Stage where you know words but not meanin (Advice Center) Language Learning Forum

Stage where you know words but not meanin
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11 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

emk
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Message 9 of 11

16 August 2014 at 2:22pm | IP Logged

glidefloss wrote:

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.

Yeah, this is a pretty common thing. It's related to what I was trying to explain in my Cheating and Consolidating post:

In a nutshell, my advice would be to:

1. Do anything you can to artificially boost your listening comprehension (use familiar subjects, favorite stories, TV series where you can infer a lot of dialog from what happens on screen, watching with transcripts and rewatching without, or anything else you can imagine).

2. Do lots and lots of listening to "lock in" that artificially boosted comprehension.

Usually the reason why you can understand individual words but not assemble them into sentences is because you haven't listened enough for large "chunks" to become automatic. One you've heard and understood the larger chunks a zillion times, you'll have no trouble assembling them into sentences.

(Also, Serpent's advice about grammar is worth checking: Do you generally understand the "connective tissue" of the language correctly? For example, if you wrote a page on lang-8, would it come back with massive corrections everywhere, or would correctors mostly say, "Well, that's not quite how I would say that"? If you have trouble with inflections or verb tenses or cases or whatever, it might be worth paying attention to those for a while.)

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Serpent
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Message 10 of 11

16 August 2014 at 3:39pm | IP Logged

I meant to add that in my opinion using FSI drills for the grammatical component of comprehension is what we Russians call shooting a sparrow with a cannon.
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rdearman
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Message 11 of 11

16 August 2014 at 3:54pm | IP Logged

Serpent wrote:

I meant to add that in my opinion using FSI drills for the grammatical component of comprehension is what we Russians call shooting a sparrow with a cannon.

Difficult to do, but when you hit the sparrow, you ANNIHILATE it.

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