Speak slower...please :)

Hey, i just re-listened to "what's that smell" and I don't object to the speed of that one. It's some of the earlier ones that to me seemed way too slow.

Also, the latest spanishsense about fútbol was, in my opinion, painfully slow, but maybe that's because I'm a Spanish speaker. Seriously, as I was listening to it I kept thinking "3rd tone, 2nd tone, neutral tone....."

hey trevelyan and lantian,

I'm at work so I can't get into the discussion about language acquisition and muscle-memory metaphors (as much as I'd like to). As a musician myself, the instrumental metaphors are very close to my heart!

Anyway, I want to offer a compromise to Ken. Right now, newbie lessons include a dialog which is slow-talked three times, broken down and analyzed by Ken and Jenny, and then slow-talked three more times. Usually, we hear Ken and Jenny talk about chunks and expressions at natural speed (not super-fast speed, but not slow either).

So Ken, that's six repetitions of the same slow-talk. What if you mixed in some natural speed? What if, the first time you present the input, you went 1) natural speed, 2) repeat natural speed, 3) slow discrete-item speed?

Or, if you really believe that slow, discrete-item input is more valuable, what if you did at least one normal speed dialog at the end?

As a customer of chinesepod, I appreciate (and need) the newbie vocabulary.... but I would love to hear what the fart dialog sounds like "in the wild."

We can argue about the merits of slow-input for days, and get into SLA theories and create metaphors, but as language learners and professionals, the show must go on, right?

btw, I didn't know Ken was a hanzi avoider. Me, I like it; I think it lowers my blood pressure. So high-fives all around.

Edit: "I'm not saying he didn't pick up a lot of words thru this technique, (of having things slowed down, and practicing/memorizing that word) ..."

TRUTH - actually I don't really know, but I try to look at things objectively. Although Ken says "Hey as newbies let us slow things down, get the words right. But is what he says what he does?

I know that Ken didn't/doesn't learn from any written materials and he avoids hanzi like the plague, so I wonder, did he learn the bulk of his Chinese from 'slowed down audio input'?

If so, then I wonder what was HIS Chinesepod? He didn't have one. Right?

So I believe he learned the bulk of his Chinese, and gained his fluency from lots of talking and listening -- and I bet you that it was mostly at normal speed, even when he was a 'newbie'. I'm not saying he didn't pick up a lot of words thru this technique, but I'm saying, the majority of his lexicon, where did it come from?

Right or wrong? :)

How many people can play a piano? Versus how many people speak language? The traditional road to piano playing is only for the dedicated few, while I think language is a highway open to all.

Language is pre-wired in our brains, skills such as sports or music are not as widespread. I don't see yet any evidence to convince me that second/third languages are something not 'normal'.

The majority of the world speaks two or more languages, almost everyone in China does, so how'd they get there? By talking slowly to each other?? :)

Do you really believe that Lantian? I'm really surprised reading your post since all these physics-based metaphors imply a sort of automaticity in language learning that strikes me as completely foreign (of course, I learned to drive a car and ride a bike at slow speeds before speeding up...).

If we need to deal with analogies, I'd argue that language learning is much closer to learning a musical instrument or other intimately physical expression. And when I'm faced with a complex musical passage on either the guitar or piano, the best way I have to "teach" myself the material is to practice it slowly. Then faster. Then faster. Then faster and faster until my fingers are more familiar with the music than my mind.

I agree with Ken.

wow, how do you put a line break in these posts?

CT SCAN - I've never seen any research study that shows for example that certain neural receptors shut down after a certain age, or that proteins stop binding to particular areas of the brain after a certain period.

I'm not saying that our hair doesn't turn grey, I'm just saying that in terms of language acquisition there's very little scientific evidence for a critical period.

Now anecdotally there's lots of fodder to trash-talk about ;p.

Ken,

Do you think that in any of your languages learned after say 16 yo you could pass as a native if the other person didn't have certain clues like appearance or lack of cool hip vocabulary? Are you an example that there's no critical period, or does your experience confirm it?

Now in terms of learning, I would agree with this part of what you said "When you've never heard the language before it's impossible to tell where one word ends and the next one begins,"

But the unknown question is whether slowly receiving and going over a word is the most effective way to eventually turn that sound/word into production or to actually 'hear' it.

I will give you a personal example, one word is 'te se', meaning 'special'. When I was a newbie I asked my teacher how I could ask about what's good on a menu and at a particular restaurant. You know, to feed my constant desire to eat.

Anyway, he taught me 'te se'. I couldn't output it no matter how much I tried. I'm sure many people said it to me in various conversations, but I couldn't 'hear' it worth a lick. I butchered the tones into incomprehensible 'ttteeesseou' at the restaurant.

