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> Listening is easier than speaking only when what you listen to is easy and at a pace you can follow where you can have things repeated. This is definitely n
by least 5y ago
> Listening is easier than speaking only when what you listen to is easy and at a pace you can follow where you can have things repeated.
This is definitely not the case. Yes, listening to difficult audio is really hard to interpret. Your proficiency in listening isn't defined simply by how well you can listen to people in a perfect scenario, but also your capacity to understand the language.
Reading is usually easier than listening because it provides a ton of context clues, a visual indication of what is being said (as in... writing), and essentially no time limit. If you can work out what is going on surrounding unfamiliar words, you can, at least sometimes, figure out through the context of the entire piece of writing what the meaning is. With listening, you are constrained because you are listening at the pace of the speaker, but there's still plenty of advantages that exists to help you interpret the meaning.
With speaking there's none of that. It's entirely dependent on your own mastery and because of this people will almost always speak at lower proficiency than they can read or write. It might not be apparent to you because you're the one doing the speaking, but I can almost guarantee you that your level of proficiency is greater in listening than it is speaking, because you can't convey the same level of complexity in your speech that you can understand from someone speaking it.
- LanceH 5y agoIf there are multiple ways to say something, I only need to know one of them to speak clearly. For listening I need to be ready for anything.
- arghwhat 5y agoMy ability to succeed in approximately deciphering an arbitrary sentence conveying meaning A is lower than my ability to communicate that approximate meaning myself. The odds are made much lower if communicating with a new person not already aware of my exact vocabulary. Of course, I can decipher much fancier sentences than I can produce (especially in a controlled environment as I originally mentioned). My produced sentence will be much more awkward than the sentences I can decipher, but it will work. From my perspective, this makes listening harder than speaking - I will not be fluent in a language until a decade of practical use, so the only metric that matters to me is whether something had practical application and acceptable understanding. In that sense, removing parts of a sentence you can't produce before you say it still passes as a success, but not understanding anything or most what a person is trying to say to you is not. Most people are not able to sufficiently simplify their speech as they do not know what or how you have been taught. If you are already able to have the meta-conversation needed to inquire about and discuss meanings of words and sentences comfortably, then you are already an advanced speaker. Note that this is very subjective. I am expressing my current state of learning as it is, and claiming that this is wrong is silly. On the other hand claiming that you will experience the same would also be silly, but it's none tell less worth sharing experiences.