Brainstorming- help?

[rieshy]

I've been thinking more about the Italian thread and the very real problem that Ester Marie warned about of solidifying mistakes if you don't have a very literate native-speaking tutor to make corrections.

For those of us in the linguistic boondocks:



Doing transcription from audible books that are in our target language that we also have a hard-copy of to check our work against.
Translating into our target language from books that we have both an English translation of and our target language translation.

Any other ideas? Or does anyone see a glaring problem with these suggestions?

[cathmom]

Good ideas!

[Ester Maria]

(It does not have to be a native speaker, very often native speakers are quite clueless as to how their own language works, unless they are rather well-educated. It has to be somebody who knows the language well both theoretically and in practice, quite often language professors are in fact a better choice, at the stage where you still learn grammar, than native speakers.)

Transcriptions are a great idea. The problem with translations is that there are always multiple ways of translating things, so you would have to try to stick to rather simple texts and rather literal translations. You can also do parallel readings of such texts - Bible, supposedly, works rather well for that, because it is a text most people know rather well, and many translations are rather simple.

You can generally increase input, rather than output, too: by watching or reading a lot of material, so with time producing sensible output will be easier too. Getting used to the language takes time, so lots of input is good.