Parrot Time Magazine

The Thinking of Speaking
Issue #1 January / February 2013
Language Learning Methods
Audio

Audio

by Erik Zidowecki
January / February 2013 |  asd

When we talk about learning a language, the most common idea is probably of taking a course, perhaps in a local university. However, there are many other methods of picking up a new language that don't require long classes with total strangers and high fees. A popular alternative is an audio course. With the increase in popularity of digital players and podcasts, these have increasingly become the method of choice.


Audio lessons were first recorded on LPs

Audio courses are not a new idea, however. Ever since the first audio playback devices was invented, they have been used as teaching tools for languages. A student could obtain a "long playing" (LP) with relative ease. Over time, these became replaced by cassettes, then CDs, and now digital files. The contents of these different mediums have not evolved as much. Since an audio recording isn't truly "interactive" - one can only listen and respond but no one actually hears your response - it is up to the learner to gauge their own progress. Most of the time, if only achieving the ability to be understood is desired, then this is fine. But for true fluency to be achieved, some kind of feedback from another person is required.

The methods used in these recordings vary. Courses from Pimsleur, Berlitz, Barron's and Michel Thomas are all popular, and invoke different ways of presenting their material. The oldest method is to have the announcer on the audio tell you a word in your native language, like English, then have a native speaker say the equivalent word, leaving then a pause while the student repeats it. For example, an Italian course would have the announcer say "Hello", then a native Italian would say "Ciao". There would be a pause (sometime preceded by the announcer encouraging the student to repeat it) in which the learner is given the chance to respond with "Ciao". This might be, at least at beginner levels, repeated a few times, having the word repeated alternately by the native speaker then the student. Finally, the announcer announces the next word, and the process is repeated.

A great many of the people using these courses were doing so not to become fluent so much as prepare for a vacation or business trip to another country.

As you can imagine, learning a single word this way will take some time, and therefore the vocabulary you can obtain from a single recording is severely limited. Also, this method depends entirely on rote memorization. As the student progresses, the words become phrases, the phrases become longer and the number of repetitions is reduced as the student becomes more familiar with the language's sounds and patterns. A great many of the people using these courses were doing so not to become fluent so much as prepare for a vacation or business trip to another country. To that end, the words and phrases taught were specialized to what might need in those situations. "Where is the train station?" and "How much does that cost?" would be preferred to something like "I like red balloons" or "Would you like to play chess, Boris?" (that last phrase was actually found in an old cassette course for Russian).

The Pimsleur Method

Paul Pimsleur developed another method that focuses on active participation instead of rote memorization. In these lessons, the student repeats the words and phrases spoken by the native, as in the old courses. However, the student is also made to create new phrases by inference, thus making them actually think about the language. For example, if they have learned how to say "Where is the museum?", then the word for "hotel" might be given, and the student would be asked to "imagine" a situation in which they had to ask "Where is the hotel?".


Woman listening to her MP3 player

Another part of the Pimsleur method is to learn a long word in parts, starting from the end. This is not completely unlike how children are taught to read - by sounding out each part of the word before saying it all at once. The benefit from this is that in previous methods, a long word or phrase can come out as a jumble that is too fast for a student to properly even hear before being told to repeat it exactly.

The real breakthrough in the Pimsleur method, if you can call it that, would most like be the "spaced repetition". Once a person has learned a word in the more conventional method, they are unlikely to use that word many more times during the course. However, if they are expected to reuse the word a few minutes after they have learned it, then at other intervals along the way, they are keeping that knowledge at the front of their thoughts and thus more likely to retain it. Spaced repetition systems (SRS), while having been first developed in 1932 by Professor C. A. Mace, have become very popular in recent years and we will look at them more completely in another article.

Conversations

With the older courses mainly being used to teach common phrases for traveling, the newer courses are more likely to employ two native speakers who are having a conversation. In this way, the student has a more natural way of hearing how someone might respond to what they say. Just because you may learn how to ask "Where is the museum?", there is no way to guarantee you will understand all or even part of the answer you are given ("Over there.", "On 23rd street.", "Go three blocks that way then turn left at the statue of Garibaldi.", etc). Conversations are also used in most other learning methods, since they go to the heart of why you are learning the language.. to speak with others. But the problem of understanding the response is always the same. It is a common joke in films to show a tourist stumbling over a phrase from a book to ask directions of a native, only to have the native then respond rapidly in a long stream of sentences to which the poor tourist can only stare in complete confusion. Memorizing one or two possible short replies just won't be enough.

