{"id":27,"date":"2009-04-02T19:15:06","date_gmt":"2009-04-02T17:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/?p=27"},"modified":"2016-01-26T02:20:51","modified_gmt":"2016-01-26T00:20:51","slug":"just-listening-to-the-language-is-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/just-listening-to-the-language-is-enough\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Just Listening to the Language Enough to Learn It?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have come across a news article<\/a> suggesting that just listening to the language without even understanding it is enough to help you learn it<\/strong>.\u00a0First of all, I don’t quite think so. Why? Well, there are at least three reasons.<\/p>\n

First of all, where’s the evidence? There’s an article, okay, that’s a start. What about , experiments with control groups, explanations how exactly that works (what parts of the brain are involved in this and why exactly this happens)? I don’t know, perhaps the person asserting this has some evidence in his thesis but I wasn’t able to find any good evidence in the article so it remains a bear assertion. And the fact that it’s a article from a newspaper in the New Zealand that I haven’t ever heard about doesn’t add much credibility to it.<\/p>\n

Second, I know quite a lot of counter examples. For example, a friend of mine has gone to lives in Denmark for more than half a year already and he doesn’t speak a word in Danish. I meet people fairly often who live in the country and don’t speak the language (even though they are exposed to it frequently). I have recently heard a story where a guy has lived in a country for ten years and he hasn’t managed to learn the language. There are a lot of other examples.<\/p>\n

Third, it doesn’t quite make sense. I can imagine how knowing some<\/em> and then listening to the language can help you sometimes guess the meaning of certain words from the context and slowly build up your knowledge. I can imagine how watching people speak directly where they use gestures and body language, etc. can help you pick up new words and expressions. However, I can’t imagine how knowing nothing (or knowing just a little) you could call , say, listening to the radio in the language an efficient way to learn<\/em>. Moreover, have you ever tried doing that? For me personally, if I don’t understand what I’m hearing, after a few minutes my brain would simply tune out all the noise and focus my attention elsewhere (just like it gets tuned out when you are watching a movie.<\/p>\n

I would rather spend my time learning some solid basics and moving from there to listening and watching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is lots of listening input an efficient way to learn a language? I share my take on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[42,43,41],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1048,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions\/1048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}