Frustrated beginner, please help

Welsh General / Questions
#101

We all have our own unique experiences, and our interest in the topic, and a friendly desire to talk about it all - I’d hate any sense of ‘[x] knows more than [y]’ in here, because I think that sort of pattern is very damaging to real academic (and personal) enquiry… :slight_smile: [But I do of course see and appreciate enormously your kind and caring intentions…:slight_smile: ]

[quote=“netmouse, post:96, topic:8234”]
Well, yes! After the courses, you just said “Read read read!”, which I did - and it basically worked, but it’s not very specific is it?! :slight_smile:[/quote]

But ‘read read read!’ isn’t exactly hazy, is it?! Perhaps the underlying issue here is that if there are better ways to go from intermediate to advanced, I don’t know what they are (although I’m looking forward very much indeed to seeing what happens when we can build our bulk listening approach)…:slight_smile:

I’d agree that it would be sweeping to say that exposure solves everything - but we’re into the kind of territory here that overlaps hugely with first language ability - how and why some people become more wide-ranging, ‘correct’ users of their first language - and apart from having parents who enjoy talking to their children (which makes an eye-watering difference), I’m not aware of any lines of enquiry there that seem to have ‘this is the solution’ potential to me.

In terms of getting people to conversational confidence, though, bulk exposure is tried and tested - so that has to be what we suggest - along with putting our hands up to admit that we don’t know what the linguistic fix is for someone like your husband!

I think they tend to exclude people who aren’t academically confident, and I think they’re an unnecessary distraction - and that they have the side-effect of nudging people in the direction of feeling that they need to ‘revise’ if they haven’t ‘understood’ it yet.

It was very helpful indeed when you raised these doubts at the point when we were just launching the Levels - it prompted me to look very specifically at the usage patterns I was seeing from people who’d started on the Levels versus the Courses. Of course, we haven’t revisited the conversation since then, but I’ve had far, far more exposure now to people who’ve come through the Levels, and it’s my perception that they are as a rule significantly more conversationally adept.

One of the main reasons that I started work on the Levels was that we had people arriving at Bootcamps having done the whole of Course 1 with problematic gaps in the conversational usage. The Levels have largely cured that. The emotional boost of ‘Oh, look, I can use past, present and future with all these verbs!’ at the start of Course 1 doesn’t actually translate into much actual communication - so it often translates into early and disappointing encounters, which can be a set-back.

I think where we’ve arrived is that you like the spaced repetition element of the SSi Method, but not the rest of it - which is fair enough! - and I’m very glad to have this kind of valuable conversation. :slight_smile:

It seems to me, though, that rather than fundamentally changing the methodology, it might be an easier fix for grammar-interested academically confident learners to add a Gareth King grammar book to their learning mix? And I’m not saying that dismissively - I genuinely believe it would be a better solution than trying to build an ‘SSi+grammar’ course (to a certain extent, that’s what Course 3 is, and I think it’s my worst piece of work by quite some distance - probably better for me to play to my strengths than try and become a grammar teacher!). :slight_smile:

That’s very interesting - one might have expected them to get slightly worse, since you’re dealing with a wider range each time. Good luck with the next one!

Out of interest - now that you’re approaching it in a much more deliberately experimental way, what sort of impact is that having on your emotions during a session?

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#102

Because no-one ever uses it…:wink: [Which is a slight cheat, because there are other gaps where the answer is ‘have a go at extrapolating’, but it’s still a decent rule-of-thumb - if you can’t extrapolate it and we still haven’t helped, there’s a fighting chance it’s not an ordinary speech pattern… :slight_smile: ]

It might be interesting to do a side-by-side analysis of the Courses and the Levels - I think they’re very similar in a lot of ways, and that the core differences are more to do with the first 5 to 10 sessions or so - I certainly don’t perceive Course 2 and Level 2 as being dramatically different - just a few shifts in the direction of less explanation with Level 2.

We’ll probably never entirely kill the Courses - they’ll just get more tucked away over time, and less flagged up - our solution for people who want to go at different speeds is probably going to have more to do with online streaming and giving people a level of ‘settings’ choice. But our new languages are all going to be more similar to the Levels (with some extra layers of fine tuning, which may come to the Levels themselves one of these days!)… :slight_smile:

The whole balancing act is really about taking the output of a person who has the same attitude as you do (ie me!) and then trying to temper the wind to the shorn lamb for learners who don’t want quite so much pain with their chips…:wink:

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#103

Just in time for lunch…

Definitely! I’m as interested as you!

