japanese
3) Listen to the cumulative audio up to whatever point I am at on repeat via iPod, while walking around or taking the bus or -whatever-.

Steps 1 and 2 take about a half hour each (varies depending on chapter, pace is set by the Japanese audio reader). Step 3 was quite boring at first, but now that I've read through chapter 4 the repeat rate is decreasing and I don't mind so much.

At this stage (~8 hours combined listening from steps 1,2 and 3) I can only say that I'm finding it quite easy to pick up vocabulary that I _already knew_ but didn't recognize. I've learned a few new words in context which were quite easy to pick off from minimal sentences. I certainly do understand a fair bit, but I'm not a complete beginner. In fairness I can't judge how my comprehension is changing at this early stage, but it is enjoyable.

I am going to listen to chapter 5 before reading chapter 5 and try to carefully note my feeling of comprehension. Lucky for me I don't know shit about Harry Potter, so I think my background knowledge bias will be minimal. I'm going to then repeat steps 1,2,3 up until chapter 10, and I'll listen to chapter 10 before reading the English and carefully note my comprehension. Finally I'll do steps 1,2 and 3 again for all but the last chapter (#17) and try to do a test of my comprehension at that level.

Admittedly, my listening hours won't be at the suggested amount as I'm only getting maybe ~2hours per day, but the aural immersion certainly won't hurt and I'm really curious to see if my previous studies (Genki I + II, Core2K, RtK completed) have perhaps put me in a position to get a head start with L-R.

k.

I'm giving the reading in English, listening in Japanese thing a go over the next week or so. I've already been listening to the audiobook whilst going to sleep for maybe 3 months, and I've been through the book once before with the audio and Japanese text so I thought I may as well give it a try.

I'm not expecting miracles as it does seem a lot like watching dramas/movies with subtitles. But it seems a good way to stay focused on a lot of input.

caivano Wrote:I've already been listening to the audiobook whilst going to sleep for maybe 3 months

Well, you should understand it completely already then.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Well, you should understand it completely already then.

:-)

@caivano, how much time are you listening before falling asleep. Have you read the story before hand? How much time, if it's possible to estimate, have you spent awake while listening to the audio?

Thora, I don't think anyone takes the original L-R poster seriously, nor is there any confusion on HTLAL about what L-R is: (simultaneous) listening and reading. Sometimes L1 and L2, sometimes L2 and L2. That's all it means.


It's hardly anything new either. Khatz has always promoted more or less the same thing--take a story you know very well and listen to it in L2 over and over again all day long on your iPod until you understand it. SRS was a minor addition to this, really a footnote. But for some reason most of the AJATT readers payed way too much attention to the latter, and dismissed immersion environments and Khatz's LR-like techniques as nice to have, but not essential.

I always found the L-R method's originator to be thoroughly entertaining and I thought it was pretty obvious that his/her occasional outrageous statements were meant to get under the skin of some of the more pompous individuals who post over there. His/her exchanges with the LingQ founder were classic.

Who cares about the personality of the original poster, all that matters is the content of her arguments. Seriously on pretty much every message board I've visited, the members with the most valuable insights also tend to get the most criticism...Having ideas that are new, differ from the mainstream, or are too difficult for some people to understand attracts criticism and argument. Steve Kaufman (LingQ's founder is always pissing people off for example)

Right now I am taking a break, but in two hours I should be done with the first reading L1 listening L2 of HP1. A few things I have noticed. There are some words I sort of know now. If I hear them in the story I know what they mean, but I can't remember them if I sit down and think about it for a min. Several times I have gotten lost, but I hear a word I sort of know like the word owl and I can catch up to the text.

Man some parts are really damn hard. The parts where J.K Rowling describes the setting are especially hard to keep up with because there are no words I recognize. I'm not sure if a beginner should start with this method. My total time is 8 hours give or take. Although it has been difficult at times I am enjoying this method so far. just wanted to give you guys an update.

digitlhand Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:Well, you should understand it completely already then.

:-)

@caivano, how much time are you listening before falling asleep. Have you read the story before hand? How much time, if it's possible to estimate, have you spent awake while listening to the audio?

Honestly no idea, I usually fall asleep within about 5 -10 minutes I think. The reason I listen is mainly to send me to sleep, and for the rare occasion when I can't go straight to sleep.

