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Can one speak better than understand? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5387 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 81 of 186 22 September 2012 at 8:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
It's only part of the picture, not the whole picture. At least, not for most learners. That difference is what this discussion is about, though, and where the disagreement is. I was trying to point out that people are looking at the word "speaking" in different terms. Edited by Kerrie on 22 September 2012 at 8:03pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5422 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 82 of 186 22 September 2012 at 8:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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OK, I'll not refer to the cat, but I think it's interesting here this distinction between speaking and conversing. In the first case, the presence of other people seems irrelevant. I can speak to myself. Communication with other people is not important.
On the other hand, conversing means verbal interaction with other people. So, it's important that I understand the others and that they understand me. I can live with those distinctions. So, we can conclude that some people here learn languages, not for the purpose of communicating with other people but for the sole purpose of speaking for the pleasure of speaking. That's fine. Many other people, including myself, learn to speak in order to communicate with other people. Listening is obviously very important. In the first case, listening skills are not important. So I could see how one could feel that one's speaking ability is better than the listening ability. Listening is basically irrelevant. Lest we get carried away with this whole business of listening, let me draw everybody's attention to the title of this thread. I didn't say listening; I said understanding. There is a difference. Whether you're speaking for your own personal pleasure or to communicate with other people, you have to use a set of words and a set of grammar and phonology rules. My basic question that I've been repeating ad nauseam here is: how could you speak more than you can understand? The question isn't whether you can understand native speakers speaking quickly or using words or grammar that you don't understand. That's a given when you are learning a language. The fundamental question is how can you speak material that you cannot understand. For example, how can you use a grammatical structure or an idiom properly and then claim that you can't understand it when you hear it? Unless, of course, there is a problem of listening, i.e. you can't make out the words because of a decoding problem. You can't hear the words properly. Now that is a real problem. It's not a problem of understanding, it's a problem of decoding or listening. In an earlier post, @emk claimed that he could use the French verb "oser" well but he couldn't understand it in a French television series. How could he use the verb well and not understand it? It seems impossible. The problem is hearing it. It's a listening problem. Unless of course the word is used in a sense that @emk didn't know in which case we can say that he didn't know how to use the word in that sense. Now this is a real problem, especially with things like idioms where one knows the words but not the idiomatic meaning. I maintain that it is impossible to speak more than understand because you can't really speak what you don't understand (I'm not talking of course about parroting). But much of this discussion is irrelevant for the people who are not interested in conversing with others because communication or conveying meaning to others is not important. So it's easy to claim that "I can speak well" when there's nobody to judge or to interact with. But conversing with other people is a different matter. And now we see people saying, "I can speak the language well, but I can't have a conversation." Well, what's the point of learning to speak (for the purpose of conversing)? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5758 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 83 of 186 22 September 2012 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
(I honestly can't parse that sentence. Please enlighten me.) Edited by Bao on 22 September 2012 at 8:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5387 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 84 of 186 22 September 2012 at 8:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
Some people learn languages solely to read. Many learners practice speaking (self-talk) before they start talking with other people. It's part of the learning process for a lot of people.
The problem isn't listening. The problem is decoding, which is the process you use to go from listening to understanding. That's actually the crux of the answer to your question. For some people, that decoding process doesn't work fast enough to keep up with normal conversations. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5122 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 85 of 186 22 September 2012 at 9:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
That's fine. But then, those people have no place in this discussion, do they? They shouldn't be concerned with whether they speak better than they understand. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6589 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 86 of 186 22 September 2012 at 9:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
And hello, good old debate about the usefulness of learning to converse on your own. I disagree that there's nobody to judge - usually, when you clumsily put something together, you just know it's wrong, don't you? So anyone who knows you can't translate all the words and get correct L2 sentences is able to judge their own performance, to an extent. The addition of a native speaker's judgement isn't always a guarantee either - a polite "you speak quite well" may turn into "native speakers say i'm fluent". and native speakers usually give too much attention to the pronunciation. An experienced learner can judge his/her performance better than a newbie with a native friend would. (unless it's such a close friend that he/she is able to be frank and clear without upsetting the person) And monologue doesn't mean absence of other speakers. It means a lack of interaction - you're able to tell a story but you can't answer the follow-up questions. But I'd say the best feedback is the native speakers' reaction: do they ask you to repeat? do they look puzzled? do they reply so fast that you understand nothing? do they praise your skills? (makes most learners assume they're better than they are) do they switch to another language and how soon? Also just to clarify, I don't learn in order to speak to myself. But speaking is a lower priority for me; instead, rather than learning to speak and as a side effect learning to understand, I focus on understanding until it's good enough that I would understand a conversation. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4484 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 87 of 186 22 September 2012 at 10:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is the real bottom line here. The person in question asserting he speaks better than he understands needs to forget speaking and concentrate on increasing vocabulary and grammar knowledge until he has the tools to understand at a certain level, and then practice extensive listening and reading until he actually can understand. I mention reading as well because reading a particular turn of phrase makes it more familiar when heard. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6589 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 88 of 186 22 September 2012 at 11:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Where are the advocates of speaking from day 1? :-)
1 person has voted this message useful |
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