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Stage where you know words but not meanin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| glidefloss Senior Member United States Joined 5959 days ago 138 posts - 154 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 1 of 11 13 August 2014 at 6:22am | IP Logged | ||
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Is there a stage in language learning where you can hear and identify individual words, knowing what each mean,
but not understand the sentence's meaning? Maybe every other sentence is like this. Sometimes it's all the sentences. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7196 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 2 of 11 13 August 2014 at 11:25am | IP Logged | ||
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I think it's when the connector words and grammar details that are used all the time are not yet working automatically in your head. I've found that FSI is good supplement for that component of language learning. The courses in Spanish and French are very good. I see they are on your studies list. Edited by luke on 13 August 2014 at 11:51am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5299 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 3 of 11 13 August 2014 at 12:36pm | IP Logged | ||
I've had that experience, but not as a "stage", ie. it's not like it happens during my 2nd year of learning no matter what I'm listening to, but instead, it happens with some speakers/recordings/movies and not with others, happens with some genres and not with others, throughout the learning process. Happens with fast speech more than slow speech. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4135 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 4 of 11 13 August 2014 at 1:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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That happens quite a lot for me in tagalog right now. I'll understand each individual word of a written
sentence, but I can't puzzle out the meaning of the sentence. For me, I think it's a lack of an intuitive understanding of how the language works. It will get better with more exposure and review of comprehensible text. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4435 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 5 of 11 13 August 2014 at 7:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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If you listen to a story in the news that you have heard before in a familiar language like English, it is
much easier to pick up the context in another language. This morning I was listening to a discussion on a local Chinese radio station on the TV & movie actor Robin Williams who died from suicide. The word that get repeated many times was 憂鬱症 (yōu yù zhèng). The story has been on the news for the past 2 days so even if you don't know the word, you might guess it means "Depression". The character 症 refers to an illness so you know the word has to do with an illness. Sentences in French or Spanish it is the matter of picking up enough words & phrases. In a tonal language like Thai or Chinese, you have to dissect your sentences into blocks of words that you recognize in order to decipher the ones you don't know. Since there are many words & phrases that sound similar except for the tone, some of the time you have to think in the context of the discussion or sentence to fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle. The other problem with a language like Chinese is that foreign names in a news broadcast is usually translated phonetically and can sound a bit off from the original. When you are listening in a sentence like: 財政部長 followed by the name of a person. The first part is the "Finance Minister" and then a name after. Sometimes you have to think whether a person's name is actually a word or not. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5382 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 6 of 11 13 August 2014 at 7:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yup, that's where I am when listening to most Irish audio for the first time now. With
material that's not too over my head, I can decipher more on subsequent attempts at listening and with subtitles I can make out a lot more. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5050 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 7 of 11 15 August 2014 at 11:40pm | IP Logged | ||
It happens to me a lot when the content is unfamiliar. For example, when listening to radio interviews about science in Dutch, I understand about 80% of the words and about 80% of the content of the sentences. When listening to radio interviews about Dutch politics, I understand more like 70% of the words but only 20% of the content of the message. I haven't had similar experiences where the problem was the syntax or the implied way different concepts fit together, except very occasionally in an "exotic" language like Mandarin, in cases where the language is very figurative and culturally specific. Almost never in a European language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6588 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 8 of 11 16 August 2014 at 12:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have the feeling that 50% of this problem in Spanish was gone when I realized that "a pesar" is the same as the Portuguese "apesar", and that in Spanish "pese a" is another synonym of that.
Of course what really helped was input, especially video with subtitles. Note that I hadn't used them much before. If you routinely use them, the solution might be switching them off. But sometimes a tiny chunk of grammar can also make a huge difference. In a very different way, I've experienced this in Finnish. I could speak better than I could understand :P I could produce any form easily, but identifying the case&function was harder, especially while listening. I read the Da Vinci Code with the accompanying audiobook and it took care of that. The audio made me continue even if I understood only vaguely, and from then on I didn't even think of translating. Note that it was my final year at school and it took me very long, almost the whole academic year. I'm not sure the result would've been the same if I had been able to afford longer sessions. I suspect I would've needed to keep going for a few more months anyway, either with more content or going back to the same one. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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