Saturday, April 30, 2005

Keith Lard Makes a Valuable Contribution "I've been watching a lot of Friends dubbed into Spanish, which is good because I already know who everyone is and what's going on because I've seen most of them before in English. They do speak very fast, and the deadpan delivery makes it hard to tell which bits are meant to be funny, but the canned laughter helps. I'm picking up lots and lots of little phrases and fragments, and I get excited when I understand a whole chunk at once. I think there are two skills involved in listening: the first is actually decoding a continuous stream of speech into its component words, and the second is knowing what those Spanish words mean. It's the first skill that really benefits from a lot of listening. What used to be high-speed noise seems to magically crystallise after a while into well-formed Spanish sentences. Even if you don't understand the sentences completely, you can get valuable context to help you guess the words you don't know. And as he points out, you always get things in context. Certain phrases and constructions crop up absolutely all the time, and you just learn them as blocks or templates which you can use to build sentences. If you start off by learning grammar, and you know past participles are formed by taking the infinitive stem and adding '-ado' for -AR verbs and 'ido' for -ER/IR verbs, you might have trouble remembering whether it's 'he olvidado' or 'he olvidido' for 'I forgot'. You have to remember which kind of verb the infinitive is and work forwards from there, and you could still get it wrong. On the other hand, if you listen to a lot of Spanish, you've probably heard people say 'he olvidado' a million times, and you never once heard them say 'he olvidido', so you just know. It's this 'just knowing' which gives you a big confidence boost. Words, phrases and sentences arrive in your brain fully-formed and correctly pronounced, without you having to laboriously construct them from grammatical rules and then double-check that all the adverbs agree and so on. Similarly with listening comprehension, after a while you start understanding things as blocks of meaning, not individual words. Translating word by word into English is much too slow when people are speaking at full speed - you need to hear the Spanish, understand what's being said without mentally working out an English translation, and immediately be ready to listen to the next bit. It's a little bit Zen because you need to stop trying so hard to understand and just let the sounds come in. I could liken it to Magic Eye for the ears, because it's when you stop struggling and let your subconscious brain get on with it that it suddenly happens. At first in flashes, but then in bigger and bigger chunks until you can understand whole sections of dialogue. When you're not focusing on mentally translating into English, you've got time to absorb context and body language and facial expressions which all help convey what's being said." 1:00:35 PM    comment []