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Adult Learning Disability? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| TedGrey Newbie Norway Joined 4122 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 10 07 September 2013 at 11:12pm | IP Logged |
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Hey everyone,
I joined this site to ask a specific question. It's something that has been bothering me for awhile now. I am an American living in Norway. My wife is Norwegian and I have been here for just over 2 years. For that entire time I have been taking Norwegian language classes and can now read, write and speak some Norwegian. However, I can't for the life of my understand much of anything. In class, I seem to be the one that does much of the talking, yet at the same time, the other students seem to understand what the teacher is saying while I have to kinda look around or ask the person next to me what the teacher just said. Just about everyone I speak to says that my problem should be the other way around. I should be able to comprehend much more than I can speak. I had this same issue while studying Spanish in high school and German in university. I get most of the grammar rules and can figure out what I'm reading and speak some, but rarely get what any native speaker is saying to me. Here's the important part though. Growing up, I needed some special help in school because I couldn't say certain words that had Rs and Ls in them, like "pure", "cure" and "blue". Also, then as well as now, if someone says something to me, and I am doing something else, I don't catch some of what they say. I have to be looking and focused on the person who is speaking to me to get 100% of what they are saying, and even then, there seems to be some sort of "slight delay" as my brain processes what they are saying. I get the sense that my delay is much greater than others. The last thing I would say that I can not speak too quickly, if I do, I almost always end up stuttering a little or mispronouncing words that I should know as well as even mangling the grammatical structure of my sentence. I must take my time and "measure my words". While I come across as someone that does not have a learning disability, and probably sound quite "normal" to 99% of the population, I am wondering if I do have a learning disability? What do some of you say? Should I get tested somehow? Have I somehow subconsciously created "coping" strategies to get by in life? What would I get tested for? Thanks for the advice. Edited by Fasulye on 08 September 2013 at 7:30am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6381 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 10 08 September 2013 at 3:10am | IP Logged |
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I wouldn't agree that understanding is easier than speaking. Speaking tends to be easier in the beginning
because you can regurgitate memorized phrases. Two years can be a short or long time, depending on what you do day-to-day. Do you listen to a lot of Norwegian? Do you interact with peope in English? How are you trying to improve your listening skills? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| TedGrey Newbie Norway Joined 4122 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* | Message 3 of 10 08 September 2013 at 11:46am | IP Logged |
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Perhaps I should clarify something if it isn't clear. When I said that I need to be focused 100% on what the person is
saying, I was referring to English, my native language, not Norwegian. Edited by TedGrey on 08 September 2013 at 11:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4911 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 4 of 10 08 September 2013 at 1:55pm | IP Logged |
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Testing can be helpful to understand why you have trouble, but it wont necessarily help you overcome the problem itself. I have been tested for a learning difficulty, and I have a similar listening prolem as you: even in my own language I often initially hear "blah blah blah", and it takes me a few seconds of processing time before I fully put together what was just said to me.
As is so often the case, there is no special training for people with a learning difficulty. What will help you will help anyone: practice listening. Here's what I do: I have books with audio, and podcasts/news with transcripts. I prefer to listen to the audio through several times first, just to practice pure listening. At this point I'm working on my ability to distinguish sounds, and pick out the gist. Then I listen while reading, but without stopping to look up unknown words. Then I read it without the audio, and look up a few words (but not necessarily every unknown word). There's no fixed pattern, I just do whatever I feel like, except that I always listen first. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5768 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 5 of 10 08 September 2013 at 4:43pm | IP Logged |
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What Jeffers said. I have not been tested, but I also experience a lot of lag in my auditory processing - so much that I've often already said 'huh?' and the other person sets on to repeat, when I finally comprehend the initial statement. It's actually rather comical.
I used to have horrible auditory short term memory, I could remember about three bits of information in an instruction without writing it down. (When it's known information I put it into a kind of mental picture and can make the bits bigger.) And when people talk to me and I wasn't expecting they might talk to me, I often understand garbled nonsense. And I can't filter out outside noise in the same way other people seem able to. So I help myself by frequently looking at people's mouths when they talk - it somehow helps to make my processing faster and more accurate, maybe because my mind doesn't wander as much. In my case, the local library had just gotten audiobooks in English when I moved to a different city eight years ago. I thought the cover of Artemis Fowl looked really cool, and borrowed it. And I listened to it, five, six times, mostly while doing chores, every time understanding a bit more of the story. Then I got the next one. (I just liked the voice and accent of the narrator a lot.) And then, at some point, I realized I could not only read English but also understood spoken English much more easily. And my auditory short term memory, or the way I use it, has somehow become a bit better. Still, my main difficulty seems to lie in my attention span and focus. When I get massive input and repetition, my brain sighs and learns to deal with it. So I do a lot of listening and listening related tasks. Apart from what Jeffers mentioned, I also *Listen for key words That is useful for dealing with things like news reports or podcasts, when you have a headline and a transcript. So, you use the headline or skim the transcript, and then listen to the audio trying to figure out what is said regarding the key word. This can be rather frustrating, but when you follow international news in a known language and follow it up with international news in the learning language, and do this several times a week, you learn to map unknown words to known information. *Repeat a lot Repetition can be a wonderful tool, when it's something you really enjoy listening to, or really want to understand every single word. *Transcribe Transcribing audio by yourself and then checking it with a real transcript can do wonders. It also can be really frustrating, especially the first couple of times. If you try this, make sure to start with audio that sounds clear to you and where you can catch some words, and really short snippets, maybe a minute or two long. Maybe start with recordings from your textbook. Maybe the very first lesson. Rewind until you think you can't understand anything else. And make sure to pay attention to every bit of improvement, not to what other people at the same level seem to be able to do. Edited by Bao on 10 September 2013 at 10:28pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| TedGrey Newbie Norway Joined 4122 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 10 10 September 2013 at 9:32pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the replies. I appreciate the advice. I wonder how easy it is to get tested here in Norway as the main
language is not English? I'll look into it and see what I find. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6127 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 7 of 10 11 September 2013 at 2:49am | IP Logged |
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In classes, the most important thing, for me at least, is hearing those page #'s. If you make out 'blah blah blah
page 135 blah blah' -- then at least you can get to the page in the book without sneaking a peak at what page everyone else is on. For me, I've been in Japanese classes so long, I see people come and go. Some who are really good, some who are more baffled than me. They show up, and then they leave. Me and a few others have been doing this for years, and we've watched each other over a longer period of time. I just accept that some people find different aspects of this easy or difficult. It's frustrating to compare yourself to others. Really I am sure my listening has improved, but it always lags my reading. There's no comparison. Can you watch Norwegian TV with Norwegian subtitles? For me, Japanese TV with Japanese subtitles is hugely easier to understand. I'm not sure how much this helps with improving listening comprehension, but at least it gives me something to do with listening that's not too frustrating. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5562 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 8 of 10 11 September 2013 at 1:45pm | IP Logged |
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Your whole post sounded very familiar to me (well, I'm not really the one who does all the
talking, but that aside). We should all get together and form a club for the hard of comprehending. Just in case it wsn't already mentioned, when transcribing, practice to try to listen and remember as much of whole phrases as possible before writing it down, rather than splitting it into easier chunks. I have recently got interested in reading about ADD, as apparently there seems to be a link to poor auditive memory. Are you a bit disorganised about stuff generally? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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