Now when I listen to it I always know what's going on, although I can't understand a load of the descriptive stuff and Hagrid and Dumbledore are still difficult.

digitlhand Wrote:

digitlhand Wrote:

Quote:Can you define what "natural listening" is? I have an idea, but I would like you hear what you consider it to be.

I'm sure we all have our own individual meanings for it, my own experience with L-R has been that once I pass a certain number of hours, I stop translating words and sentences in my head and I understand what is being said... Besides that, I can obviously hear individual words in real time, I'm not trying to listen closely to what is being said (at first this was really hard for me in Swedish).

I don't mean to say I understand everything I hear, by no means can I do that with German even now, I still learn new words everyday and every hour; however, the best way I can put it is, I feel like I'm listening to a conversation in which if it were in English I understand what is being said most of the time, but new words that I don't know pop in all the time.
Does that help?

That sounds like the listening comprehension that anyone would achieve if they put in enough hours into listening to audio material though, which I guess is why I have a bit of scepticism. This method advocates a very large amount of hours over an extended period of time, and the results are described as being the same as if someone had been doing any other form of listening comprehension in that time; movies, shows, music, dialogues, exercises, etc. All will yield that same result if enough time and energy is put into it.
I think audiobooks are a wonderful form of listening comprehension training, but solely using them in this method seems a lot less efficient than if a student were to do audio training with all different forms.

Aijin Wrote:

digitlhand Wrote:

digitlhand Wrote:I'm sure we all have our own individual meanings for it, my own experience with L-R has been that once I pass a certain number of hours, I stop translating words and sentences in my head and I understand what is being said... Besides that, I can obviously hear individual words in real time, I'm not trying to listen closely to what is being said (at first this was really hard for me in Swedish).

I don't mean to say I understand everything I hear, by no means can I do that with German even now, I still learn new words everyday and every hour; however, the best way I can put it is, I feel like I'm listening to a conversation in which if it were in English I understand what is being said most of the time, but new words that I don't know pop in all the time.
Does that help?

That sounds like the listening comprehension that anyone would achieve if they put in enough hours into listening to audio material though, which I guess is why I have a bit of scepticism. This method advocates a very large amount of hours over an extended period of time, and the results are described as being the same as if someone had been doing any other form of listening comprehension in that time; movies, shows, music, dialogues, exercises, etc. All will yield that same result if enough time and energy is put into it.
I think audiobooks are a wonderful form of listening comprehension training, but solely using them in this method seems a lot less efficient than if a student were to do audio training with all different forms.

Ohh I forgot to mention this but your post made me remember. I now have Japanese audio playing all day in the background. I'm experimenting with Khatz's full immersion technique. I am mainly using this method for my listening comprehension skills.

My plan is to use this method along with RTK, Tae Kim, and sentence mining (KO2001). The great thing is that now I only work weekends so I have 5 days a week I can study Japanese for 8 or more hours if I wanted to.

Well, I meant more of attention-focused listening comprehension. It's wonderful to expose yourself to Japanese in any form you can but having music in the background, for example, won't do much in terms of learning unless you understand it. For example, if you dissect the vocabulary and grammar of a song's lyrics to figure out the meaning, and study those vocabulary, then each time you hear the song it'll enforce those words you've learned. But otherwise your brain just processes it as noise rather than language, since it doesn't have the grammatical and vocabulary understanding of it translate it into images and thoughts, does that make sense?

8 hours a day is great though! I always think it's admirable to see people devote that much time and effort to learning something, it definitely takes passion and discipline. Since it's summer, I made a daily 12-hour Japanese schedule for one of my students since he doesn't have a job, haha tis amazing how much sheer chunks of time pay off for results though.

Aijin Wrote:This method advocates a very large amount of hours over an extended period of time, and the results are described as being the same as if someone had been doing any other form of listening comprehension in that time; movies, shows, music, dialogues, exercises, etc. All will yield that same result if enough time and energy is put into it.
I think audiobooks are a wonderful form of listening comprehension training, but solely using them in this method seems a lot less efficient than if a student were to do audio training with all different forms.

