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> In my opinion one fact that made me so slow learning English is the fact that I started reading English without never ever listening to it. My brain is full o

> In my opinion one fact that made me so slow learning English is the fact that I started reading English without never ever listening to it. My brain is full of associations between written words and funny sounds that really don't exist in the actual language. Really good points on learning to speak before writing. Trying to learn japanese now, and I'm glad that someone told me to learn to speak it fluently before learning to write it.

riffraff 11y ago
People who learned english mostly via text rather than speech 20 years ago do have a bit of an excuse though: it was _a lot_ easier to find english content to read than to listen. These days you can just get "south park" with subtitles off some torrent site, but non-dubbed content was quite harder to come by in Italy when I was a kid. Sadly, this is not necessarily the same when trying to learn something other than english.
jzelinskie 11y ago
Do you mean "write it fluently"? Are you just skipping out on memorizing kanji and their onyomi an kunyomi? Surely to learn to speak, you need to learn grammar and that grammar is taught from a written source. I feel like you get another level of understanding what's being said out loud if you can imagine the kanji. For example, you might not know that みる has multiple forms with slightly differing meanings depending on how it's used ( i.e. 見る and 観る ). Speaking and reading/writing our two very distinct skills that need to be individually practiced. However, they benefit each other and should probably be practiced in tandem to progress as fast as possible.
- graeme 11y ago
  >Surely to learn to speak, you need to learn grammar and that grammar is taught from a written source. Actually, you don't. I've learned several languages with Pimsleur, which is audio only. I took the lessons to their end and then progressed just by talking to people. You learn the grammar intuitively. I'm doing Pimsleur for Japanese now. Though I'm learning the writing system as well, because I've heard that written Japanese lets you make more progress than, say, written portuguese would, since Kanji let you grasp some of the meaning of words before you know them.
  - Broken_Hippo 11y ago
    Some people, including myself, find it much easier to speak when the grammar is more advanced than the speaking - or at least conversations. Reading aloud for the sake of learning how to say words, was the sole exception. I'm in my second year of language classes now. Once I got a good sense of grammar - more than just basic - the ease of speaking jumped. In contrast, my brother really does well with audio learning - such as the pimsleur method. Immersive environment methods do well for him. He also benefits more from things like classroom lectures than I. My sister is somewhere in between, but since she does well with inter-personal communication, she would pick up on sayings and slang and dialects a bit faster. These sorts of differences, along with differences in learning difficulty, are noticable in class.
masklinn 11y ago
> Really good points on learning to speak before writing. Trying to learn japanese now, and I'm glad that someone told me to learn to speak it fluently before learning to write it. Japanese is a very different issue. It is structurally very simple and the phonetics are highly regular (there's a reason why japan has had successful voice-synthetized singers since the early 00s), but reading and writing fluently it requires learning 3 different scripts, including a logographic one.

riffraff 11y ago

People who learned english mostly via text rather than speech 20 years ago do have a bit of an excuse though: it was _a lot_ easier to find english content to read than to listen. These days you can just get "south park" with subtitles off some torrent site, but non-dubbed content was quite harder to come by in Italy when I was a kid. Sadly, this is not necessarily the same when trying to learn something other than english.

jzelinskie 11y ago

Do you mean "write it fluently"? Are you just skipping out on memorizing kanji and their onyomi an kunyomi? Surely to learn to speak, you need to learn grammar and that grammar is taught from a written source. I feel like you get another level of understanding what's being said out loud if you can imagine the kanji. For example, you might not know that みる has multiple forms with slightly differing meanings depending on how it's used ( i.e. 見る and 観る ). Speaking and reading/writing our two very distinct skills that need to be individually practiced. However, they benefit each other and should probably be practiced in tandem to progress as fast as possible.

graeme 11y ago
>Surely to learn to speak, you need to learn grammar and that grammar is taught from a written source. Actually, you don't. I've learned several languages with Pimsleur, which is audio only. I took the lessons to their end and then progressed just by talking to people. You learn the grammar intuitively. I'm doing Pimsleur for Japanese now. Though I'm learning the writing system as well, because I've heard that written Japanese lets you make more progress than, say, written portuguese would, since Kanji let you grasp some of the meaning of words before you know them.
- Broken_Hippo 11y ago
  Some people, including myself, find it much easier to speak when the grammar is more advanced than the speaking - or at least conversations. Reading aloud for the sake of learning how to say words, was the sole exception. I'm in my second year of language classes now. Once I got a good sense of grammar - more than just basic - the ease of speaking jumped. In contrast, my brother really does well with audio learning - such as the pimsleur method. Immersive environment methods do well for him. He also benefits more from things like classroom lectures than I. My sister is somewhere in between, but since she does well with inter-personal communication, she would pick up on sayings and slang and dialects a bit faster. These sorts of differences, along with differences in learning difficulty, are noticable in class.

masklinn 11y ago

> Really good points on learning to speak before writing. Trying to learn japanese now, and I'm glad that someone told me to learn to speak it fluently before learning to write it. Japanese is a very different issue. It is structurally very simple and the phonetics are highly regular (there's a reason why japan has had successful voice-synthetized singers since the early 00s), but reading and writing fluently it requires learning 3 different scripts, including a logographic one.