Drawbacks


An iPod, which can be used to play audio lessons

As has already been mentioned, the first major drawback to learning by audio is the slowness in building up a large vocabulary. Audio courses have to go slow, by their very nature... they are completely linear and non interactive in that they can't be sped up or slowed down depending upon the students capabilities. You also can't just casually find just the words you will need. The lesson will go over all of them, regardless of their usefulness to you. For example, if you are planning to be studying economy in Barcelona, you probably don't need to know the names of animals. Ironically, you are unlikely to learn many of either of those categories, since the course will be telling teaching you about hotels and museums.

And that brings us to the second point: specialization. Unless you have access to a comprehensive set of audio lessons with thousands and thousands of hours of material, you aren't likely to pick up what you are focusing on. For example, one person might be trying to learn how to get around in the city while another person will be trying to carry on conversations with their family and a third person might be wanting to learn how to chat up foreign women on the internet. There is no way you are going to be able to sort through and replay just what you want on your pocket MP3 player. You can direct your learning using other learning methods like books, software, and websites. Even a phrase book gives you more direct control.

Since they can be used just about anywhere... they might seem as a perfect solution to people that feel they don't have the time to learn a new language.

Of course, the most obvious drawback to this method is the lack of spelling knowledge. You might know how to pronounce words and phrases, but you still will have a very hard time handling anything as simple as a menu. In some languages, there won't be much of a problem if the spoken and written forms are similar to what the student is used to. However, if you are learning a language with a very different sound system, like Welsh, or one with an entirely alphabet, like Russian or Hebrew, then the audio course will leave you clueless on basic literacy. Some audio courses do come with some written material, but it usually appears more of an afterthought to the course.

It will also leave you very deprived in terms of grammar. While you should be able to learn some basic grammar rules through the variants in the phrases, you won't know how those rules are really defined. For example, you might learn to say "Come stai?" to a person in Italian yet at other times be taught to say "Come sta?", you wouldn't be sure when to use which. And what about a language that has nouns that are declinable? How do you learn which forms to use when if you have just learned the word "car" in three different forms, depending on if it's a subject, direct object or indirect object? And don't even think about verbs, with all their forms and tenses. Without basic grammar knowledge, you will be hard pressed to create new phrases beyond the most basic levels.

Broadcasts


An older portable shortwave radio

Lessons on LPs, cassettes or CDs are not the only kind of audio learning. Dating back to the 1920s, people have broadcast news and information to others all around the world using shortwave radios. The modern day British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) began as "BBC Empire Service" in 1932 for broadcasting in shortwave. Early broadcasts were largely to gain a larger audience for normal radio broadcasts which were limited by their range (shortwave refers to a transmission method which produces, you guessed it, shorter and tighter wavelengths that could be bounced off the atmosphere to reach places further away). After WWII, shortwave listening became very popular, and many countries were not only broadcasting in many languages but also using such broadcasts to help students listen to other languages, music, and cultural information. BBC was perhaps the biggest broadcaster, transmitting news to many countries in their own languages as well as courses in English. One of the main reasons English is so widespread now is because of these language lessons.

Podcasts

With the rise of the internet, broadcasting via shortwave has become almost obsolete. Many services have reduced or ceased entirely their broadcasts, moving instead to the internet, using streaming radio or "podcasts". A podcast (named for the device for playing MP3s, the iPod, and "-cast" from "broadcast") is a serialized audio program which can be of any content. Since buying audio courses like Pimsleur can be very expensive (the French I course from Pimsleur costs $345 on CDs, $120 on MP3s), podcasts have become a very popular alternative. The content and methods of these podcasts will vary greatly, of course, since just about anyone with a microphone and recording software can create their own. They are also likely to have most of the same drawbacks as conventional audio courses. One advantage, however, is that since they are obtained from the internet, they are likely to have some kind of accompanying interactive materials.

In general, audio courses are a good way to get a person listening to a new language and give them some basic phrases and words. Since they can be used just about anywhere, such as in your car or your portable device, while you are doing something else, they might seem as a perfect solution to people that feel they don't have the time to learn a new language. People who are intent on becoming fluent in a language, though, will find that impossible relying solely on audio courses. They are simply too limiting in depth and content to provide a student with all they require. They should be used as an introduction and perhaps as a refresher for hearing the language while other materials are used as the primary method of learning. An hour with a book course could easily surpass several hours with an audio course in terms of actual material learned.

We hope you enjoyed this first article in this series of language learning methods. We would like your thoughts and comments on the article and your experiences with audio courses. Please write to us at parrottime@parleremo.org.

Language Learning Methods - Audio
Writer: Erik Zidowecki
Images:
Matúš Petrila: CD on table (top)
Chris Chidsey: girl listening to mp3 player
Aldert Grey: iPod 4G
Petey: shortwave radio, record player

All images are Copyright - CC BY-SA (Creative Commons Share Alike) by their respective owners, except for Petey, which is Public Domain (PD) or unless otherwise noted.

Looking for learning materials?
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Beginner's Hiligaynon Word Searches - Volume 1



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