Skip to main content

Week 8: До свидания! (Goodbye!)

I started a new unit this week and it solidified two things that I’ve already remarked on before, the importance of context and the little ways my wife helps me, which boosts my ZPD. As I’ve said before, Rosetta doesn’t give the English translation, and so you have to figure out what is being said based on the image and the context Rosetta tries to create. The phrases in this picture below were kind of difficult to figure out and were really only clear after I asked my wife what they meant. In a real life context, it may be easier since I would be able to see the entire process play out, and know what came before and what came after, instead of just getting five separate images.

1. "The man and his car." 2. "His car is red." 3. "He's driving his car."
4. (This is implying that he's about to let the other guy drive his car.)
5. "He's driving his (as in the other guy's) car."
All this was pretty hard to figure out on my own.

But moving on... What I learned about my special topic of learning Russian is that it’s really hard and will take a ton of time and will require more than Rosetta Stone. I knew when I started that I wasn’t going to gain any level of fluency, but making an effort to start to learn Russian has been something I wanted to do, so this was a good opportunity to do it.

The other thing I learned was that context is really important for this sort of thing. What I’m probably getting really good at is practicing Russian in the Rosetta Stone context, but outside of it will be a whole different matter. I’m at the point where I can match up the image with the word or phrase fairly easy. But in a real life context the challenge will be to speak certain words without any visual cues. But I also look forward to being immersed in a Russian speaking context from time to time because the words I pick up there are the ones that stick with me the most. Even though, however, there are context limitations, I have still been able to transfer some words to my long-term memory and recall them when I'm not doing Rosetta Stone. Getting more stuff into my long-term memory has always been one of my main goals, so I've achieved it a little.

Another thing I’ve learned about learning Russian is that effort is really important. Sometimes I was good at practicing regularly, and other times I wasn’t. If I want to get anywhere with this, then I will need to put forth more effort. The amount of effort I put in is probably also closely linked with my motivation. When I was in Russia a year and a half ago, I got motivated, but then that went away. I want to learn it, but my motivation is still weak.

My level of motivation has been one of the things I’ve learned about myself as a learner. But how do I get my motivation up? I don’t really know, but it will probably be out of necessity, or enrolling in a Russian class would probably be helpful as well. However, I will probably keep trying to learn Russian on and off for a long time, partly because it’s just who I am. Ever since I can remember my dad has tried to learn languages in his spare time and I will probably be the same way.

Another thing I have learned about myself is that I have mostly enjoyed writing these blogs and making connections between what I have been doing and the learning theories we’ve been covering. I’m always trying to analyze and make connections between the things I observe to things I have read all the time anyway, and so this has been a good forum to do this in.

As for learning theories, I have learned that they are all important. I don’t know that you could learn anything without using pieces from all the theories. The most crucial one for me has been cognitive theory. It’s been helpful to know things about short and long-term memory, recall, dual-coding, prior knowledge, etc. But as I said before, context has also been important, and that is something that sociocultural theory talks about more, although it is in cognitive theory as well. The other important theory for me to keep in mind has been Dweck’s incremental theory, which is the one that says that intelligence is largely a product of the amount of effort you put in. I can never use the excuse that I can’t learn it, only that I haven’t put in enough effort.

"Dosvedanya!"  (Goodbye!) 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 3: усилия (effort)

A few of you have commented about how I have the intrinsic motivation to learn Russian. At the risk of making myself sound less awesome, that’s only partly true. I do want to learn Russian, but I had more intrinsic motivation to learn it when I was over there for three weeks than I do now. (If my wife didn’t speak perfect English then that’d probably be different.) There are a couple reasons why I don’t have a ton of intrinsic motivation to learn Russian. One is what I already said about not living there and also not having it as a necessary part of any communication that I do. The other reason is that it’s hard. This is a totally new language with a new alphabet, which doesn’t at all build on my understanding of a Latin-based language like Spanish. At this early stage, the challenge level is still beyond my grasp, especially knowing how long it can take to learn a language. I’m not exactly sure what learning theory to incorporate here to explain the gap between challenge and abil...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 1: Здравствуйте! (Hello!)

That’s pronounced something like “zdravstuychte.” This week’s Russian lesson consisted of some basic greetings and some other vocabulary words. But for this first blog post it will probably be helpful if I explain how Rosetta Stone’s language lessons work. It’s set up, as you might expect, with five different levels and various units and lessons within each level. I’m on level one and have worked through the first couple units. The various lessons within each unit will help you with the following: vocabulary, grammar, writing, pronunciation, and reading. But regardless of which lesson you are on, in the end you’re always learning vocabulary, which is nice. A big part of the RS method is to provide you with pictures for every word or sentence, so that you can have some kind of visual to connect the word or phrase with. It will typically show you a set of pictures and have a word or phrase at the top that you match it up with. There is also always a voice that pronounces it fo...
Post a Comment
Read more