Speaking, hearing, reading, writing, four decidedly different skills. I had a colleague who grew up in Montreal and could read and write French essentially perfectly (having studied it for eight years), could sort of make himself understood in speech and couldn’t understand it at all. I myself can speak it with not a terrible accent but many errors (of gender, verb inflection and the like) and not at all fluently, read it pretty well, but I really cannot write decent French at all.
I have a native German speaking colleague and the department used to have a secretary who emigrated as a young adult shortly after the war. The colleague once dictated a letter in German to the secretary and discovered that she was, to all intents and purposes, illiterate in German. She had come of age during the war and obviously not gotten much of an education.
True, but the point still stands: pronunciation doesn’t really help with fluency. German isn’t really all that hard of a language, especially if all you’re going for is intelligibility. I generally have my students at least moderately competent in a few weeks, and I’m going for a much higher standard of correctness. I think an afternoon or two of study would allow one to at least make themselves understood, even if their accent is terrible.
We host language students on a regular basis. I’m not sure if it is the peculair to the school we host for but the German, Swiss, Korean and Argentinian students we have had have conversational English but struggle with written English. Japenese students ace all the written tests but having a coversation is like pulling teeth.
Perhaps a BIG part is our accent (they seem to only learn with an American accent) but mostly it is that they can read ANYTHING but can not speak or understand spoken English.
Too much book work is not a good thing, at some point you need to speak to a native speaker or at least practise conversational language.
When I started a PhD program, I was required to show a reading knowledge of French and German. There were reading classes in both departments aimed at grad students, and a wide variety of available books. To this day, I can look at French or German texts and tell you what they say, but have no idea how the languages are pronounced.
I suspect there are a fair number of other people in the same situation.
Another issue - When reading, you don’t have to understand everything. A non-native English reader may not know what chartreuse is, but if they read “The leaves were chartreuse and the sky was blue” they can get enough of an idea to continue on.
Indeed. I recently found out that even though I believed I read (but not write, understand or speak) English fluently, actually, when I check out every single word in, say, an article, there are actually a significant number of words I don’t know the meaning of. Not only it doesn’t prevent me from understanding the text, but I don’t even notice it when I read. I found this puzzling when I realized it. It seems that the process of making sense of a sentence including an unknown word somehow became automatic instead of being conscious.
And as many mentioned, of course people’s language skill in writing, reading, speech, etc… can be vastly different. Being able to read doesn’t mean you know how to pronounce, how to form a sentence yourself, etc…
And the particular case mentioned in the OP is rather extreme since this person had zero exposure to the spoken language, so, even assuming he could manage to create a correct sentence, he wouldn’t know how to pronounce anything at all, nor would he be able to identify a spoken word. Try to read out loud an English text sounding every letter, say, the way the letter is pronounced when reciting the alphabet (or better, the way letters are pronounced in a foreign language). The result would be completely unrecognisable by a native English speaker.
Someone asked whether one could understand a language and not be able to speak it. Absolutely. As a child, I understood Occitan, since a lot of people spoke it around me, but I would have been totally unable to speak it. Except for some extremely common ones, I wouldn’t even have been able to remember the words, let alone to figure out how to put them in the correct order or conjugate the verbs. On the other hand, my pronunciation would probably have been correct, since I was accustomed to hear the language. Basically, my brain was equipped with an Occitan–>French dictionary, but the French —> Occitan part was missing.
Something related I also recently noticed. I’m now completely unable to even understand this language. I just forgot. Faced with a text written in Occitan, the best I can do now is guesswork, much more based on my knowledge of French and Spanish than an actual understanding of this language. But occasionally, a word I don’t understand suddenly makes sense when I pronounce it in my head. That’s probably the last remnant of my former understanding of the oral language.
