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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 5374 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 129 of 186 26 September 2012 at 2:13pm | IP Logged | ||
This post may seem a bit tongue-in-cheek but it actually is quite profound and reveals the nature of the debate. Let's look at the reasoning. We speak the same language. But we don't understand each other. Therefore we speak better than we understand. That, in a nutshell, is the essence of the debate. The key reasoning here is: Since I don't understand the other person, I must speak better than I understand. But one could take a completely opposite view. First of all, since we don't understand each other, this form of speaking is actually monologuing. Understanding is irrelevant. There's no point of comparing speaking to understanding. On the other hand, if we are talking about speaking in the sense of dialoguing, there has to be some understanding. And therein lies the question: how can you dialog and claim to speak better than you understand? But after all that abstract reasoning, let's get real. You say you speak Russian well, but you can hardly understand it when you hear it. Therefore you claim to speak it better than you understand it. Then at a party a friend says, "Come, let me introduce you to Olga who has just arrived from Moscow and doesn't speak much English. You can speak to her." What do you do? You're stuck and you will most likely speak English to Olga." This reminds me of that infamous YouTube video of Ziad Fazah who claims to speak 58 languages. Here he is on Chilean television where he is asked questions by a number of native speakers of various languages. The poor man hardly understands the questions but can answer with some sort of gibberish in each language. Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XA1Ifi-ntE Should we say that Ziad Fazah speaks 58 languages better than he understands them? It seems to be the case. Edited by s_allard on 26 September 2012 at 2:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6541 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 130 of 186 26 September 2012 at 2:44pm | IP Logged | ||
And let me just say once again that accents, dialects, slang etc shouldn't be ignored in my opinion. If you can't understand, you can't have a conversation, regardless of the reason. How much of a hindrance it is depends on the language and perhaps country. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5374 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 131 of 186 26 September 2012 at 3:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think everybody should look at that Ziad Fazah video. He didn't have a big problem speaking the languages. The native speakers could sort of understand him. But the real problem of course was that he couldn't understand the questions. I would certainly agree with @serpent that this is proof that one can speak better than understand. I just laugh at the results. You have to admire somebody who has the brass to go on television and be humiliated like that. If that's how one speaks 58 languages, then there's not much to talk about.
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| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5339 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 132 of 186 26 September 2012 at 7:55pm | IP Logged | ||
Hey, more power to him! He may not be up to your standards, but I'm still pretty impressed. Not everyone learns languages for the same reason. I know that's not what this particular thread is about, but that comment sounded extremely disrespectful to anyone who has put time into learning languages and isn't quite as perfect as you are. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6541 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 133 of 186 26 September 2012 at 8:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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This doesn't happen solely at the beginner level either. As emk pointed out, you can work with a tutor on your speaking and reach a pretty damn good level - but if the only person you can understand is your tutor, you're f-cked. And it's not always just due to accent, dialects or mumbling. You need to listen to many speakers in order to understand them.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5374 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 134 of 186 26 September 2012 at 8:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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I certainly am not trying to be disrespectful of Ziad. And I apologize if that is the impression I gave. In fact, as I said, I admire somebody who has the courage to claim that he speaks 58 languages and lets himself be challenged on TV. More power to him too. I wouldn't do it.
But the main point here is how one defines speaking a language. If, as has been suggested, to speak a language means that you can make meaningful sounds in the language even if you can't understand the language when spoken to, then by all means Ziad speaks 58 languages. I would even say that Ziad speaks better than he understands. That is one way of looking at the issue. But if speaking a language means being able to communicate with people in the language, then Ziad, at least for what we saw, does not speak 58 languages. In this sense, maybe he speaks 50 or 40 or 30 or 10, which would still be very respectable. So, the issue isn't really how many languages Ziad speaks; it's all about how we define speaking. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5476 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 135 of 186 26 September 2012 at 8:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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EDIT: Oops, crosspost. @s_allard has already discussed a lot of this.
This thread contains lots of examples of why somebody might say, "I speak better than I understand," and what they might be trying to express when they say that. A lot of these examples involve that weird place near B2 where some students can explain fairly complex ideas semi-fluently, but still have problems dealing with raw native speech. For example, imagine a student who can more-or-less talk about Keynesian economics (as long as she avoids technical jargon), but who can't understand more than 40% of the typical TV show. This student might claim that she "speaks better than she understands," which is vague and probably incorrect. But I wouldn't think any less of her for saying it. The only thing left to argue about are the definitions of "speaks", "better" and "understands." Like most arguments about definitions, it's not going to teach us anything about the world. We've discussed the facts and anecdotes at length; let's leave the definitions alone. And please let's not bring Ziad Fazah into this. That's not going to help this thread at all. Edited by emk on 26 September 2012 at 8:38pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5339 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 136 of 186 26 September 2012 at 8:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think that most of us would agree that your definition is, in general, the way we think of it when we say we speak a language. However, when you phrase a question Can one speak better than understand? you are breaking down the processes of speaking/communicating into specific parts: speaking and understanding. The answer to your original question is yes. You can understand better than you can speak. There is a decoding process involved in understanding. That is where the delay comes for a lot of learners, especially ones who have not had massive exposure to their target language. English is not an easy language to learn, but - if you're looking for it - you can have massive amounts of exposure to it with very little effort. When you live in a bilingual culture, such as parts of Canada, you have massive exposure to the language with little effort. You have more practice listening, decoding, and ultimately understanding. For those of us learning less common languages, or living in monolingual environments, we do not always get (or have access to) that massive exposure. The majority of my language study is done with no one around. Even if I can learn to understand the radio, audiobooks, and movies in my target language, the input I am getting is limited compared to the massive exposure you can get learning English. There's less exposure to natives, and thus less opportunity to practicing decoding the spoken language in its natural environment. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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