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Is this normal? (Weird experience) | ||
Tags: Epiphany | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 9 of 14 13 March 2015 at 4:45pm | IP Logged | ||
Wait a minute here. Are we talking about individuals who never had any contact with a language suddenly coming out of a coma speaking that language? Thanks to the Internet, we can quickly see that the story of the Croatian teen waking up speaking German and the American vet also waking up speaking Swedish is not at simple as it seems. In both cases, the individuals had learned some of the language before. In the case of the American vet, he had lived in Sweden for a number of years and had a Swedish girlfriend who came forward to help him. Here is what a newspaper article wrote: The U.S. Navy veteran discovered unconscious in a Californian motel in February, who awoke with total amnesia and only able to speak Swedish, has flown to Sweden in a bid to rebuild his life. Michael Boatwright, 61, was reunited in Gothenburg on Tuesday with Ewa Espling, an old flame who he has not seen in almost 30 years and hopes spending time with her might trigger an avalanche of lost memories. The point in all this is that you can't speak a language that you have never learned at some point in life. You can't play the piano if you have never learned. Many people may have studied the piano and still can not play but nobody who has never touched a piano can walk over and start playing a song they heard somewhere. Again, I'm not saying that these stories of people waking up speaking a foreign language are untrue. What I'm saying is that whatever happened in the brain has to work with something already there. That the trauma caused a person to speak more fluently than before is certainly possible - I do agree - but this is not the same as knowing words that one has never met before. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4443 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 10 of 14 13 March 2015 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | ||
You made a good point that the brain works with something that was already in memory. People who suffered from a traumatic event can come out with something positive and life-changing such as being able to understand a language learned before more quickly. For some people like Tony Cicoria being struck by lightening sparked his sudden interest in piano music. Excerpts from the article I found in Wikipedia on Tony Cicoria: Cicoria suffered burns to his face and left foot where the electrical charge had entered and exited his body. Several weeks after the accident Cicoria consulted a neurologist because he was having difficulties with his memory and was feeling sluggish. The neurological exam, including an EEG and an MRI, found nothing unusual. After a few weeks his energy returned and he went back to work. Two weeks later, his memory problems disappeared. His life had apparently returned to normal.[4] Then Cicoria, over a period of two or three days, became struck with an insatiable desire to listen to piano music. He acquired a piano and started to teach himself to play. His head was flooded with music that seemed to come from nowhere. Although, previous to his accident, he had no particular interest in music, within three months of being struck by lightning Cicoria spent nearly all his time playing and composing. The article never mentioned whether Cicoria actually took piano lessons as a child. It only mentioned the fact that after the accident (being struck by lightening) he has become passionate about music to the point that he started listening and teaching himself to play. We are making an assumption that he has never played even simple pieces like "Chopsticks", "Mary Had a Little Lamb" or "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" but in a short time started composing and performing his own pieces in public. 3 weeks ago I started working on the "Little Fugue" in G Minor (BWV578) by Bach originally written for organ on a piano. The music score I got has 4 pages. There was a lot of personal effort involved. I was basically working on the piece for at least 1h /day and got to the point of being able to play it from top to bottom from memory. In order to learn to do something proficiently, you need a lot of passion. Everyday that you work at it you are seeing more progress. Just working hard at something like an academic exercise would drive you crazy. Edited by shk00design on 13 March 2015 at 6:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4664 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 11 of 14 13 March 2015 at 11:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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So, next time someone posts about lacking passion for a language, the advice should be: go stand outside in a thunderstorm and hope you get lucky. Edited by tastyonions on 13 March 2015 at 11:45pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 12 of 14 14 March 2015 at 1:14pm | IP Logged | ||
As others have pointed out here, this event is very encouraging and represents an exciting development on the long road to proficiency. Maybe one can call this an aha moment when one begins to understand the language without having to pay close attention. In trying to analyze what is going on, there are a number of things to look at. One fundamental issue is this idea of "understanding every word". The assumption here is that every word is actually heard, recognized and decoded. Given that we are talking about an ephemeral radio program and not a recording that can be replayed many times, it's far from certain that every word was actually heard or understood. This applies also when we listen to programs in out native language. This is a very serious problem when one listens to newscasts when ordinary people are interviewed in the street. Many times, it's very difficult to make out what people are actually saying, What is certainly true is that one can get a good gist of what was said without having to understand every single word. This also applies to written texts where we can gloss over words we may not know and still enjoy the text. But with a written text one can always go over things not understand the first time around or look things up in the dictionary. Another issue is the nature of understanding. How do you know that you understand? Let's start at the basic level of decoding the grammar. A great exercise for this is to make transcriptions of recordings. This is not as easy as it looks because one has to figure out what was actually said, discard all the extra stuff that comes with the spoken language and then figure out the spelling according to the rules of grammar. A third issue is the decoding of collocations and idiomatic expressions that are widely used in the spoken language. If a person speaks of a "wild guess" or a "shot in the dark", there are two levels of meaning. A fourth issue is cultural, historical and geographical references. Things like newscasts, weather and traffic reports are often very difficult to understand because of all the references to local matters that may be unknown to someone listening thousands of kilometres away. When you put all these things together, the process of understanding every word of a radio program is actually very complex. In this regard, the idea of a relaxed state of mind being conducive to understanding is interesting because what it may actually mean is that one can more easily skip the material that is not understood. In a sense this is the very opposite of understanding every word which would enquire close attention and concentration. Being relaxed probably helps to make partial understanding more acceptable. Edited by s_allard on 14 March 2015 at 1:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| stifa Triglot Senior Member Norway lang-8.com/448715 Joined 4872 days ago 629 posts - 813 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, EnglishC2, German Studies: Japanese, Spanish | Message 13 of 14 14 March 2015 at 4:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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I experienced that with German surprisingly early, and could follow nearly everything
if there were no factors affecting the voices (e.g. ambient noise in movies and TV shows, etc.). However, I noticed later (when rewatching stuff 1/2 years down the line) that I did miss a lot of non-essential words like conjunctions (e.g. even if you don't know "sowohl A als auch B" you could get away with perfectly fine with "... A ... auch B"). Hence, even if you don't understand every single word, it doesn't mean that your understanding is very inaccurate... so I slightly disagree with s_allard. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Impossible_Alex Newbie Australia Joined 3589 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Studies: English* | Message 14 of 14 16 March 2015 at 1:20am | IP Logged | ||
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I just experienced this with french today. Was listening to music that, a few months ago
I understood 0% of, today I realised I can understand a lot of it without really trying *that* hard. Extremely satisfying ! Also first post :-) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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