He’s not that bad! Just not perfect, after 13 years in the UK. People can very easily comfortably fossilise when they have found a way to communicate something, and fail to notice for ever that it’s not exactly the same as native speakers. [quote=“aran, post:101, topic:8234”]
I’m not quite sure what is to be gained by withholding explanations and teaching points

I think they tend to exclude people who aren’t academically confident, and I think they’re an unnecessary distraction
[/quote]

Yes and no, and up to a point… How often does a new learner come on the forum to check the difference between “o’n i” and “wnes i”? And pretty much everyone who goes on to be a confident speaker is going to clock it consciously at some point - so why not just say it? (As well as expose to it, of course.)[quote=“aran, post:101, topic:8234”]
I think where we’ve arrived is that you like the spaced repetition element of the SSi Method, but not the rest of it
[/quote]

I wouldn’t go that far - it’s still the best course in the world! :innocent:[quote=“aran, post:101, topic:8234”]
It seems to me, though, that rather than fundamentally changing the methodology, it might be an easier fix for grammar-interested academically confident learners to add a Gareth King grammar book to their learning mix?
[/quote]

OK, good point. I know that’s what a lot of people do - and if it had been an officially sanctioned ‘option’, I probably would have done too. (Not doing was only really part of the experiment.)

Just be careful how you put it! At one stage of life I may well have gone for the mad option too. (Reading a huge German grammar book on the tube for a year was also a little mad…) But as it happened I was very pleased with the language-learning-without-any-excessive-pain-at-all version, which worked very nicely thank you. :slight_smile:

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#104

Actually, I don’t think it can get much lower. Just by remembering the current new word and getting the first few trivial sentences, I get a bit over twenty hits. Add a few times where I can get from the last sentence to the current one by adding a simple word that I know and that results in my current score.

It is not such a hugely frustrating experience anymore, however it still feels like an unpleasant chore. More like brushing your teeth (for thirty minutes a day- talk about overbrushing :slight_smile:) instead of going to the dentist for a root canal. It is tough to keep this up for ten days with no sense of achievement.

In addition, the experience lulls me into a state of learned helplessness. The short term memory hits don’t feel like progress at all. Remove them and I’m left with ~95% misses, which teaches me not to expect to being able to translate anything. This has the (slightly comic) effect that I tend to run out of time on the occasional easy phrase - spending all the time searching and not finding the part that I don’t know.

Cheers, Michael

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#105

Well, this is good to know! :slight_smile:

I’ve definitely been one who likes having the explanations and likes to try figure out the patterns/“rules” and try to extrapolate. I think @netmouse and I are very similar in the way we like to learn. I think hitting the balance between giving some explanation, so that there is a bit of guidance for starting that extrapolation, but not so much that it becomes too academic/scary, is probably a fine line to walk as you write the material. I did start supplementing with Gareth King’s Colloquial Welsh sometime during Course 2 - in a dipping-in-here-and-there sort of fashion, when I had a question. I have not read it cover-to-cover, but at this point that actually sounds sort of like it could be fun :blush:

This is really interesting, and I’d love to know more about how you envision the choice of “settings” (I realize that this may not be an appropriate time for such a discussion).

It will be fun to try another language using just the Levels approach - although the next one I see myself wanting to learn (when it becomes available) is one that I’ve already had exposure to, so it won’t be quite the same as when I started learning Welsh. Too bad we can’t go back in time - I’d love to do an experiment where I could learn Welsh from ground zero using the Levels and then compare results and feelings from the two different “journeys”!

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#106

I think the core elements which affect how difficult it feels are the length of the pause, the length of the target phrases, and the frequency of the repetition - I currently think that we can allow a certain amount of variation of all of those without fundamentally undermining the methodology, so I’m currently envisaging either a control tool for each of them, or just one overall easy-medium-tough choice…

Yes, it really is frustrating that we don’t (yet) have the neurological equivalent of a wet cloth on a slate!..:slight_smile:

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#107

a wet cloth on a slate!

