What’s the point of introducing such uncommon words in the first lesson??
What kind of uncommon words? Give some examples, it’s too vague your post.
Well, you will likely learn them at some point, anyway, so why not start learning them early?
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Hoe gaat het ermee? instead of Hoe gaat met je?
Waarmee kan ik jullie van dienst zijn
Because, since learners should speak from day one, they should be given expressions that make sense grammatically and are easy to memorize. Imagine that on day 1 of your English class instead of learning How are you, you were to learn How is your mood today. I think this website focus too much on learning single words rather than expressions…
I don’t believe in speaking from day one. Even if you ask someone, “how are you”, you’ll probably not understand what they say back to you anyway. The whole point of this website is to accumulate words and phrases. The focus is to learn to understand the language and build up your vocabulary.
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Not sure how long you will stick around – but some things to maybe note:
-Lingq can be frustrating, but if you give it a chance you will be amazed at what can be achieved here.
-There is no such thing as a first lesson, just listen and read to what you want, no one is responsible for your learning, Lingq is what you make it, it can be as great or as bad as you want it to be - don’t like this lesson? ignore it - or script a better one then put it on the exchange for recording and upload it - I guarantee - you will get a lot out of that single experience alone.
-The “Who is She” type series was designed to pretty much do what you are expecting, but nothing is perfect, maybe translation is off, or maybe learning “how do you do” “how are you” “how’s it going” “how are you feeling” doesn’t really require any order, in the end only you can come to peace with this concept.
-99.9999% of everyone that has ever learnt a language didn’t speak from day one, they pretty much start off speaking around day 500, and get good at around day 5000, now should adult language learners follow this path? Maybe, maybe not.
“Some people believe talking a lot is key. Can be true, but don’t forget that talking a lot means repeating your own mistakes all the time. Then it becomes harder and harder to get rid of them. Talking a lot works only if you pay a lot of attention to listening all the time and always assume that you’re still missing something…language is mostly imitation. I’d say at the beginning, imitating perfectly takes 90% listening and 10% practice. " [Gaudfroy]
You want to know what speak from day 1 really sounds like?
It sounds a lot like this:
The Annoying Orange - YouTube
Or even more clearer – from Benny Lewis himself – speaking from day 1, after 3 years, gets you to A2 : Juggling Languages: The Balancing Act That All Polyglots Must Perform » Fluent in 3 Months (but sounds like A1 to me, and that’s being kind).
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Hi Alexander and iaing. I learnt two languages (Norwegian and Vietnamese) by speaking from day one. Now I’m not going to brag about this and that. Everyone is different and has a different learning method. It’s just I wanted to point out that I’m not speaking without experience.
Hi Alexander and iaing. I learnt two languages (Norwegian and Vietnamese) by speaking from day one. Now I’m not going to brag about this and that. Everyone is different and has a different learning method. It’s just I wanted to point out that I’m not speaking without experience.
I also disagree on what you’re saying about no one is responsible for your learning. If you choose a method made by a professional rather than an amateur you will notice the difference. You have to take in account the amount of time you use on something. If a method is more efficient, why not choosing that one?
I think this article pretty much explains why in many cases it is wise to speak from day one. http://www.thepolyglotdream.com/asklucaanything3/
I try to make my courses for the students who would like to speak from the day one. You can see my courses in Russian (Русский с нуля-Russian from zero), English(Let’s start) and German (Deutsch von Anfang an) on this site.
But in this case I would like to support the creators of the course ‘Who is she?’ in different languages here because the separate lessons and the whole story are two different things.
I can limit the words in my lessons to the most popular, but by describing the story the creators must use also some not so popular words to make the plot together.
Thank you Evgueny. I just understood that the creators of the course have a story and then translate it in several languages. This would explain why the discussion seemed so unnatural, maybe initally it wasn’t meant to be in Dutch.
“Hoet gaat het ermee?” is niet zo heel ongewoon. Niet anders dan “Hoe gaat het met je?”
“Waarmee kan ik jullie van dienst zijn?” is misschien wat minder vaak gebruikt, maar zeker niet heel erg vreemd. Deze lessen zijn vertaald uit het Engels, en ik denk ook dat er wel wat op aan te merken valt. Kies andere beginners lessen als je ze niet aanstaan.
Groetjes,
Silvia
Hi Alexander, if you say to someone How are you, you should also know what they are likely going to answer.
Thank you for taking the time to write this long answer. I’ll try to answer to some of your arguments. I disagree that language is mostly imitation. If your goal is having the pronunciation of a local, this may hold true, but if your goal is communication, then I’d say that language is mostly building repertoires of words and interactions. Not somewhere in your memory, ready to come up with some reflection, but ready to be spoken out after a few secs. And this, at least for me, takes a lot of repetition, and a lot of interactions. It also depends what do you want your learning process to look like, do you want to meet people or do you want just to look at a lot of flashcards and textbooks? Regarding repeating your mistakes, in my experience, there’s nothing as being corrected by a native speaker, say in an embarassing way, to get the rule sticked in my mind, i because learning works better when emotions are involved.
Bedankt silviad. Ik denk probleem is dat lessen zijn vertaald met Google Translate. LingQ wil zeker geld verdienen, maar ze wil liever gebruikers zelf de dienst verbeteren.
Regardless of our methods, we all seem to be progressing in our language learning.
Speaking from day one will work if you enjoy it, and reading and listening for 6 months before speaking will work if you enjoy it. This is proven by the amount of successful polyglots that all have differing opinions on what the most effective methods are.
My personal opinion (and I am a very new language learner, as you can tell from my statistics) is that I want to eventually know 30,000+ words anyway. I don’t mind when I learn them.
Now, I don’t believe in a Speak from Day One approach, so this isn’t a problem for me. If, however, you plan on speaking from day one, then it might be best to learn those typical conversations first.
Thank you for your answer benjimino. I agree with all that you wrote. I just think that sharing in a forum such as this may be helpful to exchange our views.
I raised this question because I thought I could discuss this specific lesson with who created, but it looks like forums are just open to everyone and not really related to the single lesson. Anyway, a native speaker clarified to me that probably the lesson just got roughly translated from English, without much thought behind.