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Reading TL May Delay Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 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 25 of 73 19 January 2012 at 11:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think what's been mentioned in the interference thread is true of "cheating" too - this will just give you feedback about your skills. If you read slowly or find yourself rereading, you just know that this type of texts is still difficult for you. And in fact the best strategy would be to just read more texts, even if you read slowly. Optionally you can learn the vocabulary on the particular topic or work on the grammar points that you can't understand automatically, but you'll still need to read some more texts for this to be useful. (don't get me wrong, I do love natural learning myself. I learn by watching football and movies, listening-reading audiobooks and reading whatever interests me. and that last part is essential though I'm not very visual). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| KimG Diglot Groupie Norway Joined 4978 days ago 88 posts - 104 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Portuguese, Swahili | Message 26 of 73 19 January 2012 at 11:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Some languages, I get the impression, more or less needs a common written language as an reference point to figure out the spoken dialects outside of the one you speak. An example is Portuguese, where all speakers certainly write/read same language, but got some issues communicating fluently with certain accents on both sides of the atlantic.
Some accents would be incomprehensible for me, if i'd not known how to read Portuguese. Specially Lisbon accent, after learning Brazilian! :p 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 27 of 73 20 January 2012 at 12:35am | IP Logged | |||||
What you call cheating I call studying. And I do see a reasonable good vocabulary, some idea of grammar and a bit of cultural background knowledge as relevant even for people who want to speak a language - although you need to do some actual speaking on top of those things to become a fluent speaker. 10 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5346 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 28 of 73 20 January 2012 at 1:46am | IP Logged | |||||
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The spoken language is in every respect narrower and more limited than the written one: grammar, syntax, vocabulary, subject matter. You can become fluent by concerning yourself exclusively with the former, but you'll never be proficient.
Achieving spoken fluency from the vantage point of proficiency on the other hand is trivial. 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sandman Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5409 days ago 168 posts - 389 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 29 of 73 20 January 2012 at 10:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't know if I can disagree more.
Reading and listening are similar skills in that developing either to "real" speed practices an instantaneous understanding of vocabulary and grammar. I've found in my experience that massive amounts of listening will help my reading very slightly through quicker recognition of a few phrases and vocab, but improvements through pure listening come glacially slow. I've read that people pick up vocab through listening, but frankly for me, I've done enormous amounts of listening and feel that I've learned at best 30 or 40 words from pure listening alone. Almost the only words I ever recognize are one's I've "seen" before through some written work. This is with Japanese however, where word usually sound 180% different than their English equivalent and are hard to equate without beginning at a full understanding of the surrounding language, but nonetheless pure listening I've always found (including my experience with Spanish) to be a massively slow endeavor without book knowledge of vocab and grammar. If someone did nothing but purely listen to a language from scratch, without ever reading a textbook or doing any forms of written studying whatsoever, I would guess they could listen for years without understanding much. If there was sufficient listening based materials (MT, pimsleur, etc) this wouldn't necessarily be a problem, but almost by necessity these systems do not get very far into a language. If you have a "mommy" to coach you 24/7 or can live in the L2 country it would be a different issue, but for self-learners past the beginning stages we're almost forced onto natural materials that are simply way above our heads at that point. When I read however, I often notice the words that I'm regularly experiencing suddenly come up in listening. I feel quite confident that without a heavy dose of reading, there are words I would "hear" 10,000 times without having the slightest idea I ever heard them, yet after reading them a few times I suddenly find myself hearing them. I find reading helps listening FAR more than listening helps reading. And considering they almost by definition will move together to a large degree, particularly if you want to advance past a basic level, I theoretically feel an hour of reading is far more useful than an hour of listening (helping with purely passive skills that is, active is a different matter). In fact, with Spanish that's almost 100% the way I learned (this was before I ever even thought about language learning techniques btw). I crammed vocabulary, some grammar, and read. I didn't start listening really until I could pretty much read books, and at that point listening came very quickly. With Japanese I've somewhat done the opposite, massive amounts of listening and not nearly enough reading. My listening has grown extremely slowly due to a lack of sufficient vocabulary and grammar structures and my reading has grown pretty slowly due to too much time spent listening ... adding to the vicious cycle. This has somewhat been by design just because I wanted the chance to develop a decent accent over time and learn about Japanese culture/language outside of the pure textbook treatments, but I definitely feel that it was inefficient time-wise. Reading is hard work while listening is "easy" to do for extended periods of time though. That more than anything might be its real advantage. As a working person I simply don't have the energy to spend much time stuffing my nose in books, but if I did I think I'd be far better off switching some of those pure listening hours to reading hours. Edited by Sandman on 20 January 2012 at 10:53am 12 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 30 of 73 20 January 2012 at 11:40am | IP Logged | |||||
