Re: Iversen's Guide to Learning Languages (version 3b)
Posted: Thu Jan 28, 2016 3:09 pm
1.9. Can you learn a language only by reading?
Can you learn a language only by reading? No, of course not. As a minimum you need to know how to pronounce it inside your head - else it will just amount to rebus solving. The only people who may not use sounds in their thinking are people who have been deaf from they were born, and they can substitute sign language for the sounds - but once you have learnt your native language as a spoken language there is no way back.
I would like to quote a few lines from the story of Christina Hartmann, who learned to read through sign language:
I started learning sign language when I was six months old. Specifically, I learned Signed Exact English (SEE) which incorporates the same grammar and syntax as English with a heavy emphasis on fingerspelling. I'd sign a sentence like this (parentheses denote the signs): "(I) (see) (the) (baby) (cry)(ing)." Fingerspelling is forming individual letters with hand shapes. So, even before I learned how to read, I understood the concept of letters. In a way, I think that was an advantage when I started reading.
My mom read to me, just like many other children. She would sign with the book propped upon her lap and she'd give me some time to look at the book first and then start signing. I could shift my attention between her and the book. Actually, my mom told me that she had a great time and so did I.
It is obvious that writing doesn't have the same status as speech. Almost every human being can speak at least one language, but writing was invented late and still has to taught to children long after they have learned to speak. But the written language is constructed with the spoken language as its model, and much to the dismay of those who deny that written language is a language, a large part of the study of languages is based on written sources. And languages with alphabetical writing systems even mimic the way spoken languages are built with a phonetic and a phonemic layer, which represent respectively the actual sounds emitted and the logical units which are combined to form meaning bearing entities.
It is interesting that reading in the antiquity apparently mostly was a fairly loud affair, but a few select readers nevertheless learned to switch their overt verbalizations to silent muttering:
Augustine's description of Ambrose's silent reading (including the remark that he never read aloud) is the first definite instance recorded in Western literature. Earlier examples are far more uncertain. In the fifth century BC, two plays show characters reading on stage: in Euripides' Hippolytus, Theseus reads in silence a letter held by his dead wife; in Aristophanes' The Knights, Demosthenes looks at a writing-tablet sent by an oracle and, without saying out loud what it contains, seems taken aback by what he has read. According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great read a letter from his mother in silence in the fourth century BC, to the bewilderment of his soldiers.
(quoted from A.Manguel: "A History of Reading" ch.2)
Speed reading should in principle not be confused with skimming, where you deliberately skip irrelevant information. When done properly it does resemble extensive reading, which I described in the first part of this guide as follows: "The other kind of reading is the extensive reading. Here the goal is not to understand everything, but to acquire a kind of momentum while reading, and to get through as much genuine stuff as possible." In practice speed readers will skip those elements of a text which don't contribute to the general meaning of a text. The trick in speed reading is to decrease the number of fixation points for the eye and read more text at each fixation (this can be seen in a very graphical way here). A slow reader stops in many places and sometimes has to skip backwards to reread lost passages; a fast reader makes few and suitably spaced jumps and has trained his/her ability to pick up the relevant information at the first time a passage is read. Besides speed readers learn to minimize their subvocalizing, which takes speed reading a further step away from the spoken language.
So what role does true speed reading have in language learning? Well, if you read something to find something specific then you can of course do speed reading, but if your goal is to learn a language then it is just about the most silly thing you can do. The principle behind speed reading is to pick out just enough of the text to be able to piece together the meaning, - and you should certainly not start looking at the formal side of the text. In other words you skip exactly those elements in the text that are relevant for a language learner.
Reading for general content is another matter, and I have done my share of that. The most extreme case was probably when I was writing my final dissertation at the university about a grammatical topic. If I needed an illustration of a certain phenomenon and I didn't have a suitable example in my notes then I would look through book after book, turning the pages at a rate at about one page per 2-3 seconds, first looking at the right side pages, then the left side pages. But this was skimming, and I didn't even care about the content of the pages I ran through.
The fastest true 'pseudoreading' I have done happened while I studied literature and came unprepared for a lesson where I should have read a whole book (it happened fairly often as my interest in literature was waning already during my study years). In this situation you can actually zip through a few hundred pages of a standard paperback novel in 15-20 minutes, catching some of the plot, noting down some pages where there are things that probably will be discussed, getting a sense of the writing style in general and so on. This was actually enough to be able to participate in the discussion at a university level course, and paradoxically I still remember some of the content of books I have peroused in this way. But it is clearly not enough to really learn anything new, and certainly not to learn anything of the language because you already have to know it well to speed-read like that. Speed reading has its uses, but not in language learning.
