Thread: Talking about events in the past or in the future?

Originally Posted by DDT

He cannot afford to go on holiday until next summer. Он не сможет уйти в отпуск до следующего лета./Он сможет взять отпуск только следующим летом.

"He cannot afford" This part you did not mention. It specifically implies "money".

Can you give a couple of examples in Russian?
perhaps, с трудом позволить себе такой расход or ему не по карману

How natural would this be to you?
Отпуск, ему не по карману до следующего лета.

Oh yes, thanks for the correction, DDT. I totally didn't notice this aspect. I understood "can't afford" as relating not to money but time, a lot of work at the present moment and so on. In Russian "не может позволить себе уйти в отпуск" doesn't necessarily mean the money aspect, I think... However if the English sentence implies it, the correct translation might be the one you suggested only without the comma:

Отпуск ему не по карману до следующего лета.

Wow, I agree with everything bitpicker says!

Originally Posted by bitpicker

I learned English because I read many novels, sang (well screamed, growled) along to music and fell in undying love with Monty Python. School and structured learning only provided the very basics.

Same here. Only in my case it was Harry Potter at the age of 17. I heard of some people finally mastering English because of their interest in pornography. Interest and motivation are everything.

Likewise with Russian: you won't catch me using flash cards to learn words, I don't even make the slightest attempt at actually memorizing anything.

Agreed. I don't even know what a flashcard is. Are they bits of paper/cardbord that you write new words and expressions on and carry around in your pocket in order to look at them from time to time and memorize them? I never memorize anything because it's boring. I remember words because I read constantly and they constantly pop up again. So no special effort is required, they just stick in your head by themselves. And what's more important, you remember them much better because of the context. For example, I'll always think: "Oh yes, I remember this word from "Rich Man, Poor Man"" or some other book that I've read.

Originally Posted by bitpicker

I have to I look up the same word a hundred times until it sticks, but only when I need it. As I always take it from a context it gets far better integration in my mind than if I learned it only because I had to, with no context at all. I also read a couple of grammar books front to back to see what to expect, but I still look up cases and conjugations.

+100. Same story here. Grammar tables are a useful tool but there's no use trying them learn it all by heart, especially with Russian...

Originally Posted by bitpicker

It is my strong belief that I can assimilate the language in much the same way a child does, with the additional advantage of being able to support that intellectually by comparing the language with others and by analyzing grammar.

Yes, I agree with that as well. How do children learn their native language? They hear it spoken by their parents all the time, it's spoken on tv and in the street/kindergarten, they're read books by their parents and later they read themselves. This is all a huge amount of INPUT. They hear the same words and grammar structures hundreds of times so they memorize those words and structures whether they want it or not. So it is basically the amount and immersion which matter most of all. Quantity ultimately turns into quality.

There were different approaches to teaching foreign languages at different times, like the grammar translation method, which was mostly about learning grammar and translating sentences (boring but some elements are useful), audio-lingual, etc. Teachers believed that all they probably had to do was speak to their pupils the foreign language during maybe 2 lessons a week and make them repeat certain pharses and voila! they can speak the language. It doesn't work like that. I personally believe in the Natural approach, which puts the emphasis on exposure to language/input rather than formal exercises. The learning hypothesis in this approach states that only natural-like acquisition can result in mastering the language while "learning" only helps to get knowledge about the language.

In the same way I don't realy believe in "communicative teaching", which is extremely popular now. This theory basically states that all you have to do is divide your students into pairs/groups, give them some communicative task and make them speak. People can't speak a language if they haven't had a lot of input, if they haven't read a lot. To speak freely even the simplest phrases like "Well, how are you?"-- "Oh I'm fine, thanks. And you?" and be able to vary them according to the situation, you have to feel confident with the language, to have read a lot. Simply parroting a couple of dialogues from a textbook, which is what school usually offers, is not enough.

Well, that feels like a whole bucket of foreign language teaching theory but I'll be back with something more practical...

Originally Posted by starrysky

I never memorize anything because it's boring. I remember words because I read constantly and they constantly pop up again. So no special effort is required, they just stick in your head by themselves. And what's more important, you remember them much better because of the context. For example, I'll always think: "Oh yes, I remember this word from "Rich Man, Poor Man"" or some other book that I've read.

+1

(only in my case it's not books Rather films and forums)

Originally Posted by starrysky

Originally Posted by bitpicker

I learned English because I read many novels, sang (well screamed, growled) along to music and fell in undying love with Monty Python. School and structured learning only provided the very basics.

Same here. Only in my case it was Harry Potter at the age of 17. I heard of some people finally mastering English because of their interest in pornography. Interest and motivation are everything.

A big part of my generation learned English from PC games. To get what is going on in, say, "Planescape:Torment" one should have decent English vocabulary. Localizations are evil.

The brain is a devious device. And lazy. Flash cards, tables and ultimately exercises are a nuisance to it. You can memorize a declension table, but your brain will just seek the easy way out: it will learn that in the table the entry in the instrumental plural cell is -ами; but that doesn't mean the information is available when you need an instrumental plural.

I've had many a student in English whom I tried to help through exams. Of course usually they were pretty hopeless cases to begin with. But one thing I have noticed throughout: you can give them the rules for, say, if-clauses and have them memorize them. You can give them exercise books full of example sentences and fill-in-the-blanks texts until they can draw the pages from memory; but in a real-world situation when they need to formulate a simple if-clause they will still be stumped. That's because they never understood the things, they never learned them for usage, they only ever learned them to pass the exam or to finish the bloody exercise.

Until a couple of weeks ago I had a student who after better than four years of learning English in school still was stumped by such rare and unusual words as 'do' and 'be'. I bet the furniture in that classroom had soaked up more English than he had. But if all your brain seeks is always the easy way out, and that's what it will do if it doesn't have any fun when learning, then no amount of work will ever suffice.

Robin

Language is not algebra. Language is a correspondence between thoughts and their expression. Each language is an open continuum which is created by many people of different trades and in different cultural contexts. One of the most common ways to create something new is analogy. Being applied on various levels, it gives a nested recombination of known elements which correspond to known images related to perception and reasoning. Human brain has all the necessary power to learn any language from scratch, not using any grammar. A native language is learned as a set of patterns. And each pattern makes sense. Formal grammar does not make sense, it lacks in detail. That's why it is much easier to read 10000 pages of text and conversation and learn a lot from it than to drill oneself with cards and guess-the-word exercises. I managed to push my English to an advanced level by doing so.