translation-grammar technique vs non- translation-non-grammar technique

Discuss any questions in English. Practise your writing skills.

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#51

Сообщение acapnotic »

Michelangelo пишет: 26 дек 2019, 13:20 Maybe I think of the meaning of the seen heard word or phrase, but I think of it in Russian.
How can you replace something with something else in Russian? Or in any other language? I just don't understand you. When you replace something, you take it away and put something else in its place. You do that neither in Russian nor in English. It is not speaking or writing, it's replacing.
Michelangelo пишет: 26 дек 2019, 13:20 Do you always convince yourself in English and not in your native language?
In neither of them. I either understand or not. If I see that the meaning that I have replaced the word with doesn't fit, then I see a problem. Maybe I will correct the meaning attached by me earlier to the word. But this process is a separate one.
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#52

Сообщение Michelangelo »

acapnotic, Did I mention "replace"? I am sorry if it is so. I meant "to think over/interpret the heard/read word or phrase" of course.
acapnotic пишет: 26 дек 2019, 13:41 I either understand or not.
How could you know that you understand? Maybe you just say "I don't want to think over this, that is why I'd better pretend to understand it"
Until you make a logical chain of what you heard/read, how can you see the logic in what you heard/read? But for this you need to think. You can understand on the spot only what you have already known before. In that case I can completely agree that you could understand without thinking over/interpreting the text.
acapnotic пишет: 26 дек 2019, 13:41 Maybe I will correct the meaning attached by me earlier to the word. But this process is a separate one.
Again, how can you possibly know that you need to correct the meaning if you didn't think over it but just told yourself that you "understand without thinking in either language"?
Strange enough to hear this. It is generally known that people try to interpret anything new that they hear/read, or else they would just omit it whether they think that they could understand it or not understand.
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#53

Сообщение acapnotic »

Michelangelo, I replace every word with its meaning and see if the sentence makes sense.
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#54

Сообщение Michelangelo »

acapnotic, I doubt if meanings can make up a sentence. I think the meanings of words can make up sense or a logical chain.
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#55

Сообщение acapnotic »

Michelangelo, but a sentence can make sense, can't it? I see if it makes sense after I replace every word with its meaning. I never wrote that I make a sentence out of meanings.

Perhaps your translation method works not as well as you think it does if you understood me that way. :)
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#56

Сообщение Michelangelo »

acapnotic, I didn't say I engaged a translation method. I cannot read or hear anything without keeping in my mind the meanings or direct equivalent in Russian. Only when I think in Russian I can build up a logical chain of meanings. I cannot do that in English. English is only a set of sounds or letters to me, and only after substitution of those for Russian I can make up the whole sense of an English sentence. I don't like it either. I would rather understand everything directly but I cannot, and, what is even more sad, I don't even try to understand directly as I don't believe that it is possible at my level. When I reach at least C2, in that case I hope I will start understanding English without any substitutions or speculation over heard or read texts in Russian. While, it doesn't seem to me possible.
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#57

Сообщение acapnotic »

Michelangelo, maybe you could use hypnosis to temporarily forget all languages except English. Then you will have no other way of understanding English except the direct one. After you lived so for some time, your brain would adapt itself to this method and stick to it even after the hypnosis ended.

I suggest that you find a hypnotist and ask him to hypnotize you. Maybe he will even do it free of charge because he will be curious himself about the result of this experiment.
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#58

Сообщение Michelangelo »

acapnotic пишет: 27 дек 2019, 10:44 use hypnosis to temporarily forget all languages except English
Good an idea! Is it safe to use hypnosis to forget languages? Will I be able to recover them should I need?

On the other hand, do you think it is so important to know English that we must forget our native language living in our Patria? How will we communicate with our compatriots then? By gestures? I prefer translation to gestures as they seem to me more difficult to be learned than translation.
What do you think about a body or gesture language? Would you like to give up your native language to learn a body language? Indian belly dance? They say it is a kind of language for those who can understand.
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#59

Сообщение acapnotic »

Michelangelo пишет: 27 дек 2019, 11:10 Will I be able to recover them should I need?
Of course, why not? They will be only blocked, not erased. But even if you couldn't recall them, it's not a big problem for such an experienced language learner as you. You would be able to learn them again as you have learned English. Even much faster because you will be doing it in a Russian and Ukranian speaking environment. There will be a lot of native speakers around who just don't speak any other language but those two. Your learning would run in great leaps and you would become a fluent speaker in no time.
Michelangelo пишет: 27 дек 2019, 11:10 Indian belly dance? They say it is a kind of language for those who can understand.
It's too cold most of the time in our part of the world for such a language. I much prefer keeping my belly in warmth under some clothing. And if you can't see the belly, how can you understand anything? It's like talking to someone who wears a gas mask, or even worse. So no, it's definitely not an option for us northern people.
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#60

