(Note: This was originally written for r/LearnJapanese, but I believe the references to things specifically related to Japanese are incidental, and that the overall theory that I'm communicating applies to every learner of a foreign language.)
In a video that I'm having trouble finding, MattVSJapan mentioned that reading a lot can be very effective at improving one's listening comprehension, but that it's a bad way of doing so. His argument was as follows: When you read a lot, you learn a lot of sentence patterns. And then when you listen, you can make up for the gaps in your listening ability by making educated guesses about what's being said based on what would make sense in the given situation. Thus you should listen to get better at listening, rather than read to get better at understanding speech.
I believe that an elaborated version of this concept might lie at the foundation of why foreign speakers tend to end up with foreign accents, while native speakers seamlessly go from butchering the language as a small child to producing all the sound patterns properly as an adult. Basically, my hypothesis is this: How tuned your ears must be to acquire the language through listening is much higher than how tuned they must be to participate in conversations even including rapid speech about complex topics, and thus your speech will sound much more natural if you learn first and foremost through listening and then participate in such conversations, than if you acquire a large chunk of the language through reading and then participate. Natives acquire certain aspects of the sound structure not because they need to know them once they're an adult, but rather because they needed to know them in order to make it through the early stages of language acquisition as a child. Or, to be more precise, in many cases they would need such skills as an adult, since other natives would likely criticize them if their speech didn't sound natural, but instead of waking up one day and realizing they should probably watching Dogen's course on pitch accent, they would have already acquired the system naturally. There's a difference between the pressures that lead to acquisition during the early stages and the point of the acquisition itself once you're at a high level.
When you listen to a language for the first time, you can't even tell where one word ends and the other begins, but if you memorize thousands of words in writing then you essentially 'cheat'. You learn how to take sentences and break them down into their constituent words without having to figure it out yourself through listening. To restate the general hypothesis that I italicized in the previous paragraph in terms of this specific example, I should state that it seems likely that there's a lot of nuance that one's ear must be tuned to in order to initially take spoken sentences and chunk them into individual words, which one would no longer be necessary once one knows enough words and sentence patterns to know what words are being said in what order based less on raw listening prowess and more on non-listening-based knowledge of vocabulary and sentence patterns. Natives would necessarily acquire this nuance since they learn through listening to their parents and other people around them, rather than through memorizing lists and words and reading widely before speaking properly, and this nuanced phonetic awareness then subconsciously informs their pronunciation, pitch accent, and so on; on the other hand, the average foreign learner doesn't have to go through this initial process of leveraging only raw listening ability to identify the constituent parts of sentences (since vocabulary lists and other such things perform that function for them), and as a result they end up with a less nuanced ear for the sounds. Our mouth naturally follow our ears, and thus if our ears cheat then our pronunciation doesn't develop properly.
To make this analysis more concrete, consider a technique that I've been using for quite a while: While most learners memorize long lists of words, learn a model for the grammar of the language, and do a lot of reading before they're able to speak very well, I've done most of my acquisition through just listening. When I want to learn new words, I listen to audio (e.g., a YouTube video where a Japanese person is talking about something), and then I try to understand; if a word comes up that I don't know, I look it up with an app on my phone and then later add it to my SRS. It might seem roundabout to look for words in the wild, especially since I might listen to a video and not make out any new words. Surely I could just grab a frequency list and memorize a lot of words, which I could then solidify through speaking and listening. But there's good reason for what I do. The simple fact is that with this method I won't be able to learn any new word that I can't hear well enough in rapid speech to then look up. This means that it's unlikely that I'll learn any word that my ears aren't at least decently turned to, because most words like that will be hard to look up. It results in a native-like hurdle for learning about the existence of a word and associating it to a meaning: Like a small child growing up immersed in the language, you can learn words only if you can hear them properly. Although my pronunciation, pitch accent, and so on certainly have plenty of issues that I need to smooth out, without any explicit training this method has smoothly and naturally resulted in speech that's much more natural than that of the average foreigner.
I originally started thinking about this when I asked myself the question: Why do natives acquire pitch accent without trying, whereas for foreigners it often goes over their head unless they look into it specifically? Certainly you don't need a solid ear for pitch accent to understand native speech, so why do natives learn it so seamlessly? While this is an experimental thought, I wondered whether what's going on is that early in the native acquisition process pitch accent helps the learner with things like taking sequences of phonemes and chunking them into individual words, and therefore most foreigners wouldn't be subconsciously incentivized to acquire a proper ear for pitch accent simply because they 'cheat' in this regard by having other people compile lists of words for them that they can then memorize. Natives acquire by necessity; foreigners circumvent this and thus end up with good listening comprehension despite having not developed an ear for pitch accent.
In light of this theory, I would recommend acquiring the fundamentals of Japanese through a method called repetitive listening. This is where you look for content that's interesting to you, and then listen to it over and over until you master it. For example, let's say you find a YouTube video that's about 10 minutes long where a Japanese person is telling a story. You listen to it once and confirm that you're interested in understanding it. You could then put it on an mp3 player, and listen to it a few times every day while taking a walk. Whenever a word comes up where you don't know the meaning but you can make out the sound structure well enough to look it up, then you can look it up with an app like Imiwa, later transferring your search history in Imiwa to an SRS like Anki. If you do this kind of thing for a long time, it will mean that you'll acquire thousands of new words not only in context but also in a way where you weren't able to 'cheat'; you acquired them only because your ears were ready for them, and no sooner. This will ensure that you'll develop listening comprehension in a way that's natural rather than using a volatile shortcut that harms your speech, and then once you get to a decent level you can safely and effectively move onto incorporating a lot of reading.
[link] [comments]
from Cześć | Languagelearning https://ift.tt/2AlZdF8
via Learn Online English Speaking
Comments
Post a Comment