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Passive Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| gperson000 Newbie United States Joined 6453 days ago 31 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, French | Message 1 of 33 23 May 2007 at 8:23am | IP Logged | ||
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Does anyone here study a language simply for comprehension and not for communication? That is to say, do you only receive input from the language without producing output? There are languages that I would like to learn for the purpose of understanding without a need to actually speak the language. Is it possible to achieve fluent comprehension of a language without speaking the language?
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| ... Newbie United States Joined 6405 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: English* | Message 2 of 33 23 May 2007 at 8:33am | IP Logged | ||
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It's entirely possible. In fact, there are a great many people with passive fluency in languages their parents spoke to each other in earshot of their kids, but never spoke *to* their kids. You can do it as an adult, too, by solely focusing on input, and not putting any effort into output.
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| sergiu Diglot Senior Member Romania freewebs.com/invata_ Joined 6442 days ago 105 posts - 108 votes  Speaks: Romanian*, English Studies: German | Message 3 of 33 23 May 2007 at 8:33am | IP Logged | ||
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It is possible to understand everything that a person speaks in another language and not speak it at all.
I've seen these cases.What you want to do is pretty easy,but I would hate not being able to answer to someone even though I understood his question perfectly. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| gperson000 Newbie United States Joined 6453 days ago 31 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, French | Message 4 of 33 23 May 2007 at 8:47am | IP Logged | ||
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I feel that same way about not being able to answer someone but I am already trying to learn to speak two languages simultaneously. I am approaching basic fluency in Spanish and I am at a low intermediate level in French. I think that adding another language for speaking is a bad idea at this point, but I can't resist the urge of trying to learn more languages. I don't think passively learning another language will negatively affect my speaking ability in Spanish or French. Therefore, I want to passively understand another language so that I enjoy the literature and cinema, and also prepare myself for active fluency in the future, once I am comfortable with Spanish and French.
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| cameroncrc Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6520 days ago 195 posts - 185 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Ukrainian | Message 5 of 33 23 May 2007 at 10:27am | IP Logged | ||
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If you develop passive fluency, then I would imagine it would be easy to develop 'active' fluency afterwards.
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6442 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 33 23 May 2007 at 10:49am | IP Logged | ||
It's not as easy as you think, or if it is, I haven't found a good method for it. I can easily read a newspaper in French, with comprehension of over 90% of the words, and over 95% when I take context into account, and depending on the accent, I can have from no to almost complete understanding of spoken Spanish. Despite this, I'm far from actively fluent in French, and can't speak any Spanish whatsoever. Passive fluency or near-fluency helps lessons be a lot easier, but it also makes close-reading/listening for structure something that you need to concentrate on actively, since otherwise the meaning just flows into your brain, but you -still- can't produce something of the right form, etc. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cisa Super Polyglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6422 days ago 312 posts - 309 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Hungarian*, Slovak, FrenchC1, EnglishC2, Mandarin, SpanishB2, RussianB2, GermanB2, Korean, Czech, Latin Studies: Italian, Cantonese, Japanese, Portuguese, Polish, Hindi, Mongolian, Tibetan, Kazakh, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew | Message 7 of 33 23 May 2007 at 11:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Oh, this is a familiar problem! I´m so with Czech and a little with Slovak and German.
I can understand these spoken nearly perfectly, also when I´m reading, but I absolutely cannot produce anything in Czech except for a few sentences (I haven´t studied it, I know no grammar etc.), my Slovak speaking is really rusty, as I don´t really use it orally, and the same with German, as I use it in written context a lot, but don´t speak. I think if I took some Czech lessons, I would just progress incredibly rapidly, but only because I can understand so well, that does not mean I know the language. :-( Well, the same with Italian and Portuguese, I don´t know neither of them, but because of Spanish, I understand a lot. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Topsiderunner Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6921 days ago 215 posts - 218 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Arabic (Written) | Message 8 of 33 23 May 2007 at 12:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think this depends on how much "fluency" you really have. For instance,
any English speaker could pick up a French newspaper and get the gist of every article because of the similiarities in vocabulary, but that doesn't mean he would understand verb conjugation, adjective agreement, etc. However, if you do know the grammar, pronunciation, a large passive vocabulary, etc, then switching into "active" mode would only take effort and practice, not necessarily more learning. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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