A Khmer student wrote to me on YouTube and asked me to produce videos about how to read English language newspapers.
"I'd like to ask you to make videos how to read newspaper and translate it from English to Khmer. I Khmer and I having a problem to understand English phrases." Wrote the student.
Language learners often write telling me about some area of learning or area of their lives where they Gazeteler difficulties of comprehension and ask me for a trick or a guide to help them learn.
As I have mentioned in numerous other dialect studying articles and other content, you will discover no approaches with no ideas. The more hours you invest, the better you will get. And if your goal is to read at a native speaker level, then you need to read things a native speaker reads. For anybody who is a 22 12 month period-classic university or college graduate, then you should be perusing in that measure around the dangerous language. And you won't get there by reading textbooks ABOUT the language. You will get there by readingexpert articles and publications, and textbooks IN rather than ABOUT the language.
The pupil declares he has hardship browsing, and primarily singled out newsprint, after we examine this new electronic mail.
Obviously, reading is reading. On some level, reading a newspaper is no different than reading a novel or reading a short story.
You will be able to learn newspapers for anyone who is learning books and short-term tales. Basically If I asked this college student, of course, he or she is doubtless will never be reading definitely one innovative a month in English. Paper going through would just arrive if he were.
Therefore, the problem is not the reading or the newspapers, per se. The problem is the lack of practice.
I never took a course called "Newspaper Reading" in English. I just started reading newspapers. No-one trained me in, or maybe you, despite the fact and at initial, I had to know to handle the language, organization and format of paper writing articles. It just came to us. The same was true for German or Spanish newspapers which I can read almost as well as English. No one taught me, or taught Gunther or Pablo, it just came through practice.
When you start figuring out a foreign vocabulary, you can be no idiot,. That's a spot, i always make sometimes in expert articles. You are not starting with an empty brain. One reason it takes babies three years to learn their native tongue is because they are also learning what a language is and how language works. You know all of that, and much more. Babies don't know that there is such a thing as grammar. Every single piece of vocabulary has to be learned. A seven year old may not know the words "federal government, human population, economy and referendum currency" in his native tongue. So, seeing as checking a newsprint in his mommy mouth is tough for him, searching an overseas magazine might be a hardship on him.
If you are an adult, coming from a developed country, with at least a high school or university level of education, you should already be able to read newspapers in your native tongue. At that point, reading a newspaper in a foreign tongue is simply a matter of vocabulary.
True there are different uses of language, and styles of writing. And newspapers do have style which differs from other kinds of writing. But you just read, and read and figure them out.
They aren't reading through books and little memories,. This is the downside to most students, however. Most learners need to just accept that they need practice. They need to read, and read, and stumble, and fall, and read Gazeteler
I didn't develop a taste for reading the newspaper in English until I was in my late twenties. But, by that time I had read countless books in English, and completed 16 years of education. I only began reading newspapers because I had to read foreign newspapers at college. Then I learned to read the newspapers in English first, to help me understand the foreign newspaper.
Among the troubles, specially with Khmer pupils is the fact that there may be so limited penned resources included in Khmer. American students have had exposure to magazines, newspaper publishers and novels reference books, poetry, diaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, represents and biographies comic books... Most Khmers haven't had this exposure.
If they haven't look at it for their native tongue, how could they read in detail it during a unfamiliar vocabulary?
And, I am not just picking on Khmers. Exactly true these varieties of creating will not be easily obtainable in Khmer dialect, but even in Oriental, Korean, or Vietnamese knowledge, from where these loads of forms of authoring are in existence, students may not have suffered from being exposed to them. For example, Taiwanese college students said that during 12 years of primary school they never wrote a single research paper.
But then they were asked to do that in English, in their ESL classes.
Currently, I have a Thai friend, named Em, who is studying in USA. He has been there for three years, studying English full time, and still can't score high enough on his TOEFL exam to enter an American community college. In Thailand he or she is a university scholar, but degree in Thailand is much lurking behind developed schooling. And in the developed world, American community colleges are about the single easiest schools of higher learning to enter.