Сообщение Michelangelo »

acapnotic пишет: 27 дек 2019, 11:36 Of course, why not?
Shall I then ask the hypnotist to block my English in order to start thinking in Russian or Ukrainian?
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#61

Сообщение acapnotic »

Michelangelo, no, in that case it will have become clear that this technique is too risky. So you will have to stay with English as your thinking language. I don't think you should be scared by this prospect. After all, it's a means of international communication. You will be able to speak to far more people than live in your own country or even in the entire former USSR. You will even have the right to claim that you are a native English speaker, since it will be your first language and you will be thinking in it.

As for Russian and Ukrainian, I believe that you will master them to the level of direct understanding in a natural way. Just because you will have lots of practice every day. Your brain will get too tired of translating on the fly and will switch to catching the meaning directly.
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#62

Сообщение Michelangelo »

acapnotic, your ideas seem reasonable. However, it would be interesting to learn opinions of other devotees of translation/non-translation technique. Maybe they know some simpler or easier ways how to transit to non-translation method if it is more efficient one, or maybe they would convince us that translation is more helpful and can improve a person's thinking.
Just imagine, one can listen to the sound of English words and sentences, translate sounds into Russian words or think over everything in Russian and s/he could do that simultaneously with those who just listen without spending time on translation. Just imagine the speed of comprehension of this person when s/he starts consume what s/he could hear in English directly without translation. The efficiency of this person make be greater than 300% as compared with those who do not translate into Russian. Just imagine the efficiency of a person who is translating from English into Russian and Ukrainian simultaneously.
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#63

Сообщение acapnotic »

Michelangelo, I think you would need another head or even two to do such amazing things. It's a myth that we use only 10% of our brain. Scientists say it's pure bullshit. Evolution would have never wasted so much gray matter because every cell in our body and brain consumes resources and energy. So it should do something useful in return or go out. Life is competition, and you can't afford an organ 90% of which just eat and shit and do nothing to help you survive. Humans would have died out long ago with such a parasite in their heads.
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#64

Сообщение Michelangelo »

acapnotic, I read an article by Kato Lomb. She wrote that she knew 8 languages and could translate simultaneously from any of these languages to any other of these languages. If she could do that with 8 languages why one cannot do it with only two? Why do you think I would need two heads for that. Do you think Kato Lomb had eight heads for doing that or she just lied?
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#65

Сообщение acapnotic »

Michelangelo, I remember reading her book a long time ago. Well, she may be a cyborg from the future with eight processors in her head. I would not be much surprised. If aliens are around us, as you have probably heard, why can't cyborgs be among us as well?

If she is human, I think she does it not simultaneously, strictly speaking, but switching from one to another, just like operating systems on computers do to run several programs simultaneously. A single processor can do it so quickly that you won't notice those switches. When you translate, it's much easier because people who you translate aren't speaking all at once, at least most of the time, but one after another. So at any given moment you translate from one language to another one, not from eight to one or from one to eight.
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#66

Сообщение Michelangelo »

acapnotic, after I had read her book I decided that I could learn 8 languages as well. I started to learn them, I tried to acquire words of one language via those words I had learnt from another one. I printed a book in different languages and I read several versions of the book in parallel in order to find out the meaning of words by comparing texts in different languages. However, I failed and you can see that I can hardly understand English and sometimes I cannot understand even Russian or Ukrainian, and even a plain text to say nothing about a kind of jargon or slang.
I don't think now that it could be reasonable to even get back to French or German, whose basis I had learnt and could even write or speak a little bit in those languages. Of course it is even more difficult to resume my Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Romanian, Czech, Polish or even Bulgarian (in which I read dozens of books years ago, but never tried to speak and didn't even know any pronunciation of any Bulgarian word :( ).
I think it happened because I really didn't have 8 heads and one my head was too little to keep everything for long.
I don't know how our memory works but it is for sure that it keeps retaining the information without reach or our brain and doesn't allow to derive what you had learnt so that you can use it. Only little part of it is accessible and it could be much less than 10%, it could be even less than 1 % IMHO.
If you have trained your memory to let your brain access at least 10% of it, you must be a big connoisseur in whatever field. Congratulations!
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#67

Сообщение Dragon27 »

