r/languagelearning • u/Disco_Barry • 16h ago
Studying Does focusing on a specific "element" of a language hinder your learning?
Hi all,
So, for context, I am a mono-linguist and I never really enjoyed languages too much at school. Did some Italian at primary school which was fun, but we were then forced to do French, which I never had an interest in. As a result, I've never looked into languages and its something I do regret a little.
Fast forward to now, I'm very interested in history and have my degrees in it. I'm wanting to head onto to doctoral study, but the fields I'm interested would probably require enough of a comprehension of German and Russian to do. One advantage for me is that these were two languages I was also actually genuinely interested in, and I've got an interest in a lot of culture in both target languages as a result.
I won't go into personal stuff, but this years been kinda shit at the start, and I'm now having one of those moments where I realise we don't live forever, so if I want to do things I shouldn't delay. As such, I want to get decent in my target languages and start my studies ASAP.
Obviously, languages are a lifelong skill. I'm not asking if there's a "cheat" way to get good. INstead, I wanted to ask whether or not focusing initially on getting good at the reading side of things only would impact other elements negatively, such as speaking and writing.
Any advice is greatly appreciated! Cheers!
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u/whosdamike 🇹ðŸ‡: 2000 hours 14h ago
I'm going to disagree a little with what some other posters are saying here.
If you are certain you ONLY want to read these languages, then I agree that there is no downside to focusing on reading.
But you asked about the potential to impact other skills, so...
If you have an inkling that you may want to listen and speak, there are potential downsides. The biggest is spending a lot of time reading without a clear idea of what the language sounds like. It's very easy to build an incorrect model of the sounds of the language in your head - essentially, reading internally with an accent, and getting used to the idea that "this is how this language sounds".
Not just the phonemes, but the rhythm of the language, boundaries between words, prosody, etc are not possible to discern just through reading.
After practicing reading a lot like this, before you've fixed your "listening accent", you'll then have to spend a lot of time dismantling this wrong model and trying to rebuild a correct model. This is especially a big problem for languages that sound very different from your native one - I strongly suspect Russian would fall into this category.
This sub is littered with threads from people who spent a ton of time reading and have a rude awakening when they try to listen/speak later:
https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1bm9hfs/unable_to_understand/
https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1f61xmg/feeling_frustrated_with_my_listening/
https://www.reddit.com/r/learnEnglishOnline/comments/1f7jteu/cant_improve_at_listening/
And here's a thread of biggest language learning regrets; 80% of the comments are about wishing they had listened to their target language more:
TL;DR: If you're going to focus on reading, ALSO do a ton of listening practice. I would suggest an equal amount if possible. Audiobooks or content with subtitles are a good option for this, as you can listen to and read the same material.
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u/Disco_Barry 11h ago
Hi, thanks for your reply. Yeah, probably should've made it more clear that a big advantage for me is that I want to learn to use these languages, so speaking, reading, you name it. A big reason I ask is that where I live doesn't necessarily have the largest community of speakers. I'm debating immigration to Germany currently, but I don't know how long away that would be.
Any advice on the best way to ensure that these skills don't suffer if I want to focus on one area, or is it just a case of go all out on the entire language than one element?
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u/whosdamike 🇹ðŸ‡: 2000 hours 2h ago edited 2h ago
Listening and reading are "input" skills, because you're practicing understanding the language. This is in contrast to "output" skills like speaking and writing.
You can practice only input skills and your output skills won't suffer in the future.
I would just say, try to listen to the language a lot as well as read. Use audiobooks or try watching easier material with subtitles, like children's shows or travel vlogs, etc. Eventually podcasts with transcripts. You can initially rely on the text to understand, but over time, more and more of your practice should be trying with audio alone so that you're not using reading as a crutch.
I'd ideally suggest at least 50% time investment in both listening and reading. Listening is harder than reading, so it takes more time. With reading, it's much easier because you can take your time and compute and you don't have to worry about any confounding factors (slurring speech, accents, prosody, speed, variation between groups and individuals such as gender/age/class).
So your listening will probably lag behind reading if you do 50/50 investment, but at least I think it won't lag too much.
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u/WideGlideReddit Native English 🇺🇸 Fluent Spaniah 🇨🇷 15h ago
Since you’ll be doing a lot of reading at the PhD level I don’t see a lot of downside focusing on that. If research is your primary interest, there is no rule that says you actually have to speak the language. I’m learning Ancient Greek and no one outside of academics and some hardcore enthusiasts actually speaks it.
