seeing is ever so much easier than hearing

[kareina]

Even though I *know* that the very best way to learn a language is to try to speak it, all the time, I don't actually manage with that goal very often. In my normal life it is just too easy to use English. Most of our friends are not only fluent in English, but enjoy speaking it, so we do. I do hear Swedish conversations semi regularly, but only when they are talking amongst themselves--when people want to include me in the conversations they switch to English. The one place wherein I actually need Swedish is when we head to lord_kjar's parent's house--his Dad speaks less English than I do Swedish.

I really enjoy our visits out there. They live in a beautiful house on a large chunk of land, so there is no noise from neighbours. Their view is of a channel of ocean, with a mostly forested bit of land on the far side. A nice, relaxing setting, and the company is good. His family is rather close--he has three brothers and a sister, and even though three of them settled in the south of Sweden they maintain very regular contact, usually phone calls, and in person visits several times a year. This weekend one of the brothers, his wife, and their daughter was up visiting, so we went out, as did the other brother and his wife who live in the north. This meant we had 8 adults and one child in the house, which meant much laughter and conversation. While I can't follow most of the Swedish conversation, yet, I still rather enjoy listening to it, it is clear that they are a happy group, and it is good entertainment as I sit and stitch. Sometimes they translate for me, but usually I am happy to just listen. This morning I woke up from a dream wherein I realized that the steady hum of background conversation in the dream that I hadn't been understanding was people speaking in Swedish. I guess that is what happens when one spends a couple of days listening to it.

I now have a stack of books I have borrowed from the visiting brother's wife--the latter books in the Anne of Green Gables series, which will be interesting to read in Swedish, and a couple of books written about the same time period in Swedish which she tells me that if I like those I will probably liked these too. But I will save reading them till after I have read the ones wherein I already know the story.

I did pick up a copy of the first Pippi Longstocking book this weekend and read it--there were very few words in there I didn't know, and I can't blame my understanding of the story on remembering the English version--I read that book only once, in the 6th grade, borrowed from the school library, and had long since forgotten the details. My reading is really very much better than my ability to understand the spoken language. lord_kjar's dad tried to test my ability to understand what I head by reading random sentences to me from the book, but because I had already read those pages it was easy--I could just compare the sounds to my memory of the printed page... I wonder if people with no hearing problem lag as far behind in learning to understand the sound of a new language as compared to reading as I do.

Later today we have our normal Sunday folk music session, followed by the folk dance session. Always much fun, and another good chance to practice hearing Swedish.

Comments

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Hearing comprehension and reading comprehension are entirely different skills. While I imagine that physical hearing problems add another layer of difficulty (which I don't have), I've always had immensely more difficulty in learning to understand spoken language than learning to read a new language.

For me, it's as if there's a layer of brain processing of the sound that just doesn't work right for me. I listen to the incoming sounds and it starts out sounding like the teacher's voice in the old Peanuts tv specials. "Blah blah blah blah." And the crazy thing is that, in extreme cases, I can listen over and over to a word and not be able to tell you what phonemes it's composed of until I've seen the written version. If I'm following along reading the new language while I'm hearing it, then I'm a lot better at being able to assign the correct phoneme-interpretations to the sounds I'm hearing. And once I've picked up a repertoire of words and phrases and patterns, then I can fill in the assignment for new material coming in. The weird thing is that I don't only have this problem in languages I'm learning new -- under some circumstances I have it in English as well. (In fact, just the other day at work I experienced it.) It can happen that if I don't have a relatively rich context for a word, and if the word is being said even slightly differently from the exact phonetics I'm used to for it, not only do I not recognize what word is being said, but I couldn't even repeat for you what sounds I think I'm hearing.

It's the closest thing I've ever identified to a learning disability in myself. It caused me all manner of misunderstanding problems back in grade school (before I'd learned quite so many coping strategies -- like just keeping my mouth shut unless I was absolutely certain what the other person had said). I had my hearing tested several times because I was "having hearing problems" ... but it always came up perfect because I was actually having sound-processing problems. I once ran across a newspaper article on a "newly identified learning disability" that sounded exactly like what I experience. So who knows, maybe it's a real syndrome or something.

At any rate, this is all very digressive and hijacky from your original question. But the short answer is: yes, even people with no organic hearing problems can have (in some circumstances) a much harder time learning to understand spoken vs. written language.

[kareina.livejournal.com]

Ooo--my life would have been so much easier if I had learned the strategy of keeping my mouth shut unless I was absolutely certain what the other person had said.

I suspect that in addition to my hearing problem I also have a bit of a sound processing problem. What you describe sounds so normal to me. The first time I visited Australia my mom and step dad took me sightseeing, and Terry would say we were going to go to ****** next. I would say excuse me, and he would repeat the place name, and I would still not be able to even guess what sounds went into the word, and I would look at my mother, and she would repeat it, and suddenly I had an understanding of what sounds combined to make the word, because her accent was different from his. Now, the place names *were* odd (e.g. Nar Nar Goon), but I remember finding it odd that I could not identify a single sound in them when he said them, but I could when she did. Once I'd seen them in writing though it was easy to understand the way he said it.

[corvideye.livejournal.com]

Every language learner I know has an easier time with written over spoken language. On paper you know exactly what you're looking at, verbally it is much harder to parse.

[kareina.livejournal.com]

That is comforting to hear.