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Reading TL May Delay Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 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 65 of 73 23 January 2012 at 9:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Depends on how much it changes...
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| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5010 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 66 of 73 23 January 2012 at 9:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
I couldn't have said it better. Of course you need to learn the pronunciation first and noone here said otherwise. But I don't think you need to avoid reading in general, quite the opposite. And I still don't agree that reading is harmful because of being a slow process and being easier because of it. In my post long ago (I don't have access to the internet that often this week) I was speaking about reading native materials mostly or things like graded readers and articles and such. These things will make you get to a better speed up to the native one as you progress. Nearly noone enjoys to spend half an hour with five lines of text. It reminds me of one teacher I used to have. She forced us to do this in her classes. We were reading Harry Potter and we never got past first few pages. And she was doing the same with films (she stopped it every half a minute for a new word, made us search it in a dictionary, and spoke about it for five minutes before continuing the film) so you can see it is perfectly possible to butcher any listening material the same way. In such case it will be very harmful. You won't learn native speed, understanding larger chunks of the language and it will be demotivating which is the worst thing in my opinion. But it is very different from using slow speech at the beginning of a course, for example Assimil. But in general, I agree with Jeffers and others that you need to progress from easier to more difficult. From slower to faster and to native. Sorry if my post is a bit less coherent than usual, it is mostly caused by reading the thread in small chunks all over the day. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6126 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 67 of 73 23 January 2012 at 9:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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So the argument is that reading delays fluency, okay, maybe? I think I know how to study reading and make progress, but I still don't think I have a a clear idea what the alternative is. What is the method that does not involve reading? Would this involve no use of dictionaries or grammar books either? Or do you listen and then look up words in a dictionary? How do you figure out what people are talking about?
Would this be target language and English audio combined, like Michel Thomas? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 68 of 73 24 January 2012 at 1:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
Valid point. And one reason to separate two kinds of activities: intensive and extensive. When I study a short snippet of a text intensively I try to get a bilingual version (if necesary using Google translate), I mostly copy it by hand, look up unknown words (even when I have a translation if it leaves any kind of doubts) and check endings etc. with my tables. It takes a lot of time, but even in my intermediary languages I learn a lot about the language. In between I read extensively, and then I don't care if there are unknown words if the general meaning is clear - and I hardly take notes because it would slow me down. Both activities are necessary (although the intensive studies tend to take most of the time with weak new languages, while the extensive activities dominate later on - and the latter can also serve as relaxation in between the hard intensive study sessions). The same distinction is valid for active activities - sometimes you should try to speak/write correctly, but in between you should have periods where you aim for fluency. Edited by Iversen on 24 January 2012 at 1:52pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sandman Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5409 days ago 168 posts - 389 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 69 of 73 04 February 2012 at 5:47am | IP Logged | |||||
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This thread has seemingly turned into one involving reading vs. listening to one more or less based on pronunciation, which is important, but not the only important thing.
Clearly, listening is important for pronunciation, as without it we wouldn't have very much to "mimic" and without any listening I would guess that all our accents would be quite amusing when it came to interacting with the locals. The necessity of listening in order to know how correct speech sounds hardly negates the value of reading however. And in some ways, and in my experience both Japanese and Spanish in particular (which both follow fairly regular reading to pronunciation rules), reading itself can help with pronunciation quite a bit. Listening to things you aren't quite sure about, without knowing how a word is spelled (particularly with languages where the spelling is a good indicator of the pronunciation) can at times "fossilize" mistakes (apologizes to the earlier poster that hates the term, with whom I agree to a much slighter degree) just as easily as an over-reliance on reading might. Even in English, I'm sure we've all had plenty of experiences where we've been singing completely the wrong lyrics (that sounded right to our ear) to a song we've heard a thousand times over ... yet a single glance at the correct lyrics clears up everything instantly. Our ears can completely deceive us, even when dealing with our own native tongue. Japanese is full of words, that to the ear, a westerner would very easily confuse with other words if not acutely aware of the spelling (a very slightly elongated pronunciation of a vowel, a very slight holding of a consonant, the nearly inaudible pronunciation of a vowel made at full speed but a sound made nonetheless, etc). When aware of the spelling differences, although our ears will still try to trick us, it gives more information in knowing WHAT TO LISTEN TO. Knowledge of spelling and reading will help highlight the hundreds of subtle pronunciation issues that might otherwise go unnoticed. One of the funnier parts of the Japanese Pimsleur series has a westerner getting into a cab needing to go quickly to a hospital, only to find themselves dropped off at a beauty parlor. A very specific listening exercise of that situation could overcome this problem, but knowing how to read Japanese in general immediately highlights the hundreds of similar issues that might pop up without going over them individually. Listening and reading can both help with pronunciation, particularly when they are used together intelligently. When it comes to the passive side of language learning, I'll still stand toward my bias toward reading. Reading has helped my listening more than listening has helped my reading. Japanese and Spanish aren't massively difficult pronunciation-wise for an English speaker, so perhaps getting away with more reading might be easier for some languages than those that are notoriously more difficult to pronounce. I haven't studied Mandarin or Korean, which I've heard are far harder to pronounce and "hear". I don't find it unthinkable that the appropriate mix of reading vs. listening might differ depending on the language. Edited by Sandman on 04 February 2012 at 6:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4702 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 70 of 73 04 February 2012 at 6:46am | IP Logged | |||||
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I would be surprised if listening enables you to read Kanji, Sandman. But I'd also scratch my head if reading actually helped you to get better at listening comprehension.
