DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6086 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian
| Message 1 of 14 29 November 2011 at 3:28pm | IP Logged |
How do you divide your language study between reading, writing, listening and speaking ? If I was to estimate my time spent it comes out roughly as follows,
Listening: 55%
Reading: 30%
Speaking : 10%
Writing 5%
Listening to my target languages consumes the majority of my study time, while writing in the language takes up very little. How do you divide your time ?
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Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6555 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish
| Message 2 of 14 29 November 2011 at 3:43pm | IP Logged |
I was just thinking about this myself, because I know it is a big problem for me. I tend to be a visual learner anyway, and in the past it was also often hard to get a lot of audio materials, so I've always tended to focus most heavily on reading. In the age of the internet, I should be able to change that, but I don't seem to. I was just thinking today, that I need to make a goal for myself to listen a certain minimum amount of time every day.
Right now I'm at about:
Reading 80%
Listening 12%
Writing 8%
Speaking 0%
I need to even out reading and listening for a while, I think. The writing I do is probably sufficient considering it takes me half an hour to write a short paragraph. Speaking can wait till I'm more comfortable, especially since there is no one around here to speak to anyway. Eventually, I will probably try to find a Skype partner, but I'll wait till I'm a little more proficient.
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Melisse Triglot Newbie Sweden Joined 4805 days ago 19 posts - 36 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishC1, French Studies: Dutch, Russian, Modern Hebrew
| Message 3 of 14 29 November 2011 at 4:32pm | IP Logged |
This is about where I am right now. I really need to improve my listening skills though so I should probably change this.
Reading: 50%
Speaking : 30%
Listening: 15%
Writing 5%
Edited by Melisse on 29 November 2011 at 4:33pm
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fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4800 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 4 of 14 29 November 2011 at 5:47pm | IP Logged |
If I put numbers on each category I'd just be making them up, so I won't bother. Since starting Spanish about 10 or 11 months ago I've been:
Mostly reading
A lot of listening to movies and other Spanish audio.
Just a very little bit of writing
Almost no speaking except for reading aloud, which I don't count as spontaneous speech production.
--gary
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Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5338 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese
| Message 5 of 14 29 November 2011 at 7:54pm | IP Logged |
I like the written word more the spoken one.
Reading 40%
Writing 30%
Listening 20%
Speaking 10% (not counting reading words aloud, only complete sentences and dialogues, if
I can pull it off)
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Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6532 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 6 of 14 30 November 2011 at 2:27am | IP Logged |
depends on the language...
Finnish - right now I'm in Finland and it's 55% listening, 25% reading, 20% speaking. other languages' ratio is for when I'm at home
Portuguese - 50% reading (including SRS - for the others, too), 35% listening, 15% writing
Italian - 55% listening, 35% reading, 10% writing
Spanish - 55% reading, 40% listening, 5% writing
Romanian - 90% listening, 10% reading
Indonesian - 60% writing, 40% reading (I currenly only read and write emails, not fully in Indonesian either)
I mostly study the "natural" way so this just reflects my use of the languages.
Edited by Serpent on 30 November 2011 at 2:28am
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gabe76 Triglot Newbie Hungary Joined 4678 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, German, English Studies: Spanish
| Message 7 of 14 30 November 2011 at 12:19pm | IP Logged |
I learn mostly by reading but i can practice speaking and listening with audio courses like pimsleur or linguaphone. They helped me a lot.
Reading 50%
Writing 10%
Listening 20%
Speaking 20%
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Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4817 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian
| Message 8 of 14 30 November 2011 at 3:22pm | IP Logged |
My ideal ratios:
Speaking: 30%
Listening: 30% ... a balanced conversation and all
Reading: 20%
Writing: 20%
like I said: ideal world. I want to speak with ease, so I am starting to speak at every chance I get, and it has helped me TREMENDOUSLY. On Sunday I Skyped with 3 separate Italians for a total of probably 6 hours. After just that day, I noticed a significant improvement in my ability to produce the language on the fly.
Part of it is that I've decided not to care too much about making mistakes for the moment, until I get proficient enough... I'll definitely fix it later, now I just want to be able to communicate freely.
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