Some said it sloooow, like the professor, some just said it. All mattered not during this special time of my learning.

I have come to believe that at that time I was just too overwhelmed by the words before and after it in the whole sentence of asking 'What's good to eat at this restaurant' and all the inputs and complexity of actually saying something in a restaurant.

I went back many times to that professor, we wrote it down, repeated it, I practiced with other people. Useless.....

I was being a 'good newbie' and really hitting the books and using all the traditional academic methods. I said that word to myself, spoke it outloud like A LOT. Then I started to say forget'a'bout it. Times a wasting.

It's now more than a year later and I think back...geez that's an easy phrase to say. At some point my mind kicked in and the sound became meaningful speech. I can now hear it and use it, I mix it up into other contexts. I don't know at all 'when' it became memory.

So my point is, even at the newbie and elementary level is it really the most effective pedegogy to encourage 85% vocabulary and review during a critical foundation building time when in all practical reality, most newbies won't be able to utilize all that vocab in actually natural sounding speech?

I think in fact it is the opposite, at the beginning stages learners should feel and be encouraged much more to just listen, utter continuous sounds, have confidence, interact and let their minds grow the language.

(btw, I do realize that in fact you do recommend this in those podcasts!)

In later stages, more focus on terms and nuanced meanings produces more results as at that point one is less overwhelmed by all the input and whims of language.

Are we talking chicken and the egg??

I think in the newbie, elem podcasts, if you mix them up with some other formats, Cpod could definitely shift the pedagogy to something more balanced. How about after the scripted dialogue, present a few different people saying a word?

How about presenting the word in different contexts, but letting the the contexts be just about 'listening' out for the word, not to understand that other context also at 100%?

Why not present the words/phrases at some different speeds? With different emotions? Is all this good stuff only reserved for the intermediates and advanced?

Why do newbies and elem feel there is such a gap to intermediate and advanced? I don't think it has anything so much to do with more or less vocabulary, but rather about how the current content is presented.

Simply to much: listen to the dialogue, then break it down.

There's little of the other conversational 'meat' around the words, this meat suddenly shows up as an all-you-can eat buffet at the intermediate level. Yes that's write, a parched thirsty man that can't drink the water as Niagra gushes down in front of him.

Ohh, let me continue in my usually talking something to death way....

About what Ken said "Have you ever heard a newbie speak in a sustained, natural way that was also at native speaker pace"

Yah...I have, and those newbies have gone thru about three years of natural paced input, without any adultlike need to accomplish things in language like making money or picking up babes, and lots of blabbing out the sounds of the language and ...

they rapid-fire shout out whole totally wrong 'words' in a fluid sentence like "aminals", "ini mini miny mo, catch a by the tiger toe” “it’s only two more blobs”.

Why do we as adults feel like there is a need (or it's better) to avoid all this, this transition and development is natural.

We call a child who has gone thru three to four years of full-immersion daily language acquisition a 'child' and yet have the gall to expect adults to become 'advanced' in less time than that?

That to me does not 'prove' biological determination, but rather social expectations.

Some people like to talk to kids in baby talk, but studies show that the slowed down words, repetition or over-enunciation do not have a direct path to near-term utterances by the kids.

Yet we expect this of adults? They NEED baby talk???

Adults who are newbies in a target language-desert, often with just months or hours, broken up over batches of time doing other stuff? Talking to them slow and breaking everything down works? Never worked in the past.

I guess to sum up, I'm saying, if I were a newbie today, I'd load up the iPod, listen to everything as much as you can as long as it holds your interest. Babble and blubber on like a toddler moving towards the ice-cream.

One day, you'll wake up and realize you can say, hear and EAT ice-cream. There's no need to fret the details too much about the milk, sugar, ice, salt, and chocolate in the good stuff!

Sorry, I'm back! Ken, I've been watching my hits on that post rise, ever since this discussion started. By linking to it, I think you brought more attention to my post! Oh well, I tried to make nice in the update. ***** P.S. I think the next podcast should be about Critical Period Hypothesis, don't you, Lantian?

This is all good, healthy discussion! I certainly don't claim to know it all. Good luck with your hanzi.

Ken, we have been just missing each other's responses. You can have the last word, I'm going to go practice my hanzi. Take care!

Ken, obviously I respect your experience! And I agree with John, above, that superfast input is not helpful to beginners, either. However, I am skeptical of slow, detached discourse as a comprehension strategy.