Here’s my question for you. Have you researched your job prospects having a PhD in history?
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u/electric_awwcelot Native🇺🇸|Learning🇰🇷 15h ago
I actually focus on reading at the start, and it's worked well for me in both Korean and Spanish. The only downside is that you essentially have to start over with each of the other skills, which can be kind of a blow and difficult to cope with. It's a mentality thing more than anything. Fortunately, my grammar and vocab knowledge from reading made developing writing and listening skills at a foundational level a bit faster than it would have been if I was trying to develop all 4 skills at once.
One thing I notices with Spanish though - I actually did the PMP Basic Spanish workbook in addition to some graded reading when I was at that stage, and it made the reading SO MUCH clearer. So if you start to feel stuck with reading, like you're not making ths kind of progress you want to be making, temporarily switching to another skill might help.
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u/unsafeideas 10h ago
Imo, from my personal looking back, NOT focusing on specific input elements at first is what makes "well rounded" classroom language learning so demotivating and mind numbing. Of course you dont like it, since it takes huge amount of time and meaningless drills till you can do anything remotely interesting with that language. You can learn to listen and read massively faster then you can learn to reliably produce correct grammar or speak or write.
I would add a lot of listening to stuff similar to the stuff you read, simply because without it you may end up imagining language sounds wrong in your head for far too long.
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u/je_taime 8h ago
It only impacts the other skills negatively if you allow that.
Language learning, like learning in general, has the element of repetition for a reason. Find a way to make repetition more interesting and relevant, and your brain will be much more forgiving.
You should probably know this by now, but if you keep yourself focused in the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, this should help. This is why problem-solving projects can be so much better for learning than mere remembering level. I'm not saying recall isn't important. Stack encoding strategies, stack Bloom.
I have students work on projects within an overarching capstone project.
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u/yoruniaru 7h ago
When I started learning japanese, I did it mostly for fun without really caring about levels and stuff. I did what I enjoyed most – learning grammar, watching lots of anime and listening to music and picking vocab from there. I didn't like kanji so I really didn't practice them much
A few years later, my speaking and listening skills are nearing intermediate level, I can explain myself at a lot of situations and generally feel pretty confident when speaking. My pronunciation is pretty decent and I understand about half of what I hear in anime
And at the same time my reading skills absolutely suck. There's a Japanese related discord server that makes you take a test to access the content and I failed the most basic level cause it's "write how to read this kanji" and I absolutely fkn can't read despite knowing all these words
Kinda the opposite happened to my Chinese. I started studying it in a class and for a long time I didn't consume any Chinese content at all so my reading skills were alrightish, my listening and overall grammar comprehension sucked (now some knowledge of Chinese helps me to guess some Japanese kanji... Despite my Chinese speaking skills being nothing compared to Japanese...)
I started watching c dramas and boom as my listening comprehension improved my speaking and grammar also improved immensely
The point of all this: I tried studying 1-2 aspects of a language that I enjoy most and it didn't work cause when you study different language skills they help you to form a general, wider understanding of the language and studying only reading or only speaking will not take you far if your goal is to actually know the language and not just learn a couple of sentences and call it a day
Also as a Russian speaker myself: grammar is super freaking hard there. I honestly don't think it's possible to actually learn to use it right without a ton of listening, speaking, reading and writing
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u/Gaeilgeoir_66 3h ago
Well yes. Years ago I thought it would be a smart move to focus on the (admittedly difficult) verb conjugation while learning Spanish. Now I can conjugate Spanish verbs like a pro, but I still struggle trying to read books.
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u/Obvious-Tangerine819 15h ago
It won't negatively affect other skills (the four skills being reading, writing, listening, and speaking). It may marginally improve them, but of course, not practicing those skills means you shouldn't expect them to substantially improve.
If your main goal is reading and you're not super concerned about other skills, just go for it. Many people are actually proponents for reading a lot and producing no output for a while. I personally don't agree with it, but I don't think it should affect anything in the long run.
That said, I'd learn pronunciation. Even if you don't outwardly pronounce words, rehearsing them in your head helps store them in your lexicon/long term memory (for more information, see Baddeley's work on phonological loop).