So to summarize: you can learn many aspects of your languages from written sources, but the more you exclude speech the more your learning will result in some kind of rebus solving or construction, rather than the free and unhindered use of a living language.
For me there is one state of consciousness which is almost a necessity if I want to activate a language. I think of it as 'the buzz' (no Danish name, sorry). This state occurs when you get so much input that your head starts spinning. If you accept this chaotic state you can try to turn it in the direction of organized thinking, which is just one step ahead of speaking. I primarily achieve this with a combination of extensive reading and listening to comprehensible sources. The spoken sources are necessary because they represent the kind of information transport which is called "push" in the computer (and the marketing) world. A 'push' comes to you, not the other way round. In contrast reading is essentially a "pull" action. For bookworms hours of concentrated reading may function the same way, but you have to really caught by a book to feel that it bombards you. 'Normal' readers have to literally drag the information out of a written text - if the close their eyes or get distracted the stream of input stops. And therefore it is harder to achieve the 'buzz' I mentioned before. In contrast your ears are always open, and the problem is only to find something or something that delivers a steady stream of speech.
You may have seen references to something called the 'din', and it seems that Elizabeth Barber described this thing in 1980, followed by Krashen in 1981 (and 1983). It is supposed to be "an involuntary mental rehearsal of a language that occurs after we have had extensive comprehensible input in that language." The most comprehensive discussion I have seen so far (with references to later research) is in a book called "Inner Speech - L2" by Guerrero, which can be partially seen on Youbooks - but alas, it cost more than 100$ as an ebook, and I'm definitely not going to pay that much. It was briefly discussed on HTLAL in 2010, but the links in that discussion have died since then. There is another article by the same author at archive.org, but I haven't had time to read that one through. Some of Krashen's own reactions to research in the field can be found here.
I'm slightly uneasy with the claim that the din thing is an involuntary rehearsal (and maybe even a rehearsal strictly as part of a Krashen-like acquisition process). Inner speech has been discussed long before Barber and Krashen, and for me the rehearsal happens in its clearest form when you decide to do inner speech. The mumbling background I call buzz is only half voluntary - it is more like a stream of consciousness which has been set in motion by too much input and now runs mad inside your head. And a large proportion of it consists of borrowed elements from the language you have been bombarded with. However this turmoil would have to be consciously directed before I would accept to call it a rehearsal.
The snag is that without a lot of preparation none of those sources would be comprehensible at all - and intensive work primarily with written sources is my way to collect the information that makes them comprehensible.
Can you learn a language only by reading? No, of course not. As a minimum you need to know how to pronounce it inside your head - else it will just amount to rebus solving. The only people who may not use sounds in their thinking are people who have been deaf from they were born, and they can substitute sign language for the sounds - but once you have learnt your native language as a spoken language there is no way back.
I would like to quote a few lines from the story of Christina Hartmann, who learned to read through sign language:
I started learning sign language when I was six months old. Specifically, I learned Signed Exact English (SEE) which incorporates the same grammar and syntax as English with a heavy emphasis on fingerspelling. I'd sign a sentence like this (parentheses denote the signs): "(I) (see) (the) (baby) (cry)(ing)." Fingerspelling is forming individual letters with hand shapes. So, even before I learned how to read, I understood the concept of letters. In a way, I think that was an advantage when I started reading.
My mom read to me, just like many other children. She would sign with the book propped upon her lap and she'd give me some time to look at the book first and then start signing. I could shift my attention between her and the book. Actually, my mom told me that she had a great time and so did I.
It is obvious that writing doesn't have the same status as speech. Almost every human being can speak at least one language, but writing was invented late and still has to taught to children long after they have learned to speak. But the written language is constructed with the spoken language as its model, and much to the dismay of those who deny that written language is a language, a large part of the study of languages is based on written sources. And languages with alphabetical writing systems even mimic the way spoken languages are built with a phonetic and a phonemic layer, which represent respectively the actual sounds emitted and the logical units which are combined to form meaning bearing entities.
It is interesting that reading in the antiquity apparently mostly was a fairly loud affair, but a few select readers nevertheless learned to switch their overt verbalizations to silent muttering:
Augustine's description of Ambrose's silent reading (including the remark that he never read aloud) is the first definite instance recorded in Western literature. Earlier examples are far more uncertain. In the fifth century BC, two plays show characters reading on stage: in Euripides' Hippolytus, Theseus reads in silence a letter held by his dead wife; in Aristophanes' The Knights, Demosthenes looks at a writing-tablet sent by an oracle and, without saying out loud what it contains, seems taken aback by what he has read. According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great read a letter from his mother in silence in the fourth century BC, to the bewilderment of his soldiers.