That’s what we used when I started school (1949-50) in Stoneywood, Aberdeenshire. I still vividly recall the smell of the mildewy cloth. :smile:

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#108

Progress Log - Challenge 8

  • 30 hits

  • 18 errors

  • 89 misses

Had to do this before I got my morning tea. It went better than expected. I even had a tiny sense of achievement - my first since Challenge 1 - when I could recall a few words that previously eluded me.

The next few days will be a bit chaotic on my part. I should be able to continue my streak of one challenge per day, but I may not be able to post my progress each day. So, I have a question for @aran: after Challenge 10, should I start again with Challenge 1 (I still don’t recall some of the words from that one), or do you want me to do Challenge 3 first to get stats not marred by previous repetitions?

Cheers, Michael

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#109

Let’s go for 3 so that we’ve got the clearest possible comparison - no previous repetitions, and already listed stats…:slight_smile:

That sounds like some words finishing their journey up through the spaced repetition - it may be that you need more spaced repetition than other people (I’m not aware of much good work on individual variations with spaced repetition, so this might be an interesting line of enquiry) - in which case it would make sense that the process seemed initially less rewarding for you…

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#110

I have recently completed Course 2 and not yet started on Course 3. So I have no first-hand knowledge of working through Course 3. Yet.

I have taken my time, repeated whenever I wanted to and used the pause button frequently. I have also watched Peppa Pinc and other children’s characters, listened to children’s stories in Welsh, have read (though not until I was well into Course 2) children’s books in Welsh and then continued on into more adult literature. If I don’t understand the reason for a grammatical structure I look it up in my copy of Gareth King’s book. But I still speak carefully and very slowly in Welsh.

Aran:
We’ll probably never entirely kill the Courses - they’ll just get more tucked away over time
I am completely happy with the Courses so far. They suit me very well.

My wife gave up Course 1 in Lesson 6 and, after a break, restarted her Welsh with the Mynediad course from Popeth Cymraeg. When Level 1 came out she changed to that and just took off. It is different and suits her well. She makes herself understood in a sort of Welsh and asks for the words she doesn’t know. I would like her conversational ability; she would like my understanding of grammar.

While both the Courses and the Levels are available we will just carry on at our own pace for as long as it remains enjoyable. And add in whatever supplements we fancy along the way.

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#111

You forgot me. I’m actually doing 2nd full repetition (probably 4th on Course 1 and 3rd on Course 2) and I only at the beginning went by the model of starting 1, starting 2, repeating 1, starting 3, repeating 2 etc … Then I saw this doesn’t go anywhere in deed so I plunged into making the whole course (until Lesson 6/1, 6/2 loosing my nerves and stopping in the middle of it and stopping learning for about a month moaning here in between). Then I totally abandoned Lessons 6 (even bonus lesson) and continued with Lesson 7 going all the way till the end and when I finished everything I decided to repeat absolutely everything by the system abcd… you describe, including Lesson(s) 6. It’s just that I’m more of a learner as @Nicky’s wife is, now, not with the repetition until I’m 100 % sure but with that part saying that if I dont’ feel like doing lesson I won’t do it but when I start I finish it in one piece all without pause button. I never knew what pause button is even not at the very beginning that’s probably why I’ve moaned so much. However Welsh is constantly in my head these days. I’m going to the bus at 5:00 am, listening to the birds singing and my feelings goes through my mind in Welsh. If I’m late for a bus I usually say “Aros amdanna i, plis! Paid mynd!” :slight_smile: (and it passes me … haha)

I’m really curious for the stats of @Eigentime learning when he finishes 10 and returns to 3. I never went to this model and it’d be interesting to know.

I also have to be ashamed I ever moaned for not getting anywhere and SSiW doesn’t work for me because my stats were oposite to Michael’s with only 4,5 short term memory. Yah, @aran I shoudl be banned of saying I can’t do it even at the very beginning so I should never dare to say something like this again!

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#112

Progress log - Challenge 9

That one was bad.

  • 21 hits

  • 13 errors

  • 121 misses

Cheers, Michael

#113

Reading the stats and comments with them I can’t get rid off the feeling that you’re approaching doing lessons with expectation of making bad results. That seams the more to the last (10th) lesson you go the kind of worst results and the feeling you’re doing bad. What about changing attitude a bit and approach to the lessons without any expectations at all? When I did so I had (unexpectedly) better results. It didn’t help if I approached to the lessons with the attitude like “I’ll just do fine” either because the results didn’t fulfill my expectations at the end. Try to start the lesson without any presumptions of what the results will be. I believe you’ll do just fine with this.

