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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ต.ค. 2023
- Hey language learners! We’ve received a LOT of requests to answer this question: Is it better to be a better reader or a better listener?
Proponents of a listening heavy approach will argue that this method is more natural, mimicking how children learn. They also argue that underdeveloped listening skills will hurt your progress further on down the line.
Proponents of a reading heavy approach tend to argue that reading is one of the best ways to acquire vocabulary and it’s easier to make comprehensible and enjoyable - thus reducing burnout long term and increasing overall learner success rates.
So what do we recommend here at Refold? Listening heavy? Reading heavy? Or something in between…
Tune in to find out!
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I’ve had different experiences with different languages. With easy languages like Spanish, German, French, reading is SO powerful I can’t imagine not prioritizing it. You would need to be obsessed with sounding like a native I think to prioritize listening over reading. As far as listening ability (not speaking) for spanish I think reading actually helps it. If I get to where I can easily understand a word if I read it I am also fairly confident that I’ll understand it when it’s spoken. But the same is not true for Japanese. So often I was able to understand something when I read it but not when I heard it spoken until I had heard it several times. This was super frustrating. I don’t know if there was anything I could have done to make this less painful.
I’ve never been that worried about my accent like Matt is. Although when I was in Japan for a bit I thought people didn’t want to speak Japanese to me or only easy Japanese because of my accent. But it did vary from person to person. I don’t think having great pronunciation would have changed things. As long as I was still less than perfect along with my very non Japanese face, I think most people will adjust their speech according. While Matt can pull off the impression of perfection I think we all know that’s not realistic for most people.
I do want to add a small note to the interacting with native Japanese speakers thing. And not to devalue your experience, but just to say what I've seen others discuss on the topic.
Which is most advanced learners talk about how different Natives speak with them depending on their pitch accent level. Whether it be antidotal accounts from learns or discussions had by Dogen in his master course series on Pitch Accent ---- that it is incredibly common for Native speakers to judge a person's Japanese level off of their Pitch Accent level. Since it is the most instant and readily obvious measure of skill at the language.
Of course I fully agree that people can have very large differences between their strengths and weaknesses in a language and a lot of learners probably are a lot better then their Pitch Accent would imply. But I also think it is completely fair and generally the case to assume someone's level based on Pitch Accent. If I had to pick one single aspect of Japanese that most directly correlated with overall skill it would be that. Especially since, it is technically true some learners could be good at the language without being good at Pitch Accent, but it is always going to be true that if a person has good Pitch Accent they are at least likely to be much better at the language.
But take everything I said here with a grain of salt. I'm still very much a learner and have yet to head to Japan to interact with people directly. But again, this general line of thought is something I've heard a lot and it does make sense to me at least.
Of course the better you speak Japanese the more likely they are not to grade their language when talking to you. And I really have no idea how good my pitch accent is. I studied it a little but got bored quickly haha. So maybe not so good. It's not so bad that people just switch to English though. They usually will speak Japanese with me just easy Japanese. If you look like a foreigner as much as I do, I think your pitch accent would need to be perfect for them to really speak naturally. There's no way I'd ever speak Japanese with perfect pitch accent no matter how much I tried.@@DragonMasterGold
A lot of people doing refold, not all but a lot, are doing it because they want to consume content from another language. Listening is probably better if your goal is speaking. But for a lot of people, that’s not the goal, reading and watching stuff is. So if your goal is to be able to consume content in your target language, don’t let someone tell you not to read just because it might hurt your accent. Because if speaking isn’t your goal, then who cares? If I didn’t start reading as soon as I could read hiragana four years ago, I would not still be learning Japanese. And now I can watch shows, read books, and talk to people if I actually feel like it. And I’ve never had someone not understand what I’ve said due to bad pronunciation. And I don’t make fun of my Japanese friend’s English pronunciation either.
How do you eat h shows if you aren't listening a lot?
@@Branden-vl9sl You need to listen as well, even if you just want to read because it makes your reading smoother, but you shouldn’t avoid reading if you want to read especially if speaking is a low priority for why you are learning anyway.
Focus on reading AND listening. Read a lot, listen a lot. Where possible, read what you're listening to, listen to what you're reading. Listening is hard because words are not known or recognized by the listener. Reading is the principal means of word discovery, and (accurate) transcripts make audio input comprehensible.