I think the key is that audiobooks, especially for very long novels, just contain so much more raw material than any of those other sources that you listed. How many actual words are spoken in 10 hours of movies or TV shows compared to a 10 hour audiobook? I've met people who claimed to have learned foreign languages by watching TV (There's even a blog about using the 'TV Method' to learn languages), but in every case it took years.

Certainly non-stop speech contains more raw material, but the amount of time required to be able to learn and understand all of the grammar and vocabulary used in a single novel will take an incredible amount of time, and until one understands the material that is being spoken, it is just noise. If one cannot understand the spoken material without the crutch of a translation into their native language by their side, then it's not really understanding it. Either way you cut it, for a native English speaker to learn Japanese to a high level of proficiency it will take long years of hard work. There's no way around that.

The most efficient method of learning a foreign language, by far, is making that foreign language an essential part of your existence. Your relationships, friendships, social interactions, entertainment, all your conscious as well as background thoughts, surroundings, occupation: an entire lifestyle of that language to the point where you are practically breathing it (not that this is an option for many people). And even then, with a highly educated and intelligent person, it will take YEARS to learn Japanese to anywhere near a native-level for native English-speaking adults. That is why I am so sceptical about all the methods I see floating around the internet that promise anything else.

There is no silver bullet. Some methods are certainly more efficient than others for your time, sure, but in the end no matter what it's going to take effort, time, effort, time, effort, time. Rinse and repeat. I am nearly 100% sure that if I had tried to learn English by only listening to english audiobooks of Murakami novels, with the English and Japanese original in hand, that I would be no where near where I am in English today.

I really don't want to come off as rude or snobby. If someone enjoys a method, and they think it's working for them, then they should be all means use it! But I also believe that it's harmful for methods to insist that they offer unrealistic results. People see claims like "I learned to speak native-level Japanese in a year!" and then become dreary about their own rate of progress, etc. I just think it's good for people to keep in mind that this is the internet, and that if a method seems too good to be true it often has the same credibility as those spam e-mails saying you can grow your penis by two feet if you give them $1,000

Quote:I just think it's good for people to keep in mind that this is the internet, and that if a method seems too good to be true it often has the same credibility as those spam e-mails saying you can grow your penis by two feet if you give them $1,000 tongue

This thread might be on the way down... lol

Quote:Either way you cut it, for a native English speaker to learn Japanese to a high level of proficiency it will take long years of hard work. There's no way around that.

I remember Germans and people who learned German as adults tell me the exact same thing. German has all these cases you're never going to learn, verbs break off sometimes but not always...

Quote:If one cannot understand the spoken material without the crutch of a translation into their native language by their side, then it's not really understanding it.

The crutch is only there for a little while.

Quote:Certainly non-stop speech contains more raw material, but the amount of time required to be able to learn and understand all of the grammar and vocabulary used in a single novel will take an incredible amount of time, and until one understands the material that is being spoken, it is just noise.

I can attest myself that this is just a wrong statement. As I have said before when I learned German, I used the first Harry Potter book by reading a chapter in English and then listening to the German audio by itself later. The rest of the books I used chapter summaries of about 10 sentences long. I was at a much lower comprehensibility when I was doing German when I went solo on audio alone. Swedish was the same story.
Now one might say that Japanese is so far off that using this translation "crutch" is blinding me and I really don't understand the words that I hear. Rubbish. I have a translation with me about 20 percent of the time, the rest of the time I'm listening, 80 percent, is all audio solo. It's not incomprehensible I hear the words I've learned and I hear sentences that I'm understanding.

The audio is not noise... patterns emerge with more and more listening, words are learned by context, which in turn teach more words. It reaches a breaking point and soon one is able to understand the majority of what they listen to.
One can say that I'm lying in my progress and that's fine.

I'll say it again. I am learning Japanese faster than I was learning German.

Aijin Wrote:Well, I meant more of attention-focused listening comprehension. It's wonderful to expose yourself to Japanese in any form you can but having music in the background, for example, won't do much in terms of learning unless you understand it. For example, if you dissect the vocabulary and grammar of a song's lyrics to figure out the meaning, and study those vocabulary, then each time you hear the song it'll enforce those words you've learned. But otherwise your brain just processes it as noise rather than language, since it doesn't have the grammatical and vocabulary understanding of it translate it into images and thoughts, does that make sense?

