Iversen wrote:I would say that there are several tresholds, but it is too simplistic to identify any of them with a certain percentage of known words.
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So above the low level compehension treshold there is one more treshold: the one where you say that you really have understood just about everything, and in principle you then have to know the meaning of each and every word and understand the role of all grammatical element and structures - and maybe even know some facts about Troyes. Maybe that's where the famous 98% known words come into play. In a written text this would basically imply that you only needed to (or felt tempted to) look a few words up per page. With speech it is harder because you don't have time to look anything up so here the necessary percentage may be higher than with written texts.
But hey, maybe you don't need to understand everything to the last iota ...
Now that I have more time in the summer doldrums, I want to return to the question at hand. Although I agree basically with Iversen’s observation as to how we think about understanding a foreign spoken language, I think there is a fundamental problem in most of these debates on comprehension : how do we know that we understand ?
The classic answer that we see here is to count the words and grammatical structures that we ‘know’. This is taken to mean that we have seen or heard these elements before and we have probably ‘learned’ or ‘studied’ them. Thus when we hear something we don’t know, we run to the dictionary. This works relatively well for concrete things and terminology but becomes more complicated with grammatical items and idioms or figurative language.
In Spanish for example, when you hear the very common imperfect subjunctive form of the verb, what are you supposed to know other than in this context one has to use the imperfect subjunctive ?
I believe it is impossible to determine a specific level of comprehension. Instead, what we do is subjectively observe how we react to the spoken language. Here we are either in an interactive situation where we have to speak or in a purely receptive situation such as when listening to a recording.
In real interactive situations, we know the frustration of understanding questions but feeling unable to answer then appropriately. ‘I understand 100% but I can’t speak’. This of course seems only normal in the learning process.
I believe this is not entirely accurate. Instead, I believe our receptive skills go hand in hand with our productive skills. Very simply put, you can’t fully understand something until you have used it yourself.
This may sound ludicrous. ‘Do I really have to have spoken those thousands of different words before I can say I really understand the spoken language ? ‘ Not really because some words are more frequent and important but others. But the fact remains – in my opinion – that understanding takes on a whole different meaning – no pun intended - when you have actually used the different forms yourself and correctly of course.
This is what explains that excitement that you experience when you start to feel at ease in the language. This may be just with your tutor or conversation partner but there is wonderful feeling that comes from ‘nailing it’ when you use the right word or idiom at the right moment.
And this is what idiomatic discourse is all about. Here we are talking about putting the words together in a way a native speaker would speak. Not just one way but in any number of ways that seem natural. And your interlocutor interacts spontaneously with you and the conversation goes on.
For example, that Spanish imperfect subjunctive becomes more prominent once you have started using it yourself. Whereas you never used it before, now you find yourself using it all the time. You suddenly can’t do without it. The really interesting thing is that you didn’t hear it before and now you are hearing everywhere.
When it comes to purely listening to recordings things are a bit different because of the lack of interaction. Here we have to ‘use’ the language in dictionaries and textbooks. We end up talking in our heads or just speaking aloud. And we have no feedback that tells us just how much we really understand.
The point of all this is that comprehension becomes an active skill. The more you speak the better you understand. And the more you understand the better you speak. All that studying and listening are essential of course but actual use is what takes us to the ultimate threshold of proficiency.