So I really get into this, you know, sentence.
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here and today I want to talk about a theme
that I've discussed before and that is the sort of combination of big
picture learning and nuts and bolts learning in, in language learning.
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Uh, I should say that that, uh, the ability to listen to interesting
content, whether it be in the language you're learning, or even
in content of interest to you in your own language is so powerful.
The quality of the audio, the range of material that's out there right now,
I'm listening to an English language book from Audible called American
Psychosis, which traces the history of, sort of, right wing hysterical
movements in the United States.
And it's very interesting.
So sometimes I take a break from listening to Arabic and I listen to
the book while I'm doing the dishes.
Now getting back to the subject of big picture learning and
nuts and bolts learning.
So for me, Arabic is difficult.
Uh, it's difficult for a number of reasons.
I think, first of all, it's, it's written in the Arabic script,
which is still difficult for me.
It has more complicated grammar than Persian because
it has masculine, feminine.
It has, you know, one, you know, dual like plural and then completely plural.
It has a number of sort of somewhat more finicky details of grammar
than say Persian, which is more similar to what we are familiar to in
Indo-European languages and additional difficulty with Arabic is that there
are different, uh, forms of Arabic.
So there's Egyptian Arabic, there's Lenvantine Arabic, and of course,
North African Arabic and, and Gulf Arabic and Iraqi Arabic and Yemeni.
I don't know, so many forms of a language.
And because I like to access the language and the culture in so many different
ways, then political discussions by and large are gonna be in standard Arabic.
But I found the MTV Lebanon, which is also political discussion, but
it's in Lebanese or Levantine Arabic.
Movies typically on Netflix are, most of them are either in, uh, you know,
they're either from Lebanon or from Egypt.
So I'm, I wanna have some sense of those languages.
So I'm really studying three languages, Standard Arabic,
Levantine Arabic and Egyptian Arabic.
And I even got a book that compares Levantine Arabic to Egyptian Arabic.
Getting back to MTV Lebanon, which is quite difficult, they're having
these political discussions and there's, again with Arabic, there's
so much more vocabulary in Arabic.
It seems so much more.
You need more vocabulary than in Persian has been my
experience for whatever reason.
So it, it looks like, um, constant uphill battle.
And I'm wondering if I've ever, if I'm actually getting anywhere.
So what I do is, so I've started doing this now with the material
from MTV Lebanon, which by the way I download the MP3 file, I
put the MP3 file on Happy Scribe.
I get a transcript.
I upload the whole thing into LingQ as a lesson.
Then I go through it in sentence mode.
Now, right away by going in and going through sentence mode I'm
starting to slow things down.
The, the big picture would be just to listen to the whole thing,
read through the whole thing, not understand as much as I would like.
It seems like a, you know, a real uphill struggle, Sisyphean task, so to speak.
But if I go through sentence by sentence, then I look up each word, I can then
review, you know, have sort of vocabulary review activities for that sentence,
which could be three or four items of vocabulary using matching pairs.
Then I can reassemble the sentence.
Also I can listen to the audio several times.
So I really get into this, you know, sentence.
Of course a sentence is a sample of the language.
And so I don't do this the whole time, but I'll do this for a fair amount of
the time, because if I can break, if I can get into, if I can break the code of
the sentence, get a better sense of the structure, get a better, especially now
dealing with, you know, Lebanese dialect and some of the words that they're using.
So I get into some depth with each sentence and I listen to it quite a few
times, but it would take, it takes a long time to get through the 30 or 45
or 50 minutes of this, um, you know, radio interview or television interview,
uh, you know, going sentenced by sentence, reviewing all the words, re
you know, reassembling the sentences.
So I don't do it all the way through, but it's a sample it's it reminds me
of when we were, we were making lumber for a very large, uh, prefabricated
house manufacturer in Japan.
We had very strict quality standards, knot size, you know, twist, bend, uh,
you know, cracks in the wood, whatever we had very, very strict standards.
So we would, you know, take a hundred pieces out of the line every hour and
just to check on the quality and that sample representative sort of what was
in the wood that we were processing, because presumably the wood that we were
using, the sort of raw material would've been of a, you know, one sort of origin.
And so to some extent, the quality of the hundred pieces that we
took out was representative of the quality of the whole run.
And in the same way, I feel very often if, if I can do this sort of
in depth, nuts and bolts learning for a sample percentage of this content,
it helps me when I do the sort of big picture listening to the whole thing.
Reading the whole thing.
Similarly, similarly, uh, as I'm going through my, uh, you know, lesson,
this, uh, television interview from MTV Lebanon, it takes me a long time to
look up every single word and to check every single, single yellow word that
is a word that I've looked up before.
So at some point I say, okay, rather than read through the whole thing, which
for me, reading in Arabic is much slower than reading in the Latin alphabet.
So at some point maybe halfway through, I start to skip.
So I skip from blue word to yellow word to yellow word to blue word.
So really only looking up the words that I either don't know because I haven't
seen them before or that I'm still not really that familiar with, even though
I've seen them maybe 3, 4, 5, 6 times.
So I look those up again.
So I'm just jumping from unknown word, not fully, you know, understood word
and going through the text that way.
I still...
and so that's a kind of a nuts and bolts sampling of the vocabulary, but
I still listen to the whole thing.
And to some of the words that I, you know, in my sampling looked up, some of those,
I remember some of them, I notice when I listen, but it's not a hundred percent.
And so much of language learning is not a hundred percent, but it's a sampling.
So I can go through, you know, sentence by sentence, reassembling
sentences, getting a better grasp of the structure of the language, getting
a better grasp of some vocabulary items, then I might speed up the
sampling by skipping from word to word.
Uh, but I still listen to the whole thing.
So I'm combining nuts and bolts with, you know, big picture learning.
And I, I, I think, you know, this is something I recommend that you find
your own combination and your own way of combining I, I should, while I
think of it, another form of nuts and bolts learning is to look up grammar
issues, things that you're, you know, questions that you have in your mind
about why it works this way and that way.
And there's so many resources for doing that.
So just to, to finish up here so I, I think it's important to have a
combination, have a strategy, your own strategy, uh, where you combine the nuts
and bolts with the top down learning, you still need to do a lot of top, like
big picture learning, lots of reading, lots of listening, but you also need to
spend some time on the nuts and bolts.
So there you go.
Thank you for listening.
Bye for now.