Buondì.
I get a lot of silly questions: via email, on the phone, and from students (and staff) at the school.
But this one I made up, to illustrate today’s point:
“How long will it take until I can understand everything I hear?”
Actually, it’s not such a daft thing to ask, assuming that:
1.) you have absolutely ZERO experience of learning a foreign language, or
2.) you have no ability to reflect on how long it has taken you to reach your current ‘level’ in understanding your mother tongue.
I certainly remember, back in the day, wondering why learning a foreign language was so DIFFICULT.
Why did nothing I do seem to make any difference?
How come OTHER PEOPLE managed to understand everything and to speak effortlessly??
But if you’ve already successfully ‘learnt’ a language, then you’ll know that learning another is possible.
You’ll have some idea how to go about it and, more or less, how long it will take until the progress is noticable.
I also recall, as a child, that my parents used to listen to a certain serious radio programme on the BBC each morning during breakfast.
It featured news, discussion of the day’s events and themes, a weather forecast, and so on. The target audience would have been informed, interested adults.
So not me, an uninformed and only marginally-interested child, later teenager.
In fact I wouldn’t start consuming this type of media content until I was a young adult in my early-twenties, around the time I got a job in an office and started buying a daily newspaper to read on the commute and during the boring lunch hour.
Insomma, up until then I’d been in my own bubble of youth. What I heard on the radio over breakfast was basically just noise for adults, devoid of any meaningful context.
Only when I decided to participate did what was being talked about begin to become meaningful.
Suppose you decide to take up a new pastime, let’s say knitting.
It’s a skill with which I am only peripherally familiar, as my wife’s a passionate knitter.
But what the hell! If she can do it, so can I.
So I grab a pattern and a ball of wool that I am assured will be suitable, pick up the right-sized needles, and do my best to follow the instructions.
Boh! This is not making any sense.
I Google the unfamiliar terms but the explanations, while written in plain English, don’t help me know how to proceed.
I give up trying to figure it out on my own and ask Stefi, who’s delighted that I’m showing an interest.
She explains cheerfully (and rapidly) what I should actually be doing.
I listen as best as I can, but I’m baffled.
So explanations completed, I set down my needles and head for the kitchen in search of a cold beer.
While rummaging through the refrigerator, I reflect that perhaps, in order to understand this strange new language of knitting, I will need to develop a certain corpus of EXPERIENCE.
Only then will the terms and instructions become meaniningful.
But back to language-learning (besides being an ace knitter, my wife’s also an accomplished linguist, way more so than I am…)
This morning, as I washed the plates from last night’s meal, prepared sandwiches for the kids’ lunch and took tonight’s dinner out of the Instant Pot (if you have one too, do send recipes!), as is now my habit, I listened to ‘P1-morgon’ on Sveriges Radio P1.
That’s more or less the equivalent of what my parents used to bore me with forty years ago: news and features, a few minutes each of business and science stories, highlights from the world of culture, and so on.
And as I listened, I reflected on how much of what I heard I was understanding, or failing to, and how, and why.
The format of the broadcast is ormai (by now) very familiar, which helps me follow the transitions from story to story and know who’s speaking, and about what.
How much I get of the actual content depends a lot on what’s being said.
But the more I listen, the more familiar it all becomes: who’ll be the presenter on the Chistmas TV show, which soccer star won the ‘Golden Ball’ for being the year’s top player, the government’s plan for tackling the shootings and explosions in Malmö, traffic accidents due to ice, and on and on until I turn the radio off to begin writing this.
There’s just so much to know, not just about the language, though that too, but also about the users of the language, where they are, what concerns them, what they use the language FOR.
For instance, I can now recognise when someone’s speaking Swedish with an Arabic accent (it’s not hard) and notice that the content of what’s being said is coherent (it’s possible to be a muslim and an anti-racist, the girl was explaining.)
Of course, it’s likely that unless we choose to specialise in a particular topic (gang crime in southern Sweden, knitting), we’ll never know everything there is to know about it.
But certain aspects of the language (the most frequently-used grammatical, phonological and lexical elements) become more and more familiar with exposure and practice.
Which gives our brains an ever-greater chance of piecing together the phonemes entering our ears into something we will find meaningful.
It’s not that you study the grammar, memorise the word lists, then turn on the radio or TV and understand everything.
Nor that you immerse yourself in the media or society using the language you want to learn and so pick up the language rapidly and effortlessly.
If I could pour Italian into your brain, download the language in an instant though a USB port in your skull, so you had it all there, ready to go, as soon as you opened your mouth or someone spoke to you?
You’d save a lot of money on Italian courses, of course.
But it wouldn’t change the fact that you were a foreigner who doesn’t know who’s who in Italian politics, or why it matters.
You might still drink cappuccino in the afternoons.
“How long will it take until I can understand everything I hear?”
You’ll never understand everything you hear.
You don’t in your own language, though on a day-to-day basis that doesn’t present a problem.
Give it a couple of months of full-time study (a couple of years, part-time) and you’ll begin to be able to get by.
To be proficient, six months to a year of full-time study should do it, depending on which language we’re talking about.
Five or six years of part-time courses and/or self-study will have a similar effect.
But proficent doesn’t mean ‘everything’.
There’ll always be stuff you hear on the radio that makes you go “Boh?”
But at some point?
You’ll be OK with that.