If Em finally passes the TOEFL and gets into community college, in the first two years of core requirements for an American Bachelor's Degree, he will be given assignments such as "Read George Orwell's 1984, and explain how it is an allegory for communism, and how it applies to the Homeland Security Act in the US."
When foreign students stumble on an assignment like this, they always blame their English level. But I am confident that the average graduate from most Asian countries couldn't do this assignment in his native tongue. Their curriculum just doesn't include these types of analytical book reports.
When I was teaching in Korea, there was a famous story circulating around the sober ESL community. A Korean girl, from a wealthy family, had won a national English contest. She had been tutored by expensive home teacher, almost since birth, and her English level was exceptional. The prize was a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school in the Unites States, graduation from which almost guaranteed admission to an Ivy League school.
Apparently, one of the first assignments she was given at her new school in America was to read a poem and write an original analysis of it, and then give a presentation in class. When it came time for her presentation, the student stood up and dutifully recited the poem, word for word, she also regurgitated, exactly, what the lecturer had said about the poem in class. And she failed.
In Korea, her incredible memory and ability to accurately repeat what the teacher had said, had kept her at the top of her class. But in America, she was being asked to do much more than that; think, and establish, study and offer and defend.
The majority of learners believe that their difficulty in dealing with foreign papers, training books and instruction or conversations lies in their lack of vocabulary or failings of language. But once they posses a relatively large vocabulary, the real problem is some combination of culture and practice.
Getting back to the Khmer student and his problem reading English newspapers: To understand English newspapers you also have to know all of the current information and concepts in the newspaper. The best way to deal with foreign newspapers, at the beginning, is to first, read a news story in your own language. Then read the same news story in the foreign language newspaper. Also you can watch the news in your own language and then in whatever language you are studying, and compare.
Translation isn't just about knowing words. You have to know concepts. The created wording requirement express a similar indicating within a goal terms the way it do from your source dialect. Which is the foremost tip of translation. Even if the wording, in the end, is not even remotely like the original. No matter how good your foreign language skills are, you cannot convey meaning which you don't know in your native tongue.
Recently, newspapers in Asia were running stories about the Taiwan Y2K crisis.
To understand the newspaper stories, you would first need to understand the original, global Y2K crisis. The global Y2K issue was something that Cambodia wasn't very involved in because there were so few computers in Cambodia in the year 1999. There were probably less than one hundred or so internet connections in Cambodia at that time. Next, you would have to know and understand that Taiwan has its own calendar, based on the founding of the Republic of China in 1911. Administration banks and places of work in Taiwan, history celebrations in line with the Republic of China schedule, which suggests, if you take profit due to an Cash machine machines right now, the year shows as 99.
You are going to recognize that Taiwan is going to achieve its first century, in the year 2011, which is experiencing a mini-Y2K catastrophe, mainly because the year or so portion of the day inside the computer just has two numbers, any time you know and appreciate these specifics.
The bulk of my readers do not live in Asia, and may not have known anything about the history of Taiwan, or the Taiwan date. But, any person with a normal reading level should have understood my explanation. It is possible to relate it for some other details you understand, just like, other calendars and otherY2K conditions, even though it is not really a requiremement that you will posses past expertise in the precise predicament that you are checking about.
Once you look at the in this article justification, the terminology is rather standard. There are probably only a small handful of words, perhaps five or six, which an intermediate language learner wouldn't know. So, these words and phrases may possibly be appeared up for a dictionary. And for a European student, with a broad base of education and experience, that would be all of the help he would need. But for students coming from the education systems of Asia, particularly form Cambodia which is just now participating in global events such as the Olympic Games, for the first time, it would be difficult, even impossible to understand this or similar newspaper stories.
The key lies in general education, not English lessons. Students need to read simply and frequently build their general education, in their own language first, then in English, or else they will never understand English newspapers or TV shows.