(quoted from A.Manguel: "A History of Reading" ch.2)
Speed reading should in principle not be confused with skimming, where you deliberately skip irrelevant information. When done properly it does resemble extensive reading, which I described in the first part of this guide as follows: "The other kind of reading is the extensive reading. Here the goal is not to understand everything, but to acquire a kind of momentum while reading, and to get through as much genuine stuff as possible." In practice speed readers will skip those elements of a text which don't contribute to the general meaning of a text. The trick in speed reading is to decrease the number of fixation points for the eye and read more text at each fixation (this can be seen in a very graphical way here). A slow reader stops in many places and sometimes has to skip backwards to reread lost passages; a fast reader makes few and suitably spaced jumps and has trained his/her ability to pick up the relevant information at the first time a passage is read. Besides speed readers learn to minimize their subvocalizing, which takes speed reading a further step away from the spoken language.
So what role does true speed reading have in language learning? Well, if you read something to find something specific then you can of course do speed reading, but if your goal is to learn a language then it is just about the most silly thing you can do. The principle behind speed reading is to pick out just enough of the text to be able to piece together the meaning, - and you should certainly not start looking at the formal side of the text. In other words you skip exactly those elements in the text that are relevant for a language learner.
Reading for general content is another matter, and I have done my share of that. The most extreme case was probably when I was writing my final dissertation at the university about a grammatical topic. If I needed an illustration of a certain phenomenon and I didn't have a suitable example in my notes then I would look through book after book, turning the pages at a rate at about one page per 2-3 seconds, first looking at the right side pages, then the left side pages. But this was skimming, and I didn't even care about the content of the pages I ran through.
The fastest true 'pseudoreading' I have done happened while I studied literature and came unprepared for a lesson where I should have read a whole book (it happened fairly often as my interest in literature was waning already during my study years). In this situation you can actually zip through a few hundred pages of a standard paperback novel in 15-20 minutes, catching some of the plot, noting down some pages where there are things that probably will be discussed, getting a sense of the writing style in general and so on. This was actually enough to be able to participate in the discussion at a university level course, and paradoxically I still remember some of the content of books I have peroused in this way. But it is clearly not enough to really learn anything new, and certainly not to learn anything of the language because you already have to know it well to speed-read like that. Speed reading has its uses, but not in language learning.
So to summarize: you can learn many aspects of your languages from written sources, but the more you exclude speech the more your learning will result in some kind of rebus solving or construction, rather than the free and unhindered use of a living language.
For me there is one state of consciousness which is almost a necessity if I want to activate a language. I think of it as 'the buzz' (no Danish name, sorry). This state occurs when you get so much input that your head starts spinning. If you accept this chaotic state you can try to turn it in the direction of organized thinking, which is just one step ahead of speaking. I primarily achieve this with a combination of extensive reading and listening to comprehensible sources. The spoken sources are necessary because they represent the kind of information transport which is called "push" in the computer (and the marketing) world. A 'push' comes to you, not the other way round. In contrast reading is essentially a "pull" action. For bookworms hours of concentrated reading may function the same way, but you have to really caught by a book to feel that it bombards you. 'Normal' readers have to literally drag the information out of a written text - if the close their eyes or get distracted the stream of input stops. And therefore it is harder to achieve the 'buzz' I mentioned before. In contrast your ears are always open, and the problem is only to find something or something that delivers a steady stream of speech.
You may have seen references to something called the 'din', and it seems that Elizabeth Barber described this thing in 1980, followed by Krashen in 1981 (and 1983). It is supposed to be "an involuntary mental rehearsal of a language that occurs after we have had extensive comprehensible input in that language." The most comprehensive discussion I have seen so far (with references to later research) is in a book called "Inner Speech - L2" by Guerrero, which can be partially seen on Youbooks - but alas, it cost more than 100$ as an ebook, and I'm definitely not going to pay that much. It was briefly discussed on HTLAL in 2010, but the links in that discussion have died since then. There is another article by the same author at archive.org, but I haven't had time to read that one through. Some of Krashen's own reactions to research in the field can be found here.
I'm slightly uneasy with the claim that the din thing is an involuntary rehearsal (and maybe even a rehearsal strictly as part of a Krashen-like acquisition process). Inner speech has been discussed long before Barber and Krashen, and for me the rehearsal happens in its clearest form when you decide to do inner speech. The mumbling background I call buzz is only half voluntary - it is more like a stream of consciousness which has been set in motion by too much input and now runs mad inside your head. And a large proportion of it consists of borrowed elements from the language you have been bombarded with. However this turmoil would have to be consciously directed before I would accept to call it a rehearsal.
The snag is that without a lot of preparation none of those sources would be comprehensible at all - and intensive work primarily with written sources is my way to collect the information that makes them comprehensible.