Now boldly go to the last lesson in a set! You can do it! I know you can!

Hwyl!
Tatjana :slight_smile:

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#114

Ouch… that sounds like a tough day! Well done for not throwing yourself off a bridge.

Er… Michael? You still there? You haven’t thrown yourself off a bridge, have you?

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#115

I’m sure he is although this last stats report was a bit quiet one … @Eigentime … ! :slight_smile:

(Sorry, I depsertly need to get you in a better mood (regarding learning)) :slight_smile:

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#116

Hello @tatjana

I’m still living, but on the road with only occasional Internet access and only my phone to write. There never seems to be a bridge nearby when you need one. So I will just keep on struggling with the challenges - did I mention that I can be bloody minded?

Anyway, thank you and @aran for the encouragement. It’s appreciated.

Cheers, Michael

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#117

That’s my kind of learner… :slight_smile: :star2:

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#118

I’m curious - maybe I missed the answer to this, but where are the stats coming from? Does SSi in app form keep track of this (I just use the mp3s so I wouldn’t know), or are you keeping track of it yourself? The stats are definitely useful in this thread for Aran to help you find the best approach for you, but I’m not convinced it is beneficial in the long run as you are putting so much attention and worth on them.

I also wanted to ask what environment you are doing the challenges in. I know from one of the other threads that I am not the only one who does other things while they’re doing lessons (for me it is the washing up, I learnt German with Pimsleur doing the same thing), and I do much better doing this than on the occasions that I have just sat down with SSi (Spanish) and no other task.

I also wanted to suggest trying mnemonics for any particularly sticky bits of vocab - an example of something I use with Spanish is for the word “amenudo” (spellng?) meaning “often”. Whenever it came up I went blank, forgot the rest of what I was supposed to say, and stood there in a bit of a panic. So I broke it down to “a” + “me” + “nudo” and thought “I’m often naked, so often is ‘ah, me nude-o’”… now when it comes up I don’t panic, I laugh… and then miss the rest of the sentence because I’m laughing, but at least I remember the word.

I’m glad you are sticking with it, at least for now. If you do decide not to continue at some point, please come back and try again after a break - it is amazing how much the brain processes in the background, and you might find it has fermented nicely into a tasty Cwrw of knowledge.

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#119

SSi lessons don’t give you any stats following or something like this as it actually (I believe so) isn’t what you’d suppose to do except with occassions like this with @Eigentime, me and what’s us like. I don’t know how Michael does them but I did it all prety simple (well, simple for thchy me anyway). I made a table in Excell with conditional functions in the cells. When the answer was wrong (however I counted every tiny bit wrong even if just accent wasn’t quite what I wanted) I’ve pressed F (what meant false) and the cell previously conditional formated colored red. When the answer was correct (however for me had to be 100 % correct) I’ve pressed C (what meant correct) and the cell collored green. At the top of the table I’ve made 3 rows with counting forumla in them. The first row counted all answers, the second row all False answers and the third row all correct answers. At the bottom of the table I’ve set another 3 counting rows and one extra. All 3 rows counted the same as on the top just that the formulas were set to calculate the percentage of all, false and correct answers. The extra row calculated the average all course percentage as I went through the course.

When the tables were set the following and entering the data was prety easy but you’re right: this is not rewarding in any way and I just did that for the purpose the same as here - to give @aran the data he needed to make suggestions what and how I should do next.

So, who doesn’t absolutely need stats, don’t do them at all. Go by the feeling about how much you do correctly and how much you do not.

For rthe doing lessons part … I can’t do anything else but lessons even now with such long time of learning behind me. It’s interesting enough that I have no problems talking to someone while doing something but lessons are another thing. They demand full attention from me.

On the part of stopping and starting again. If nothing works then it’s probably the best thing to stop for a while and come back later. I stopped for about a month or so, doing absolutely nothing. Then I came back to learning and I can say I was pleasantly surprised how much I can remember but also how much I’ve forgotten, especially if there were longer and tougher sentences to be said. I never used that kind of associations to remember the word though. Actually I never tried as it always seamed too complicated to me.

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#120

Progress log - Challenge 10

  • 28 hits

  • 9 errors

  • 102 misses

Could have been worse. I’m looking forward to tomorrow when I will go back to Challenge 3.

Cheers, Michael

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