Sometimes people need to have simple truths told to them that aren't obvious at the time, and I'd like to make the first contribution I have made in a while as I transitioned from academia into the working world. This is obvious to advanced learners, but still.
For those who don't know, there is a saying about learning German - you don't know until you finish your sentence whether the person you're talking to will kiss you or slap you. That's because the verb (when using a modal verb, let's say) which defines the sentence often comes at the end of a sentence (depending on how many clauses the sentence is composed of). In your native language , you're used to information being encoded and ordered in the way that your language and the associated culture prioritises it, but in others it's different. In agglutinative languages, things like prepositions are attached to the words they're referring to, to give another example. THere are many ways which humans have developed to communicate, adn you ahve to remember that.
Why is this important? Well, because as the title says, when you learn a language you have to learn to listen in a different way to how your native language programmes you to infer information from a text. You will get the same information, but encoded in a different way and often in a different order. Dropping the bias of constantly comparing a language's way of encoding and communicating information to your own is a major milestone in becoming not just a good learner of a language in particular, but developing effective language learning habits that can apply to any language.
Again this obvious to more experienced people, but often it is good to distill a complicated topic into a simple, utilitarian concept that can be applied quickly without having to learn it as a prolonged, or at worst *difficult* lesson.
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