reineke wrote:I don't remember ever hearing it the other way around for alphabet- based languages: ie I can understand spoken Spanish but I can't read it.
I learned what little Spanish I have almost entirely by ear. When I read Spanish, I actually read it faster if I read it "out loud." One of my Spanish-speaking colleagues finds this hilarious, and I admit it's pretty odd.
But then again, my study of Spanish was based almost entirely on native movies and TV from the very beginning. It was a really interesting experience to focus so much on listening so early in the process. It's strange to have listening as my strongest skill. But I think I like it.
Listening certainly sticks longer than, say, rote memorization of grammar. As a mentioned in another thread, I spent about 100 hours on Spanish and I've barely touched it in a year, and if I play the dialog tracks from the episodes I worked intensively with, I can still understand them at 80% (as opposed to maybe 90% when I studied them actively).
So count me in as another vote for TV and other forms of hard-core listening work at some point in the learning process.