I don't have much to say at the moment. But I've been putting together some ruminations on language learning. Here's a recent draft. I was thinking of making it into a standalone webpage somewhere, after some more editing and content, for my students to see.
Jared's thoughts on how to actually learn to SPEAK effectively. Or, rather… "a list of some things that don't really help you speak better."
- Memorizing vocabulary doesn't really help. Lists of words with definitions or translation-meanings have a place, especially starting out, but farther on, learning and memorizing lists of words with meanings, in this way, will not ever help you improve fluency.
- Knowing grammar won't make you speak better. It helps to understand the ways that the grammar of the language work, but studying it and memorizing "right" vs "wrong" grammar cannot improve your fluency.
- If you can't understand what you hear, you won't get better at speaking. Listening is critical. It's better to study listening by hearing real conversations, dialogues on television, etc., instead of just listening to things from textbooks, which are made-up conversations that are not real. And it's better to be able to answer simple questions about what you hear than to just memorize the content of the dialogues, too. Answering simple questions well (automatically!) is more help than answering complicated questions slowly or uncertainly.
- Good reading or writing skills don't guarantee you will be a good speaker. Spoken English is a different language that written English – really! The spoken version of any language is very different from its written version.
As anyone who looks at my little "notes for Korean" will no doubt realize, I'm not very good at following my own advice. There's a comfort and safety in pursuing language-learning analytically, that makes it very difficult to abandon such efforts despite their ineffectiveness.
-Notes for Korean-
소식=light fare, plain meal
소식=news, information
새롭다=new, fresh, recent
Basic adverb-derivational endings
-이=for most "old" or native-korean verbs
-리=for descriptive irregular verbs in -르 (this is just a systematic extension of the -ㄹ- doubling irregularity)
-히=for sino-korean verbs in -하다 (this is a highly productive and large class)
I had an epiphany as I figured this out: most -하다 verbs are sino-korean, and the whole process is about accommodating the complex morphology of korean, when borrowing from other languages – it happens with english loanwords that become verbs, too!
곱다=beautiful, lovely, fair
-부터=from, since