I don’t know how about you guys but I can’t think of myself in an English speaking country with a bad accent. In my opinion there’s no point in studying a language when you don’t want to sound like an average native speaker. It’s what you do to become like them, it’s essential. And that’s why I’ve spend about 3-4 hours a day over the last year listening and watching English native content. And now I feel quite comfortable to start doing some shadowing and work with pronunciation. I read something only when I get to a comment section or watch memes on Reddit
Does watching stuff with subtitles count as reading? could it 'hurt' my accent too?
We consider everything that includes text as reading, since that's mostly what you're doing.
We haven't seen any compelling evidence that reading early "hurts" your accent. How "natural" or "good" your accent is depends a lot more on your natural inclination for accents, your dedication, your practice habits, your ability to feel "at home" with a different accent, etc.
I hope this helps!
- Ben
I don't like reading, so my listening skill is almost the same as my reading skill but I really want to be an intellectual person and read more.
Listening is king. I'm not sure why it's a debate lol. When you read you subvocalize and when you subvocalize, people just starting out to language learning will use their native language's phonetic blueprint, not the target language.
Reading is great, no doubt especially for increasing vocabulary, but what's the point of being able to read 100 books in your target language but when a 7 year old talks to you (in target language), you're stumped? Listening/speaking has always came before Reading/Writing.
No the debate is that since reading is the fastest way to build your vocabs and grammar, so I could argue that reading 50 books + 1000 hours listening would lead to stronger listening ability than 10 books + 2000 hours listening, which makes it easier when you start your output later on. Now the point is whether the resulting bad accent would matter if it's in the long run.
@@shicioo8639 I won't completely disagree with you but you skipped my initial argument that, if ultimately learning/acquiring another language is to communicate (to understand and be understood), what point is it to have great reading comprehension but you still cannot understand a 7 year old?
There are plenty language learners that are more aligned with 50 books + 1000 hours of listening train-of-thought that still struggle with understanding/comprehending videos and tv shows aimed at a demographic of 7-13 year olds. It's not necessarily that they don't KNOW the vocabulary, its that their ears have a hard time LISTENING to how those words are used in actual speech. [Repeat] listening can help with that.
This last point isn't completely related but similar, I know about input before output but again, being locked in your room only getting input for 5+ years before actually speaking is a bit odd to me. I don't subscribe to speaking from day one but 900 days later is crazy to me lol. I have no evidence for the following but I think there is a relationship between listening and speaking that is understated. I believe one's listening ability can improve with speaking and vice versa. but I digress
@@Shka_maru Maybe I should elaborate on my point a little bit more clearly. My comment makes it seem like I prioritize reading over listening, which is not the case. Last year, I read about 20 japanese books but that still only accounted for 20% of immersion time. I treat reading as a form of deliberate practice, all of the reading is to make sure that when you're listening, all the stuff is "possible" to hear or potentially "comprehensible".
The only reason I make it such a big deal is apparently a lot of people DO NOT read at all. Oftentimes I see refolder post their own videos about their 1/2/3 years journey it always boggles my mind there's no way the progress would be this slow if they had just read a little more. Their progress usually speeds up only after they reach the second or third year because it requires this amount of time to listen out unknown information by pure listening. What they are doing is basically how I learned English back when I didn't even know massive input approach existed 8 years ago, which I think is even slower than traditional study method.
I generally read at least 10 pages worth of text every day and it takes about 30~45 minutes to finish. By the way, when I'm in this mode I look up all the words and make almost all the unknown information to anki including stuff I've already made, and leech every card if it fails three times. I have a reason for this but I won't elaborate here. From my experiments I found this to be the most efficient, and it takes less than 30 minutes daily to complete the whole deck.
So to your question about "what point is it to have great reading comprehension but you still cannot understand a 7 year old?", my answer would be just listening to a lot of 7 year old talk, and before that, make sure the reason for not understanding is indeed lack of listening but not informal speech/slangs.
Regarding to speaking, I agree with you that it could improve listening. I don't have much experience in this but my take is that it doesn't matter if you decide to start early but you should try your best to imitate native speaker.
reading with no audio
vs
reading with audio
vs
subbed watching
vs
subless watching
The format of all videos is the same. Boring.
You need to use more anomations.