I haven't studied Japanese, but Sandman's account does ring a bell. If you learn words one by one during a course or from some patient native speaker then you may not need any preparation. And if you understand almost everything in something you hear you may also be able to guess the meaning of a few unknown words - but I would probably have to hear them several times OR write them down to make them stick. And as Sandmand I feel that pure listening isn't something that has brought me a significant amount of new vocabulary. On the other hand, when I read intensively I do my utmost to make the words stick in the first place, and I can go back to them for repetitions. Even extensive reading is better than extensive listening in this respect. But getting to know words and phrases and constructions is only halfway to using them. I doubt that you will find any modern learner (or teacher) who seriously believes that learning a dictionary and a grammar by heart will make you a fluent user of any language (in the sense that you can actually produce sentences like water flows from a tap). You need to do something active to become an active language user. If you want to be able to speak then speak. If you want to be able to write then write. The extreme version of doing passive things first, active things later, is the theory of the "silent period". I can understand why learners might want to avoid getting a rap from people who find their utterances too miserable, but at some point you must start doing something active with your language. If speaking is too daunting then thinking silently is a good way to start producing language before you are ready to present your newborn baby to the world. You still need to do some actual talking later in realistic settings to become fluent, but if you can think in a language this goal is normally not far away. This whole idea about preparing globally for fluency is central to my ideas about language learning: reading and studies first, then silent thinking plus writing, and then actual speaking and writing in public as the last step - although travelling may force me to start saying simple sentences before I'm ready to take the big plunge. This model is quite different from the sequential method where you start speaking from day one, but within an extremely narrow field, and then you extend this field with (or without) the help of grammars, teachers and dictionaries. I frankly don't care whether I can say "Hello, my name is ..." in a new language, as long as I can't read a scientific article in the language and write about it in my log here at HTLAL. Edited by Iversen on 20 January 2012 at 11:51am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4702 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 31 of 73 20 January 2012 at 12:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't really pick up new words while speaking or listening. Normally, I'd just read friend's posts on Facebook and put unknown words into ANKI. This way I'm pretty sure they're words actually used nowadays, not some old fashioned expressions people would find funny if i used them.
2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5010 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 32 of 73 20 January 2012 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
Reading slowly has value in the beginnings but after some time, you will be forced to think in the language and understand from context just like when listening, unless you don't mind getting bored to death. I loved Sandman's post because I fully agree with the value of vocabulary gained through reading. Reading improves my listening comprehension a lot because most of my listening mistakes lie in unknown vocabulary and nothing else. The only way the reading could harm your progress is when you do nothing else or nearly nothing else. But that would apply to more areas of language learning, I'd guess. Speaking is a different thing as it is an active skill. I'd say the passive skills help with it, at least as a base of what is there in the language available for your attempts. And importantly, listening skills, and passive vocabulary, gained no matter how, will be very needed for your speaking practice because usually you'll be speaking with someone, not giving a lecture. You may get your point across with basic vocabulary and grammar (and you will improve from that point by practice) but your conversation partner, unless it is a paid teacher, won't bother most times. Not understanding not only bothers your partner (more than grammar mistakes) but it drives your focus away from speaking. I'd avoid those arguments "children learn this or that way". At medical faculty, we are being taught from the beginnings that a child is not just a small adult, it is a different organism in many ways. And here I would say: "An adult is not an overgrown child, their brain work differently in many ways". Sure, there may be adult people who learned by listening only or without L1 etc but it is not that widely spread. Reading (both intensively or extensively) in general is not an obstacle between you and the language, it is just a tool. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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