Michelangelo пишет: 29 дек 2019, 09:29 in which I read dozens of books years ago, but never tried to speak and didn't even know any pronunciation of any Bulgarian word :(
After I got hooked on phonetics it feels to me completely unnatural (perverse, even) to learn the language purely from its written form (even if it seems much easier). Even if it's a dead language, there has to be some kind of linguistic reconstruction of its phonetics that one can use for a mental representation of its sound. For a living language I don't even want to learn to read it before I acquire some reasonable listening ability so that I would have this 'buzz' of the language in my brain that I could map the written word onto. I believe this also leads (inadvertently) to a better and deeper inculcation of the language in my brain (given how much more time I devote to developing better listening comprehension of the language at my earliest stages of learning).
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#68

Сообщение Michelangelo »

Dragon27, If you don't have anybody to speak to, and you want to know what is written in books, should you first learn a listening skill or just learn letters and read?
Everything depends on your goal, keeping in mind that there was no Internet back then in 1970s, and even textbooks were hard to obtain to say nothing about audiomaterials.
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#69

Сообщение acapnotic »

Michelangelo пишет: 29 дек 2019, 09:29 Only little part of it is accessible and it could be much less than 10%, it could be even less than 1 % IMHO.
They say the entire memory is used, but for the most part subconsciously. We just don't see that. When you are looking for a decision to some problem, for example, you actually just sit (or lie) and wait till some idea pops into your consciousness. To come up with this idea, your brain uses your memory, but it doesn't show this process to consciousness. Consciousness is slow. Imagine how slowly your computer would work if it had to show to you on the monitor every intermediary result of its computation and then wait till you have read and recognized it. This is just pointless.

Another matter is accessing any part of our memory consciously just for the data stored there. It seems harmless, so it's unclear why we can't do so. But some people apparently can, so probably there is some block that prevents the rest of us from doing it. It would be great to find it and get rid of it.

But we shouldn't forget that evolution does only what is necessary for our survival. Is it necessary for survival to be a memory usage phenomenon? Probably not.
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#70

Сообщение Dragon27 »

Michelangelo пишет: 29 дек 2019, 10:39 Everything depends on your goal, keeping in mind that there was no Internet back then in 1970s, and even textbooks were hard to obtain to say nothing about audiomaterials.
Well, of course, if you literally have no materials, then you have no other option but to work with what you have.
Otherwise (or, rather, nowadays) it is much better for a language learner who intends to develop a better overall language skill and wants to maintain his language beyond the 'just read a few books I needed to read for some reason and never returned to the language again' state to start with the proper basics (with the primary representation of the language - its spoken form). It will help your reading too, btw.
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#71

Сообщение Michelangelo »

acapnotic пишет: 29 дек 2019, 10:41 Is it necessary for survival to be a memory usage phenomenon? Probably not.
It would be cool anyway. Moreover, it could be essential for survival too if you get into some extraordinary situation and you need to recall some codes or procedures and you wouldn't be able to as your memory fails.
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#72

Сообщение acapnotic »

Michelangelo, yes, but those situations are too rare. If we all got into such situations every day, then those who are not phenomenal would die and the phenomenal ones would fill the empty earth with their children, and so the whole mankind would have their ability.
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#73

Сообщение Michelangelo »

acapnotic, I wouldn't be so sure that from phenomenal people would phenomenal people be bred. You know that the nature likes variety and usually phenomenal people cannot be born in each generation but maybe at least in generation, and that is why a conclusion may be arrived at that not only phenomenal people will populate the Earth but common ones as well.
Moreover, even some phenomenal people often became morons due to drugs, alcohol, tobacco, etc.
So don't ever let your children smoke or drink or inject shit if they have been born to be phenomenal ones or else there is a threat to turn them into morons goats.
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#74

Сообщение acapnotic »

Michelangelo, that only means that the exraordinary situation should be prolonged till all newborn children are phenomenal. Maybe even longer because if phenomenons can survive it, is it extraordinary for them? Well, maybe for the first generations, but they will get stronger and stronger generation by generation, so eventually this situation will become normal. This is how adaptation works.
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#75

Сообщение Michelangelo »

acapnotic пишет: 29 дек 2019, 17:34 Well, maybe for the first generations, but they will get stronger and stronger generation by generation, so eventually this situation will become normal.
Don't you think that in order to make them stronger intellectually you would need to isolate them from the outer worlds so that they didn't know any temptation of this world, but grow within the frames set by some devoted people. And still there will be a lot of threats which we could learn from a lot of sources scientific and sci-fi.

Frankly speaking, I am afraid I don't remember all the details of the situation in question, however, I think that to create a situation for growing phenomenal people we would need to invest a lot of money to create a phenomenal environment for growing phenomenal people. Otherwise most of them become common people with common thoughts and ideas and we will end up with the negative results.
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