8 hours a day is great though! I always think it's admirable to see people devote that much time and effort to learning something, it definitely takes passion and discipline. Since it's summer, I made a daily 12-hour Japanese schedule for one of my students since he doesn't have a job, haha tis amazing how much sheer chunks of time pay off for results though.

Exactly,this is right on the ball. Best method is basically breathing the language in every part of your life. That's if you want to become native-level and fast.

Personally I have no real expectations of what my language abilities will be after a couple hundred hours of L-R, but I do think it's an interesting experiment and I'll definitely share my results. I suspect one of the turnoffs people have with it is that the whole idea sounds so easy, but it's far from it. It's a very intense and exhausting method, requiring one's full concentration. Many people, I suspect, will not be up to its demands and give up early on.

sheetz Wrote:Personally I have no real expectations of what my language abilities will be after a couple hundred hours of L-R, but I do think it's an interesting experiment and I'll definitely share my results. I suspect one of the turnoffs people have with it is that the whole idea sounds so easy, but it's far from it. It's a very intense and exhausting method, requiring one's full concentration. Many people, I suspect, will not be up to the demands.

Easy is a good thing! What I usual do is keep the looking-up/studying to my srs. Outside the srs I usual do exactly listening>reading almost everyday. Use rikichan to remind of me of reading,etc.

digitlhand Wrote:I can attest myself that this is just a wrong statement. As I have said before when I learned German, I used the first Harry Potter book by reading a chapter in English and then listening to the German audio by itself later. The rest of the books I used chapter summaries of about 10 sentences long. I was at a much lower comprehensibility when I was doing German when I went solo on audio alone. Swedish was the same story.
Now one might say that Japanese is so far off that using this translation "crutch" is blinding me and I really don't understand the words that I hear. Rubbish. I have a translation with me about 20 percent of the time, the rest of the time I'm listening, 80 percent, is all audio solo. It's not incomprehensible I hear the words I've learned and I hear sentences that I'm understanding.

The audio is not noise... patterns emerge with more and more listening, words are learned by context, which in turn teach more words. It reaches a breaking point and soon one is able to understand the majority of what they listen to.
One can say that I'm lying in my progress and that's fine.

I'm not at all accusing you of lying about your progress, I'm glad you seem to be making so much progress and that your efforts are paying off

But, I do think that you are underestimating the brain's ability to make sense out of context. If Harry Potter is something you've not only read countless times in English, but done this in other languages as well, then you're mind is basically just taking the Japanese, and fitting the words into the blueprint you already have for the characters, plot, and dialogue. Working with material you're extremely familiar with is nothing at all comparable to understanding raw material in the language. I think that after this method, if you try listening to a Japanese work you have no previous experience with, you simply won't be able to comprehend it.

It's one thing to understand all the grammar and vocabulary being used in situations you're already familiar with, but learning hundreds of grammar points in all their different contexts cannot be achieved through a single resource. If one learns vocabulary only in a single context, by hearing them over and over in a story, they are recognizing patterns through brute repetition rather than understanding of those words individually. You may be able to learn a verb in a sentence, for example, but completely not recognize the verb when in one of its many conjugated forms in another source, because you haven't learned the word through enough exposure to it.

Another problem with regards to vocabulary is that it is based upon the specific material. Harry Potter uses a selective group of words based upon the situations and environments in the story. Even if one were to memorize all the words in the entire series of books (which would take an incredible amount of time to go through) there would still be thousands and thousands of words you wouldn't know. While it may give you good experience with the vocabulary used for fantasy novels, a basic conversation about cooking, for example, or any stories set in other time periods or settings, you would be lost.

If someone truly wants to learn all their vocab and grammar from audiobooks, then my personal suggestion would be to do it with material that is more relevent to daily life so as to be more essential for general understanding of the language. In the same way that only using something like One Piece manga as a resource for your vocabulary leaves you in no way prepared for real life Japanese, I don't think Harry Potter is the best option.

A wide variety of types of sources are necessary for full-breadth understanding of a language (even if it's only listening comprehension you want) which would require countless audio books in all genres. Which goes back to my point about time, time, time, and more time.