Written Japanese is, even when written in Kana, contrary to popular belief, not even close to how it's actually being pronunced. Reading Japanese helps listening/speaking not one bit, and listening has no effect on literacy. These are completely different subjects and have to be treated seperately for maximum effect. Don't get the wrong idea here - I think it's a healthy mix of everything, and a focus on your weakest skill at each given time that reinforces other areas most. If you can't *hear* a sound, you won't be able to write it. If you don't know the correct reading of a Kanji, you won't be able to use the *word* while speaking. And while it may theoretically be possible to learn it completely with reading only, how long would you want to wait until you can practice verbal output? IMHO, reading doesn't _hinder_ progress. But a focus on reading does. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 71 of 73 04 February 2012 at 5:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
Uun, it actually does help, because either activity helps you to solidify sentence patterns, collocations and idioms. Because these are accessed via our heuristic knowledge system, the most important factor in learning them is having repeated encounters in comparable contexts. It is not only possible, but helpful to transer knowledge you learnt aurally to a visual context and vice versa, because when you're literate and study a language in its written and spoken form, learning a word one way will create an empty space in its other representation that you only have to fill, and then you can access that word via both pathways, which makes it stronger linked into your overall knowledge of the language and so more accessible. And, more importantly, you can profit from the advantages both media offer. I actually made the experience that I could correctly guess at the reading of kanji words because I knew from the context which word was most likely to be there, and I often can understand spoken words I first studied from a written source. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sandman Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5409 days ago 168 posts - 389 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 72 of 73 18 February 2012 at 9:38am | IP Logged | |||||
Honestly, I'm not sure what your point is. It almost seems like a borderline troll post, no offense really, but it seems overly nihilistic. You say that listening does not help reading, as well as stating that reading does not help listening. They're both passive skills with tons of overlap in Japanese, so that doesn't even pass the smell test. Japanese spelling is amazingly regular. I don't know why you'd say otherwise. One still needs to hear each word a few times to be confident in its pronunciation, like you would with any language, but it's likely one of the most direct reading to pronunciation languages there is. Japanese people think it's more direct than it really is of course, but it's still absurdly straightforward once you figure out the usual ways they "mispronounce" their own language. I have a Japanese girlfriend, and many words or phrases I pronounce without ever having heard it before and she immediately knows what I'm saying. I hear words in dramas or anime that I've just learned for the first time from a written source earlier the same day. Frankly, that's almost the only way I ever hear a Japanese word that I haven't noticed before. I agree that it's very difficult to go from listening to reading, much harder than with other languages due to the kanji ... until you have enough experience with kanji that you already know and can recognize the main pronunciations of each. I would never claim going from listening to reading is an efficient transition to make, particularly with character based languages, but it still can be useful with often repeated phrases. From reading to listening, however, is a completely different story and I'm frankly a bit baffled that you would disagree. I find that probably the easiest transition to make, whether it be Spanish or Japanese or any other language I would guess. Any time I've been comfortable quickly reading and comprehending a word or phrase solely from readings, it has always been fairly trivial for me to recognize it in its oral form. Edited by Sandman on 18 February 2012 at 9:55am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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