The example was about scenes, not entire stories. The percentage referred to content, not to individual words.s_allard wrote:Xmmm wrote:s_allard wrote:The part I find interesting is more the low end. How can one understand 50% or less of something?
I don't know, this must be a trick question.
Let's say a TV show consists of two scenes, each one minute long and that's it. I will give the English transcriptions for this show:
...
Okay, so I understood 100% of scene number 1, and basically 0% of scene 2. So I say "I understood 50% of this show".
You're saying 50% is wrong? We should use 0% instead? 0% is more accurate? Why?
I stand corrected. I have to admit that this sort of calculation makes sense. Right now I'm reading a collection of nine short stories by Marcel Aymé, called Derrière Chez Martin. Let's assume the stories are all the same length. I can read eight without the slightest difficulty. I don't have to look up the least word. All the idioms are crystal clear. The antiquated tense uses are not a problem. But when it comes to the ninth short story, I can't understand a single word. In this case I can say that I understood 89% of the book.
I have to say that I've never encountered a situation like this when it comes to understanding a target language but it may exist. It's hard for me to imagine perfectly understanding the first episode of a TV series and not a single word of the next
nine episodes of the 10-episode season.
What I have always experienced, and I don't think I'm unique, is more like the entire work is a mixture of known and unknown. Some pages or episodes contain more unknown words or meanings and others less.
You can be familiar with the words I bolded but still remain clueless:
A: I cannot believe that yet again that bastard has gotten involved and caused a fiasco. I said last time I was going to slit his gizzard and this time I mean it.
B: Word.
though you can comprehend about 30% of the content if you get the parts "I can't believe", "I said last time I was going to..." "and this time I mean it". if you know what happened, you can figure out that A is angry with the person, has previously claimed they would do something nasty and is still saying they're willing to do it. (ironically my description is harder to understand than the story itself)
you might even understand that person B agrees and after it comes up a few times figure out more or less what "word" means here.
also if there are L2 subs, native speakers of most European languages will understand fiasco. but orally they might not recognize the pronunciation, even if they've seen the word in writing but automatically read it as in L1.
Basically it's an estimate of how well you understand the scenes, paragraphs, individual sentences, with the help of the context and visual clues. Of course sometimes you'll understand the content despite not knowing some words, sometimes you'll know every word and still not understand 100%, and everything in between. A lot of native content also has multiple story lines, some of which you'll understand better than others. Generally it all evens out.