Learn a Language with Ease

A couple of people have pointed out that "Ich kann verstehen" isn't a full sentence. I know, it isn't supposed to be. It is just a sentence fragment, that you would keep on elaborating, e.g. adding "dass ..." after it. Sorry for the confusion :-)

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Learn
• a
• Language
• with
• Ease

[JoeDurobot]

Im a french native speaker, I would like to see more videos of you speaking french.

You just spoke a few words in some of your other videos and it was actually good.

[FluentCzech]

@JoeDurobot Thank you. To be honest, my french abilities are just enough to get by, and I don't think any video I made in french would be useful to anybody, plus it would alienate my subscribers who can't speak french. Native speakers, such as yourself, can make much better french videos than I ever could.

[AysarAburrub]

I agree with all that you've said in the video, but not on the last point you made about instant translation. yes it's very good if one can achieve this almost instantaneous translation process, but there's a better way in my opinion, it's understanding words and phrases in their L2 context without ever needing to translate, which is similar to how natives understand their native language. I know it's hard to achieve, but it's not impossible, through massive exposure it can be and it was done!

[FluentCzech]

@AysarAburrub Perhaps you are right, and maybe it does work for some people, but I have never managed to do it myself. If somebody pointed to a fruit and said "mazá" I would immediately think in my head "OK, so mazá means apple". I might not verbalise it, but the translation is happening in my head for the first few times I hear mazá. Then, at some point, my need to do that naturally slips away. Again, maybe other people never go through that step, but I would say that most people do.

[Jate0000]

Regarding Assimil, the spanish base books are called "sin esfuerzo", that is "without effort". The french one is "sans paine", and so on.

[heloizyjhenifer]

@5Language "sans peine" does mean "without effort" ("without trouble" is another possible translation), "without pain" is not. Just a remark :).

[heloizyjhenifer]

@AysarAburrub Understanding L2 without translating is very "easy" actually.

When I read L5 text (in my case), one year into the language, I don't translate (ie hear the L1 words in my head), either I know what a word means (object or concept etc) or I don't. It produces a mental image (more or less quickly) or it doesn't.

Producing L2 on the other hand is what might require conscious translation for a while and was the subject of this video, to me at least.

[alejandro31192]

¡gracias por el vídeo! muy interesante :D

[philbyerm]

Your videos are always a delight and always appreciated, thanks for the inspiration.

[SaBracaSam]

@FluentCzech I think your method sounds pretty interesting, I will prove it soon. Too bad you picked up that complicated example :) don't worry, I bet your viewers understood your intention...

[pesahson]

I agree with you that this state of not translating comes with time. When you internalise vocabulary, meaning when you really know a word you just grasp the meaning. If you don't know the word it doesn't matter which method you used, you still don't understand completly what is being said. If you understand, the method you applyed for learning vocabulary also isn't important.

[kobaomg]

I have to agree with AysarAburrub, I think if you work on the original text without using translation it's much better. I've been studying French through Assimil and after the first 15 lessons I've stopped using translation (I still check some words on the dictionary, but I don't look at the full sentence translation), so far I've reached lesson 51 and it's been very effective. I spend more time listening and repeating the words in the target language so that I can make this vocabulary active.

[DPBurn121]

Nice tip,i'll put that in practice and what i get.

[JoeDurobot]

@FluentCzech Well im not asking for a video of you teaching french, but a video of you explaining how you are learning french, why you decided to learn french and such could be very interesting.

You can do the whole video in english and just say a few words in french if you want.

Im just curious about all the people who learn my language, especially the ones that master english since it's a language im learning myself.

[FluentCzech]

@TheLinguaHacks Exactly, you hit the nail on the head. The translation phase is a route to automaticity, and the translation itself slowly fades away, until you are just using the language automatically.

[FluentCzech]

@xRoSkii I only speak English well, to be honest. Nobody would mistake me as a native speaker in any other language. At the same time, over the years, I have been slowly learning a few languages, and am getting better at them.

[FluentCzech]

@SaBracaSam Your are right. I hope I didn't misrepresent the example as anything other than slowly building up from very basic things. Just like teaching people to say "Can you tell me", "I would like", "I believe", these aren't very useful in isolation, but when you have the hang of a bunch of them, you can combine them with connectors such as "that". Maybe I should have left the example out, though, or explained it better.

[TheLinguaHacks]

@utubesqueeze I think "constant translation" isn't the point of what he's saying, it's "automaticity" in a word. You aren't translating any words, you are creating a intra-lingual language from the fundamental structural words that make up the language, and that allows you to acquire the L2 more efficiently. What's being 'translated' then, is the fundamental syntactical differences and other salient lexical items (i.e. false friends, cognates etc).

[SaBracaSam]

If you try to form the sentence like "I can understand" in German, you aren't allowed to leave the object out which is "it/that". "Ich kann verstehen" instead of "Ich kann es/das verstehen" just doesn't work, you can only use this as an inition to another sentence like "I can understand, that..."

[TheLinguaHacks]

I think you have unmasked Michel Thomas. This is what he would not share with anyone else, talking about his method. The key is this very idea of building blocks. I want to add that one of Luca's main points is essentially what you're getting at: the idea of building up a linguistic "core". In linguistic terms it strikes me as the language "schema", or the representation of the new language, in the mind as we learn it. You advocate active learning, rather than slow 'acquisition', of it.

[utubesqueeze]

I think Assimil, translation/assimilation methods and courses are only useful at the very beginning of language learning to familiarise your brain as painlessly as possible to something brand new. But you make much faster progress, especially if you already are fluent in more than one language, by throwing yourself into the language as soon as possible. Just keep the content small and interesting. Comprehension becomes automatic regardless. Constant translation is a separate job entirely.

[5Language]

Isn't it amazing that the Spanish translation they use for "With Ease" on the Spanish based Assimil books is "Sin Enfuerzo" and the French translation they use on the French based Assimil books is "San Paine". Effectively, these are both versions of the meaning of the word "Ease". For Spanish based "Sin Enfuerzo = Without Effort" and for the French based books "San Paine = Without Pain". Just an observation.

[xRoSkii]

How many languages do you know?

[Frizinho]

you're back!  great to see you again.