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Can one speak better than understand? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 121 of 186 25 September 2012 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Can one practice conversation skills without actually conversing? I guess you can by talking to yourself. You can take two sides of a dialog. You can think of all the things you want to say. You can practice the pronunciation. You can shadow recordings of dialogs.
But in my opinion those are basic skills, not conversational skills. Conversational skills are by definition interactive. How can you practice that by yourself? It's like trying to learn to dance the rock'n'roll by yourself. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 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 122 of 186 25 September 2012 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Except that if you can produce speech AND listen, you'll do just fine when you get an actual chance to converse with someone.
3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| showtime17 Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Slovakia gainweightjournal.co Joined 6085 days ago 154 posts - 210 votes Speaks: Russian, English*, Czech*, Slovak*, French, Spanish Studies: Ukrainian, Polish, Dutch | Message 123 of 186 26 September 2012 at 12:43am | IP Logged | ||
Yes, but you are applying the situation of living in Quebec (probably Montreal) to the situations of other people. I've lived in Montreal and there the situation is different from what most language learners are experiencing. There English and French are ever-present, whether on the streets or in the media, so people get a lot of exposure to the languages and native ways of speaking them. So there the passive understanding skills are much stronger for the vast majority of language learners. However most language learners who are learning languages in countries where the language they are learning is not spoken are in totally different situations. There are different registers of speaking a language. Most languge learners get exposed to a very high level native register (if they get exposed to it at all) and also non-native speakers in their classes. So then if they go to a country where the language they learned is spoken, they might have trouble understanding the native speakers. That is just because they have never been exposed to the different levels of registers that natives speaks. This applies to accents, pitch, pronunciation, slang...etc. For example for some learners of Spanish it might be easier to understand a complicated lecture on some subject in the language, than everyday easy speech in the streets. For example you might go to a store and you ask how much a thing costs and the person responds "dieciseis", however you don't understand the response, because it was said in a way that you are unfamiliar with. You know that dieciseis is 16, you know how to say it yourself, but you might not always recognize the word when said by a native speaker, because you have never been exposed to their speech. Plus you might also have things like idioms or slang. For example, a non-native (and even some native) speakers might not recognize what the expression "what's up?" in English means. Also when speaking, you might help to express yourself by using special words such as "thing" or "truc", while when someone is explaining something to you, they would use the exact name of a thing, which you might not understand... 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| showtime17 Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Slovakia gainweightjournal.co Joined 6085 days ago 154 posts - 210 votes Speaks: Russian, English*, Czech*, Slovak*, French, Spanish Studies: Ukrainian, Polish, Dutch | Message 124 of 186 26 September 2012 at 12:47am | IP Logged | ||
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Think Radio Canada opposed to some local person speaking in Chicoutimi... When a language learner starts talking to someone like the latter, then they will surely feel like they can speak more than they understand, since they have never been exposed to that accent... Edited by showtime17 on 26 September 2012 at 12:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| wv girl Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5240 days ago 174 posts - 330 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 125 of 186 26 September 2012 at 1:07am | IP Logged | ||
I kind of had that experience. I could hold a normal conversation about daily activities, what I wanted to do, etc., with my Belgian French teacher. When I went to Chicoutimi for a 3 week immersion, however, I had some initial difficulty understanding my host family! They seemed to understand me just fine, but it sure took me a lot of effort at first to understand what they were saying. It was just a matter of adjusting to the different accent and to being in French full time, with no recourse to English if I didn't know certain vocabulary. I still don't think I'd qualify myself as a better speaker than listener ... I was just good at certain subjects that I was really familiar with and maybe that gave them the impression that I was more accomplished as a listener than I actually was. But 24 hour French at native speed could leave me dizzy. It did improve my listening skills, though! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 126 of 186 26 September 2012 at 2:57am | IP Logged | ||
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I thought we had already gone through this before. The question isn't whether one has difficulty listening to raw speech versus classroom speech, i.e understanding my Belgian French teacher versus understanding people in Chicoutimi, Québec or speaking standard Spanish and then being exposed to a local variety of Spanish.
As I have said many times, this happens quite often and even in our native languages when we are confronted with different regional varieties of our own language. It is normal to have difficulty understanding something unusual. What I find interesting is people claiming that because they have difficulty understanding some dialect or street language they must speak better than they understand. So, for example, I've learned English at university in Italy and when I go to New York city I have problems understanding the natives. Therefore I must speak better than I understand. The other issue, for purposes of comparison, if one reads the OP is that a person claims to speak a language well but barely understand a television program in the standard language. In other words, can I claim to speak the standard language and not understand it when it is spoken to me? But all this has been discussed to death in previous posts. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 127 of 186 26 September 2012 at 10:41am | IP Logged | ||
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What about this:
a.) it's possible to claim anything. b.) if you want people to believe your claims, they should be consistent with the other person's impression of you and make sense in their world view. c.) if you want your claims to be of any practical value, they should trigger appropriate reactions that use your skills at roughly the level they are actually at d.) if your claims do neither b.) nor c.), a.) is still true. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| showtime17 Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Slovakia gainweightjournal.co Joined 6085 days ago 154 posts - 210 votes Speaks: Russian, English*, Czech*, Slovak*, French, Spanish Studies: Ukrainian, Polish, Dutch | Message 128 of 186 26 September 2012 at 11:23am | IP Logged | ||
This thread is the perfect example of why it can be said that people can speak a language better than they can understand it. We are all clearly speaking the same language here, but no one can understand what the other is saying. :) 8 persons have voted this message useful |
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