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Can you learn a language only by reading? | ||
Tags: Reading | Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Maecenas23 Triglot Newbie Ukraine Joined 4397 days ago 21 posts - 56 votes  Speaks: Ukrainian*, Russian, English Studies: German | Message 1 of 25 17 February 2013 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Without studying grammar,without communication but only by reading and listening? Is it possible to achieve native fluency that way and start speaking?
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5318 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 25 18 February 2013 at 12:02am | IP Logged | ||
I bet that you could, especially if you're prepared to listen to 10 million words of comprehensible speech per year for multiple years, and read a million or so words per year for a decade. At least that's what literate, academically-successful native speakers need to do. (The kids who are at the bottom of the class tend to hear about 3 million words per year and read as few as 8,000.) But surely it takes a lot of input to sort out ce, cet, cette, ce …-là, ce …-ci, celui, ceux, celle, celles and all the rest of those lovely French words. At some point, you're probably better off looking them up in a grammar book, which takes all of 5 minutes. Similarly, completely avoiding communication seems to cause some people to hit a wall. This happens all the time to kids in bilingual households—they often wind up with partial skills in the language that they hear every day but never speak. So I would say that if you want to learn a language efficiently, you could devote up to, say, 75% of your time to reading and listening, and spend the rest of your time chatting with people and occasionally looking stuff up. That would allow you to become a pretty competent adult after 1,000 hours of work or so, assuming you're an English speaker learning a major European language. 12 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6689 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 3 of 25 18 February 2013 at 1:17am | IP Logged | ||
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It might be possible but it's not the most efficient way, as emk has already pointed out.
Furthermore, I think the beginning would be particularly hard, as you wouldn't understand a lot of what you're reading or listening to (I assume you didn't mean using Assimil-like courses for your reading/listening practice), and very simple materials like children books/movies might be quite hard to get and, most importantly, boring. Plus, it wouldn't be all that easy to all of the sudden start talking, even when you already have native-like understanding. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zerrubabbel Senior Member United States Joined 4386 days ago 232 posts - 287 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 4 of 25 18 February 2013 at 2:12am | IP Logged | ||
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depends on your expectation of "learned" ... because in such an instance, the only effective practice you're getting is
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| tanya b Senior Member United States Joined 4564 days ago 159 posts - 518 votes Speaks: Russian | Message 5 of 25 18 February 2013 at 2:23am | IP Logged | ||
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You can learn a foreign language, to some extent, simply through reading, provided that you read the material out loud. Muscle memory is an essential component of language learning and reading out loud will facilitate correct pronounciation.
It's highly unlikely that someone can learn a foreign language only with their eyes and ears and not their throat and mouth, and expect to suddenly hit the ground running with good pronounciation at some magic moment in the future. I repeated out loud the dialogues ad nauseum in Russian and Armenian textbooks and found it very helpful, based on the observations of others who said they were impressed with my pronounciation. I repeated the dialogues so much they became part of my vocabulary and sometimes I find myself repeating them at the wrong time like a broken robot. You asked about learning a language without communication--why not devise your own method of one-way communication, reading out loud to improve muscle memory, listening to songs in the TL and watching TV talk shows where they tend to speak more slowly as way of reaching your goal. Edited by tanya b on 18 February 2013 at 2:26am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6489 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 6 of 25 18 February 2013 at 10:00am | IP Logged | ||
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My preferred and most efficient learning methods are all based on the written language, so I know that you can get far - but you can't get all the way. Just as you can't learn to read just by listening to speech (millions of analphabets testify to that!) you can't learn the sound of a language just by reading phonetical renderings of a language. What you can do is to push your writing-based knowledge so far that a relatively small investment in listening and speaking can give a very fast development in those areas.
There is however one more aspect of this. Some people (including a number of of misguided linguists) claim that writing isn't language, only speech is. That's nonsense, but it is a fact that speech is more fundamental than writing - we learn it earlier, and even when we read we hear speech in our heads. So having to learn a language totally without hearing it is against nature - and I guess that even those who study extinct languages develop some kind of phonic representation of the weird cuneiform of ideogrammatic signs in order to be able to read the stuff. But this doesn't mean that writing can't be an efficient way of accumulating vocabulary and grammar, it just says that the process can't be based on writing alone. For me there is one state of consciousness which is almost a necessity if I want to activate a language. I think of it as 'the buzz' (no Danish name, sorry). This state occurs when you get so much input that your head starts spinning. If you accept this chaotic state you can try to turn it in the direction of organized thinking, which is just one step ahead of speaking. I primarily achieve this with a combination of extensive reading and listening to comprehensible sources. The snag is that without a lot of preparation those sources wouldn't be comprehensible at all - and at least for me, intensive work primarily with written sources is my principal tool to make them comprehensible. On the other hand, writing without 'the buzz' is possible because the speed is so much lower - actually so much lower that you have time to look things up and reread the things you already have written. But even writing isn't enough to activate your thinking and your speech - it's a valuable part of the preparations, but you need to hear a language not only to know how it sounds, but also to get an idea about the speed you need to achieve. Edited by Iversen on 18 February 2013 at 10:41am 14 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6383 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 7 of 25 18 February 2013 at 2:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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Why is everyone so hooked on native fluency?
Also, the title is misleading. It's possible to reach fluency by listening and reading. It's not possible by only reading. It's possible to become a fluent, illiterate speaker by listening. (in some circumstances) In general, that's how I prefer to learn languages. But it's silly to deliberately avoid the tools that can help, such as translations, subtitles, dictionaries and SRS. still, is it possible to learn without much formal study? - absolutely. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5318 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 25 18 February 2013 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | ||
Heh. Sometimes, it seems like everybody wants to "learn like a child" and speak like a native. But almost nobody is willing to pay the price that natives pay: years of immersion, decades of school, and a lifetime of reading. Oh, and more essays and writing assignments than you can count. Seriously, who has the time? 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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