”
Lloyd said,

July 6, 2008 @ 10:02 am

Yo, Khatzu and the other gentle readers!

I have a question… do you think that correction is worth anything? As in does it help?

Here’s what I’m thinking…
I heard in some of my college linguistics classes that children are pretty much immune to correction. You correct their grammar all you want and they still keep on talking the exact same way until one day… *POOF*… it fixes itself. I’m wondering if we, the “adult learners,” are the same. I know you like to say that there’s no difference from child and adult learners in their ability to learn language, and maybe that’s true. But obviously there’s a difference in THE WAY they learn. And this is also one of your main points.. LOTS OF INPUT. Children get tons of input while a lot of adult learners don’t. So here’s my question a bit restated…

If we’re getting tons of input, do you think our errors will heal themselves in time?

And here’s something else relevant to my question… you’ve often said input before output for fear that we’ll get stuck in our ungrammatical ways and never change (or that it’ll be harder to change in the future). However, once again, what about kids? They speak as soon as they can and are making tons of errors, yet eventually they all move on to be fluent, more or less error-less native speakers. Also, I know a guy who was a Mormon missionary here in Japan for two years. When he came here he only had 3 months of Japanese training. He was here for two years, studying for about an hour every morning and then talking to people on the street for 9 hrs. a day. I’m sure in the beginning he was making lots of errors but now native Japanese speakers say his Japanese is great and very natural.

What’re your thoughts?”

I have a question… do you think that correction is worth anything? As in does it help?

Here’s what I’m thinking…
I heard in some of my college linguistics classes that children are pretty much immune to correction. You correct their grammar all you want and they still keep on talking the exact same way until one day… *POOF*… it fixes itself. I’m wondering if we, the “adult learners,” are the same. I know you like to say that there’s no difference from child and adult learners in their ability to learn language, and maybe that’s true. But obviously there’s a difference in THE WAY they learn. And this is also one of your main points.. LOTS OF INPUT. Children get tons of input while a lot of adult learners don’t. So here’s my question a bit restated…

If we’re getting tons of input, do you think our errors will heal themselves in time?

And here’s something else relevant to my question… you’ve often said input before output for fear that we’ll get stuck in our ungrammatical ways and never change (or that it’ll be harder to change in the future). However, once again, what about kids? They speak as soon as they can and are making tons of errors, yet eventually they all move on to be fluent, more or less error-less native speakers. Also, I know a guy who was a Mormon missionary here in Japan for two years. When he came here he only had 3 months of Japanese training. He was here for two years, studying for about an hour every morning and then talking to people on the street for 9 hrs. a day. I’m sure in the beginning he was making lots of errors but now native Japanese speakers say his Japanese is great and very natural.

What’re your thoughts?

www.declan-software.com/japanese_ime/#vista

or here

www.endnote.com/support/helpdocs/Changing%20Regional%20Settings%20in%20Windows%20XP.pdf

If that doesn’t work and the game still shows gibberish, then you need to set the codepage to Japanese

www.sisulizer.com/support/codepages.shtml#HowToChange

Good luck!

Even if you don’t quite get the pinpoint details of a sentence quite yet, you just need to understand that gist of it in order to “understand” it as written in the 10,000 sentences articles. You should start to get a feel for when you “get it” enough or when you don’t. I highly recommend going with a monolingual dictionary as soon as possible. Remember that it’s not time wasted; you’re reading the target language after all.

I understand your concerns. I’ll just say that it’s like clinging onto the edge of a swimming pool or a skate rink. At some point, it’s time to let go, and get into the middle of the pool/rink, if you really want to swim/skate. Sure, you’ll be shaky initially. There’s probably never a “perfect”, “just right” time. It just needs to be done…

それとポケモンスーパーファンなんて！！！エレーぞ！

Thanks for the success story Awkward Map! I look forward to reading your progress in a few months!