Dragon27 wrote:But what makes you think it's a misconception? Your personal experience?
I think it's a misconception because I have a better explanation for the phenomenon that makes sense given everything I already know and it is confirmed by my own experience.
Read my story in response to Serpent. It should give you a good idea of my position.
Dragon27 wrote:I've seen examples of people (not on this forum) that have read MASSIVE amounts of literature in English language, but still weren't able to comprehend aurally rather simple English speech (could only understand some intermediate learner's audio material),
Yep, I used to be one of them.
Dragon27 wrote:which I had no problem with (having listened to a lot of audio material and gotten used to normal fluent English speech).
Yes, I'm not surprised. I certainly agree that listening is good to develop your pronunciation and such. And I think you should not read massively before you have a decent pronunciation.
My disagreement is about what cause what. In my opinion and for all the reasons I expressed in the previous posts, I think that most of the so called "listening problems" can be better explained once you realize they are more likely "comprehension problems", and/or "pronunciation problems" if you haven't worked on it from the beginning.
Dragon27 wrote:You may argue that they didn't learn proper pronunciation first, or haven't achieved "real" understanding (didn't read properly). It's all anecdata anyway.
Sure, we can't know for sure. I don't know them, maybe you can ask them. But that's likely what happened, I think. And it matches perfectly my own story.
Dragon27 wrote:I don't think one could achieve good enough pronunciation after a few hours to go reading books with impunity.
So, I said a few hours because I didn't count. I don't know how many exactly. I'm sure it varies from language to language. So let's say 100 hours. Can we agree on that?
The exact number is not important. What is important, I think, is that once you pronunciation is good, you can reduce your amount of listening drastically and spend that time reading instead where the real learning happened.
Dragon27 wrote:When one has a good "sound model" of the language in their head one could go do that, of course.
Ah, finally we agree on something.
Dragon27 wrote:Still, to be able to understand not very well articulated speech just reading isn't enough.
How is it different from your first language? You have never met someone with a slurry speech that forces you to give all your attention. After a while we just get used to it.
So, it works the same with another language. If your comprehension is good enough you will be able to do the same. It will require some concentration for a little while and you will get used to it.
But you can't (and don't have to) prepare for every possible scenario.
Dragon27 wrote:Of course. Or you need to be shown where those boundaries are and get used to them.
Not really. Those boundaries are purely artificial they don't exist, your brain doesn't need them. It's just a feeling you have.
Think about the word "bathroom" if tomorrow everyone decides to write and say "bath room" instead, do you think it will make any difference? As long as everyone agrees, it will not.
Think about the word "une salle de bain" (in French), this is also one word, yet we write it with spaces. Do you think it's different from "bathroom"? It is not.
Think about language like mandarin written with no spaces, yet you can read them just fine if you understand the language.
Or think about Greenlandic, with words corresponding to what we call in English phrases or short sentences.
If the concept of a word is already fuzzy to begin with, word boundaries are worse. Those boundaries arise because of our thoughts process. Because certain sequence of sounds give rise to full thoughts we tend to think that they are somehow separate from the rest. This is just a point of view.
Dragon27 wrote:One can also start noticing (even subconsciously) frequent chunks of sounds after some time and start recognizing phonetic words boundaries in real speech without even comprehending its meaning.
Yes, I'm aware of that. But are those boundaries the same boundaries that speakers of the language have? My guess is not really. I know that if you try to transcribe what you hear at that stage, it's extremely painful and error-prone. And what you realize then is that those boundaries are not that clear after all. Without understanding, your transcription will be poor because your speech segmentation it not really accurate.
Dragon27 wrote:What I'm not realizing is how reading alone is supposed to solve listening comprehension problems fully.
Because they are not "listening comprehension problems", they are just "comprehension problems". They appear when you listen and so you think they come from a lack of listening. But those problems are also there when you read, you just don't notice them because they are not blocking you. You can stop and work out the meaning. But working out the meaning means that you do not really understand. Once you read without stopping and have a good enough pronunciation, your listening will be good too.
Dragon27 wrote:The only thing I could do to "realize" that is to believe (take on faith) that excessive deliberate reading will just solve it sooner or later.
What do you want me to do? I tell you what I think, what you do with it is your problem. Their is no way I can prove it to you. This is not mathematics. What you can do maybe is try for a little while: listen less and read more. Or not, your choice.
Dragon27 wrote:One can, of course, have awful pronunciation and good listening comprehension.
Yes, but this is something different. This is more like when I hear a song in my head. It sounds perfect in my head but when I try to sing, the result is awful.
Here, what you have is a speaking problem. Which comes from a lack of pronunciation training at the beginning. This is a problem that should be addressed as soon as possible. When you read, ideally, you should be able to sound out reasonably well.
To learn oral pronunciation, I use Anki. I pick one chapter of an audiobook. Split it into short sentences, aligned the audio for each sentences, generates a bunch of cards for Anki, and repeat the hell out of it. At that stage I don't care about the meaning.
That part certainly help to develop a good sense of how the language sounds.
You can use glossika as an alternative (maybe).
Dragon27 wrote:One does not understand all English accents, though, at once by achieving some universal English comprehension.
Yes, but even a native speaker doesn't understand every accents. Is this really a problem? As a second language English learner myself I understand a wide range of accents and I never trained for it. What happens is for a few minutes I need to pay more attention. And then I get used to it essentially. I have all my comprehension supporting me, most accent don't resist for long.
And sure, you can find impenetrable accents, but native from my world don't understand them either. So why should I care. If one day I meet someone speaking with one of those accents, I will work on it but until then I have better things to do.
Dragon27 wrote:You get the aural input, but your brain hasn't been molded properly to get it, and you need to listen to do that.
It has, since you know how the language sounds and when you read you hear it. So yes you brain has already the right shape. It doesn't have to be precise down to the neuron, it just have to be close enough. Your brain treats what looks alike (to a degree) the same.
Dragon27 wrote:You need to listen a lot, because this process of molding the brain doesn't get perfect results from a few tries.
What few tries? You have been reading a lot, remember?
Also it gets easier and easier. After a while you know almost all the words in each sentence, and the one you still don't know kind of pop out making it easy to learn them.
Dragon27 wrote:And the brain still needs to learn to do all of that pattern recognizing job and gather words, phrases, the way they sound, etc. By being molded.
If you want, but all those things can be learn by reading, so.
Dragon27 wrote:I have a general idea of what "neural networks" are (or the illusion of it - which can't be dispelled by some simple "mold" analogy explanation).
Well, it's telling me that you don't. This "mold" analogy is at the heart of it.
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OM