Hey Guys. I just want some opinions on what you guys do in a certain situation we have no doubt encountered before.
You are faced with a lesson and so begin reading and lingquing away. But you just aren’t getting it at all, you maybe understand enough of the words, but just can’t make sense of the article at all.
What do YOU do?
Do you accept that there will be times like this and so try and find a different more manageable lesson?
Or do you power through determined to keep reading it and reading it and investigating “turn of phrase” after “turn of phrase” until you nail the meaning of the article despite this taking along time with no immediate guarantee of clarification of comprehension?
Would be interesting to get some thoughts on this.
I move on.
As soon as I start to feel bored, I move on. I’ll hit those situations in other contexts, and eventually it will hit.
If I tried to power through, my brain wouldn’t be very receptive to any discovery antway.
This is a good question. Powering through is a good work ethic to have, but the law of diminishing returns comes into play as well.
I move on. I hope to encounter it later on, or hope it will somehow soak in sooner or later.
There is a saying, “You get what you put in”. Some words I uunderstand first time, there are lots of words that I am still learning. You can’t learn a language over night. You have to keep going, and one day in will make sence.
Here is a list of ways to stay motivated:
1: Listen to music, watch flims.
2 Native to help you to understand the language. This does’nt have to be a teacher, but it could be a colleague, or a family member.
It looks like you are trying to learn two languages from the same family group. That is like trying to learn Ukrainian and Russian at he same time, they are both from the slavic family. I would recommend, you look at Steve Kaufmann,videos He has many videos on youtube, that he has answered, questions like your.
My understanding of you question is. If I read a piece of text, the first time I do not uderstand it. After time, I start to understand words. The meaning of the text, will follow. I am learning Russian, I do not stand every word that I read. But the one thing that I do know, is with time I start to understand words. The key to learning a language is to find what works for you.
Ask your self, what type of learner are you. From there you can work out t a lesson plan that works for you.
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It depends. I’ll just say that I’m more likely to power through if the lessons is short.
Maybe you have just chosen too difficult lessons for you.
A lot of students do it. I can understand their wish to go ahead as soon as possible, but it ends often in a sort of the frustration.
I always advice to go one step back and to choose the text of your real level.
And in some days you can return to your difficult texts already with the bigger success.
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I would move on to a more suitable lesson. There is enough material outside. Why should I stick with a lesson that causes me more pain than fun? Language learning should be fun. And it can be fun. That is something that LingQ has teached me. LingQ helps you to understand texts that are challenging. But there is a difference between challenging and too difficult.
My problem is that I loose interest if something is too difficult, and that I start looking for distractions if this happens. So it is better to move on to a lesson that is more fun before this happens.
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Push through, almost always these days. If there is stuff I’m not getting, that’s even more reason to keep with it. But I use a couple of other incentive tools to ensure I keep at it, with anything I am listening or reading.
In my opinion, if I don’t have a general understanding of a text, it proves that it is too difficult for me for now, and I move on to something more accessible. Then, once in a while, I come back to the text until I feel that I’ve improved enough to be able to read it. I do the same with exercises: if I make too many mistakes, I give it a rest, and try again some time later, several times if needed, until I’ve mastered them.
It’s interesting to hear everyone’s opinions. I think the completest and perfectionist side of me always wants to try and power through it, but it is incredibly hard to maintain enthusiasm and focus if this is what you choose.
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If the researching process for the words gets too exhaustive or I get bored doing it, I just stop. If the word is important and you think you would use it somewhere, sometime, so for sure you’ll encounter that word in a different context or another text and word by word you’ll after sometime go back to that indecipherable text and understand a lot better.
For me it depends on how interested I am in the material at hand. If it’s something I really, really want to know about, I keep going. If it’s really an issue, I go back to something more manageable and return to it later when I’m better at the language. The same is true for audio where the speaker is speaking too fast, the quality is poor, or both. Example: that LibriVox Trafalgar book is just awful. Archaic words, guy speaking very quickly, and quality is horrible. I eventually powered through that, but man was it rough.
So, short answer: give up–for a while.