I’m not sure if this is the very best form for this so please excuse me if this is the wrong place. Anyway here’s the question, what’s easier for the average person to learn how to do? Learn to read a foreign language or learn to understand someone speaking it?(If anybody cares in my case I had absolutely no ability to understand spoken language after 6 semesters of the standard track. However after 2 semesters I could read reasonably well. Naturally it turns out that being able to read it was a little less useless as understanding the spoken version.)
Reading is easier because the flow of words and their separation is right there on the page. In listening comprehension, words blur into each other for the same reason that “a nice box” and “an ice box” would be next to indistinguishable for a speaker new to English. Picking up on those very subtle differences in sound based on context and tiny pauses is something that simply takes longer-term exposure and practice.
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This should have been posted to the General Questions forum, so that’s where I’m moving it.
David B, SDMB Great Debates Moderator
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That’s not true for printed Chinese, although my gut feeling is it’s true in general. However, there’s a wide range of differences among individuals, and I’m sure that some people have a much better “ear” than others.
Good point. I was definitely thinking alphabetically. Still, even then it seems to me that it would be easier to learn to read Chinese than to speak it–perhaps even possible to learn to read it without learning thing one about speaking it, due to all the ideograms.
All of this is just thinking out loud, though; I’d be interested in cites one way or the other. My general feeling is that there’s probably a minority of randomly-selected adults who could learn a language faster by ear than they would by eye, but the majority’s the other way. Childhood bilinguality might be another affair entirely, come to think of it.
Reading Chinese is much harder than reading alphabetic languages because there are so many more characters and character compounds one has to learn to make sense of it. Learning to hear is no cinch, either, because you have to distinguish the tones. Still, it’s easier than reading.
Because it is monotonic, Japanese is probably a better example of a language in which is easier to learn the spoken form than the written, especially if one excludes the most polite forms. With, IIRC, 1,985 characters in common use, plus character compounds and three alphabets, it’s pretty difficult to read.
For those that wonder the language I took in college was French. I was curious since at my university the “regular” track is the spoken version.(Supposedly done this way according to them because people general learn orally better. Spanish and French have reading version for those “rare few” that would learn better through reading.) BTW interesting read so far.
I’ve studied three foreign languages and reading is by far an easier skill to master for the vast majority of students.
Reading doesn’t involve the distractors of accent or pace of speech. Additionally, people generally write using less slang and in a more gramatically correct fashion than when they speak.
Y’know whut I mean?
Last, in reading you can take your time and understand or figure out each word at a time, or scan the rest of what you’re reading for clues as to what each word means in context. When listening to speech, you often are forced to ignore a large percentage of unfamiliar words in order to keep up with the general flow and gist of what is being said.
However, many people that grow up in bilingual households, do so listening to a foreign language without ever knowing about the written language or speaking it themselves.
You guys are correct about the Chinese. Reading is far more difficult.
Japanese is a lot easier to read than Chinese. Contrary to what you might expect, the 3 writing systems make a certain amount of sense. Hiragana and katakana are an alphabet style writing system that uses a limited number of characters, and can also be easily written in romanization. For me, at first, it was easier to read Japanese because spoken Japanese is really fast and they use different levels of speech. Beginning text book Japanese uses one form of speech and no Kanji characters.
I am a native English speaker and have studied French, German, Italian and Japanese to university level (the French and Italian). I found that for the purposes of satisfying an academic requirement, reading / other study was best. However, for the purposes of understanding the language well and being able to speak / understand better, speaking/listening was by far the better method*. The big mistake people make is trying to translate the words into words they have in their mother tongue. Until relatively recently, this was the method used to teach modern languages in UK schools, although it is changing.
I have found the best way is to just repeat what you hear other people say in the same situation (like children - just mimic, including the accent) and learn by experience. Supplement this with some formalised study and you won’t go far wrong. You will be able to communicate more effectively and quickly, even if you won’t do as well in your exams. I lived abroad for a long time and the people I met who spoke the best English** had never studied it.
- I have been fortunate to also live in France, Italy, Switzerland and Japan - it’s a must to be in a country if you want to learn that language.
** My test of being able to speak a foreign language well is to be able to effectively communicate complex thoughts and emotions in that language at 3am after several beers in a noisy disco. Ah, memories!
I have to disagree with China Guy on that one, IMHO Japanese is more complicated than Chinese. Phonetic characters make it easy at the intro level but get pretty obtruse quick. Even native speakers often can’t tell the pronounciation of a word they have never seen. Even if they know all the characters.
Japan is actually a good benchmark as far as reading/listening goes. Many senior high and university students here are capable of making sense out of say, Shakespeare, and yet are completely incapable of understanding a simple question like “Where is your school?”
That’s because a written text can be approached with no regard to time or linearity. You can chop it up and analyze it any way you want, which is not so eaily done with speech.
Well anyway, that’s what I think.
I’m going to chime in here with my opinion: it depends on the situation.
I live in Korea (I’m a whitey, from the US), and I find that learning Korean is much easier by listening to it
Keep in mind that the Korean alphabet is pretty easy, and consists of 40 (?) letters… easy to learn in about 2 or 3 hours of study…
But spoken Korean gets mashed together the same way that spoken English gets mashed together (IE: want to = wanna, same holds for Korean…)
If I learn a word in spoken Korean, I may NOT recognize it in its written form. For example: “A-mo-go-to-an-ee-ya” when written, but “amog’tanya” when spoken…
Speaking and reading/writing are WAY different skills!
Dad Kunilou’s parents were immigrants, and while they attempted to speak English at home, they also moved back to “the old country” (pre-Communist Hungrary) for a couple of years. Faced with that kind of total immersion, my father and his siblings picked up on the spoken language very quickly, although each of them eventually became very fluent in reading and writing.
However, when my sisters and I took our turn at foreign language, we all learned reading and writing much faster. In fact, only one of my sisters ever gained a good degree of verbal fluency.
When I took high school French, we started with the spoken curriculum. After a year, no one could understand anything except the patterns in the drills, and the new teacher went back to a more reading-based approach.
After taking a year and a half of Chinese I can honestly say reading is much easier for me than listening. Reading chinese is not all that difficult. Memorizing the sound and meaning of each character as you see it doesn’t take all the much skill. Reading has never been a real problem at all. Now writing is a different story. Writing requires you to do a whole lot more than just recognize. You have to remember all the the detail required to write the word like the stoke shapes and stroke order. So i would say that writing is more difficult than speaking, but reading is easier than listening.