Listen, I don't mean to clutter up your comments page, or disparage your program. If anybody I have been using chinesepod myself for a couple weeks now, including the newbie dialogs, and I especially appreciated the newbie dialog about farting. As a customer, I prefer the elementary and intermediate level dialogs, for the more natural speed. If I have offended you by naming your program in my blog and having a minor disagreement about pedagogy with you, then I apologize.

I think we've been posting at the same time and missing each other's responses!

@jpv206,

Many things help comprehension, including natural intonation (speaking clearly), repetition ('Can you repeat that please?') etc. But so too does speaking slowly ('Can you slow down a bit?'). I think this is fairly clear in my experience!

Jeez, Ken!

I just posted an update on that post. I'm sure you'll still disagree with my stance against slooooooooooww input; I don't really believe in it; I think natural speed with a lot of repetition and negotiation is a better strategy. But that's just me.

But for the record, I am RECOMMENDING chinesepod, yes, even for newbies. And, as you'll see from the post, I don't recommend very many programs.

Anyway, so we disagree on slow input. I'm glad you take me seriously enough to post my link on your site. I'm sure somewhere out there, there's a linguistics grad student who can show us some data...

Ken,

I don't think that slow input creates slow speech.

I think that slow input doesn't really help comprehension. I think repetition natural intonation are much more helpful than slow speech.

Thanks for coming by!

Lantian,

I think his premise that listening to the sounds produced slowly and clearly will make you speak slowly is plain wrong. It also looks very like an admonition to avoid ChinesePod and SpanishSense at the lower levels.

The purpose of the slow dialogs is to allow the newbie to identify the sounds as discrete elements. It's about reception, not production. Have you ever heard a newbie speak in a sustained, natural way that was also at native speaker pace, simply because he listened to some recordings that were at natural speed? Every newbie speaks haltingly because he has to process a whole lot of new information.

When you've never heard the language before it's impossible to tell where one word ends and the next one begins. There's no way round it for most of us: we're forced to narrow in on reduced chunks of input. Our adult brains tend to want to know what the elements are. That need fades away with exposure - as in the elementary and intermediate levels. It's a process.

John, lots of the best 'phrases' which sound the most natural coming from my mouth are a string of sounds that I really couldn't parse out if someone asked me to, or write down if I wanted to. I acquired it hearing it at a natural pace, not a slow pace.

So is this good language? It's certainly not 'slow' language. Do I know it, own it? Seems so.

I actually would agree with a lot of what the blogger said, "Your brain listens for semantic landmarks and then fills in the information in between", I think in natural/normal speech the mind fills in a lot.

The brain pulls from a bank of known words, I don't think it pulls from the heard phrase. The heard phrase conveys an idea, the context. The mind fills in the words.

Only transcriptionists 'hear' everything or when one pays particular special attention to what someone says.

I personally think the 'baby' brain science and accepted paradigms are 96% a lot of bunk. Show me some double-blind studies and CAT scans if one is a scientist wanting to make assertions like "we lose the ability to naturally acquire language after our early teens". They used to say 3 years old. Then it became 5. Then early teens. It used to be that people said brain cells don't grow after adolescence. Wrong.

Ken, the blogger offers a lot of very good tips about how to engage a conversation to make it comprehensible, why diss the whole post?

"Negotiate with the speaker. Make the speaker say less, maybe pause for a second. Ask the speaker to repeat. Ask the speaker to explain. Ask the speaker to write. Ask the speaker to show you."

That said, there's a time to learn vocabulary, a time to learn fluency, and a lot of times where there' a mix. Best when the mix has a good beat. ;p IMO

I hear where the guy is coming from, but if the speech is too fast, you can't differentiate the individual sounds. We're not babies anymore. We're stuck with these big dumb brains.

I think the post is a classic case of, "this is how I like to learn, so it's the best way."

Well done!

Yes, the Chinesepod newbie lessons are great for not speaking too quickly. As for myself, I prefer to speak slowly and precisely rather than a fast jumble of garbage.

... I checked the blog, and from a startet point of view, I do appreciate to hear to a clear/slowpace dialogue..otherwise I feel just lost and Chinese will be (hopefully :) ) my fourth language...

thanks f1b1, frankly as I'm a "fresh-starter", I'm just exploring the earliest podcasts. I think I'll start from the one you indicated :) .. 谢谢

There is already a lesson about this. http://chinesepod.com/learnchinese/please-speak-slowly/discussion

I saw an interesting, though wholly misguided blog post yesterday about the topic of speaking pace.

http://jpv206.blogspot.com/2007/05/what-can-i-throw-my-money-at.html

The guy seems to think that if you receive the input slowly then you'll end up speaking slowly! Never heard that one before.