You know that point when you start to understand what’s being said to you, when you pass people on the street and you can understand brief snippets of conversation, or when you can randomly watch TV and easily pick up what subject two people are conversing about… that stage… you know what I mean. Here’s my question…
From that point, is it quite a smooth transition to full comprehension over several months, or do your listening/comprehension skills plateau at regular intervals? Lets just assume you’re surrounded by the language daily and keen to learn.
I’ve always imagined that once you start understanding, and reach the tipping point, it gets considerably easier and easier thereafter - but of course, I could be wrong.
My only experience is reaching close to reading comprehension in German and picking out/recognising most words when listening - but not being able to process quickly enough what they mean.
I’m really interested in what it’s like to go through the ‘I can sort of get the gist of what they’re saying’, into the ‘I can follow normal conversation pretty easily’ stage.
Any personal experience or insights is much appreciated, thanks.
(by the way, this is just comprehension, not speaking skills).
What AK84 said. It’s highly contextual and includes the context where you learnt the second language.
Personally, I learnt French at university and law school, so I’ve been told my spoken French is rather formal. I can argue a case in French in the courts, but following a conversation in a bar can be difficult, because the flow of conversation is much faster and more idiomatic.
For me, in a total immersion environment, it’s a series of breakthroughs and plateaus. I’d spend weeks or months stuck at a particular level of understanding, only progressing slowly and with much effort, and then wake up on day to find I was functioning at a higher level. It’s like something clicks, but I’m not necessarily aware of what it is or when it happens. It all just kind of comes together, in fits and starts.
I think this will vary a lot between individuals. Someone who learns best through a structured approach (emphasizing grammar and the like) is likely to have a very different process than someone who learns via conversation and intuits grammar from that.
I’m a mixture of the two styles sven mentions: I need a hand to figure out the basics of the grammar (formal grammar, please: I’m still angry that my French grammar teacher in Scotland did not call the French verbs by the same names the French use), then once the grammar clicks it’s a matter of learning more vocabulary. I believe my uncle JM, who spoke several languages, was the same. Immersion by itself wouldn’t work, as my hands work just fine.
“That moment when you understand” depends a lot on the subject being talked about: if you don’t have the vocabulary, you might be able to transcribe the conversation (with better or worse success at actually getting the spelling right, depending on the language itself and of your understanding of its rules) but you won’t understand it. I’ve called myself “native level in English” for over 20 years, but don’t talk to me about sewing cos I draw a blank - mind you, I’d draw an almost equally large blank in my native Spanish.
Spoken language can be pretty different from written language, similar for technical language.
You can be proficient in “Hey Bob, how’s it hanging?” and then turn on the weather report and have no idea what anyone’s saying. Or you might be able to read a comic book just fine, but couldn’t get through a single page of a literary work.
If you’re learning a language that’s German/Latin derived, it’s probably not as bad, since you’ll be able to fill in some of the words you don’t know by guessing that it’s the same as English word X. But if you’re learning Japanese, Chinese, Thai, etc. any word you don’t know is just “wumba wumba” and, if you’re in conversation, you’re going to have to try and remember to look it up later. If you’re reading something, and it’s a Chinese character, then it’s a few minutes just to look up each word on the page. A lot of unknown words on a page and it’s rough going.