What is more important?

[杰.克]

Are speaking, listening, reading and writing all equally important skills? or is it okay to focus on some more than others?

 

To the chargrin of my Chinese Teachers, I personally have concluded writing is not important in comparison with the others. I have ignored the ability to write to focus on what I deem to be more important skills.  I've skipped dictation classes, never bought squared paper, barely know a dot from a stroke and all in all, its really not impacted me that much. (P.s Im about 8.5 years in and operate most of my life in Chinese Language environment) Yes I may seem like a cultural lout to my chinese teachers, but if I had never studied listening or speaking or reading, it would impact my life much more.

 

Keen to see if other people have spectrums of importance is their mind or if you think you cannot say which is more or less important as they are all equally so.

[Moshen]

Your Q&A is seriously flawed. 

 

You are asking people to give a general opinion.  But then in your second choice, you worded it as something about one's own studying.  These are two entirely different issues, and they are almost completely independent of one another.

 

Someone can believe all four skills are, in theory, equally important and yet not be putting that into practice in their studying.

 

Also, someone can not have any belief about your main question and yet be studying one skill more than another.

[杰.克]

No worries, let me know how i can reword the 2nd answer to be more fair - if you write below, I will copy and paste 

[ablindwatchmaker]

In my opinion, listening ability is the most important of the four, if we are looking at the overall contribution, over time. Listening ability is the hardest aspect to develop both in terms of the time required and the amount of fatigue it generates, especially prior to reaching an advanced level. However, because of how well listening ability transfers to the other skills, it also provides the greatest return on investment. 
 

[Guest realmayo]

It's an impossible question to answer. For instance, if you want to be really good at speaking, then it's probably best not to do any speaking for the first few weeks or months and concentrate mainly on listening, if possible!

 

On 10/22/2021 at 8:12 PM, ablindwatchmaker said:

Listening ability is the hardest aspect to develop both in terms of the time required and the amount of fatigue it generates

 

That's interesting -- I'd never thought of listening as all that difficult, or at least not all that exhausting. Perhaps it seems that way because learners are more likely to be forced to listen to speech at a much higher level than they're comfortable with, and less likely to be compelled to read through text at a much higher level than they're comfortable with (because it's harder to walk away from a conversation than to put down a newspaper).

[abcdefg]

On 10/22/2021 at 1:45 PM, 杰.克 said:

Are speaking, listening, reading and writing all equally important skills? or is it okay to focus on some more than others?

 

Of course it's OK to focus on the aspects of the language you find most helpful in meeting your personal goals.

 

When I lived in China, I thought conversation was the most important skill for me to have. I was where I most felt a need for proficiency. Reading followed that, and writing took up the rear. Now that I'm in the US, no longer immersed 10 or 12 hours a day in a Chinese environment, I'm spending more time reading and even a little bit of time writing. 

[ablindwatchmaker]

@realmayo

 

I definitely experience major fatigue after an intensive listening session. Granted, it’s usually hard material, and I do it for 2 hours or more, but compared to other activities it is noticeable. In the past, it has negatively affected my sleep, and even my weightlifting routine, if I do too much of it. I’m  also never able to do it after other hard activities, or if I haven’t had enough sleep. The difference In my comprehension when watching something like 锵锵三人行 can drop from understanding nearly everything to almost nothing, based on level of fatigue. I find it to be the most difficult aspect by far, but then I am never listening to anything at my level and am always striving to understand harder material, so there is that. 
 

@abcdefg

 

I agree, it is ultimately dependent on what your goals are and where you are in the learning process. 

[vellocet]

1. Listening

2. Speaking

3. Reading

4. Writing

 

Some of the best Mandarin speakers I know are illiterate.  I was at a restaurant with one and immediately handed the menu to him because his skills are clearly superior.  He handed it back with a rueful grin and said, "It's all you, I can't read."  My own reading skills aren't that great but long ago I made a special study of the characters used on menus, and that has paid off handsomely in the years since.  If I can't read it, probably I don't like it.  

 

Listening is most important because if you can't understand what people are saying, what use is speech?  Writing is trashed all the time because of the rise of smartphones. Heck, I don't even write in English any more. I feel that "typing" Chinese should be separated out into a different skill.  

[alantin]

@杰.克, I also find the question impossible to answer after reading your original post and thought it better to leave it unanswered.

I think a better one would be to ask how important the respondent finds each skill on the scale of 0 to 5 or to put them in the order of importance.

My order for Chinese would probably be:

1. Reading

2. Listening

3. Speaking

4. Writing

 

But writing being last in the list by no means means that I think it should be neglected. I only relatively focus more on the others.
 

I believe the four skills are fundamentally equally important but I would stress them differently depending on circumstances. In general people who read a lot have larger vocabularies, which affects their communication prowess. Language is also the tool for thinking and even if an average person would only use a fraction of their active vocabulary in everyday chatting with people, large vocabulary allows for conceptualization of more and more complex things than a small one does. Would someone need to think in a foreign language? I frequently do this and I've also heard of some research suggesting that problem solving in a foreign language leads to more objective results than doing it in your native language.

 

Communication is exchanging information either orally (or with your hands if you use sign language) or in writing, so while for some people it seem to be very easy to say that they don't need to write, it is difficult for me to distinguish these two from each other in importance. The role of writing and reading is increasing all the time as digitalization continues to permeate our lives and the world literacy rate is now about 86% compared to 31% 100 years ago and 12% 200 years ago.

 

But in the context of language learning I think the importance depends entirely on what you need to do with the language. In my case I'm fluent or semi-fluent in three foreign languages; English, Japanese, and Chinese.

 

In addition to personal life, I use English extensively in my professional life and if I look at the time spent doing these four activities, I'd say reading, listening, and writing far outweigh speaking. However I need to be able to converse fluently (while also taking the minutes) in meetings, and also talk with coworkers and friends.

 

I use Japanese almost exlusively to talk with family and friends so speaking and listening are predominant skills. I'm literate after a fashion. I can chat in Japanese on Line with my spouse's family but reading books is a chore. I haven't read a Japanese book in years. I know my Japanese vocabulary is a lot smaller than my English vocabulary, but I know how to use the words I have very efficiently and being at a level of probably a Japanese first year high-school student doesn't impede anything I need to do in Japanese.

 

I'm learning Chinese and I'm currently gradually introducing it to my work. Because of the pandemic, there is currently not much chances to communicate with Chinese people at work (some, but not much) but this will likely change as the pandemic subsides. In the future I wish to use Chinese in a similar fashion in my professional life as I use English now, so this is guiding my current efforts in learning the four skills. I have invested heavily in face-to-face communication with tutors and listening practice in the fist few years and this year I have invested more and more time in extensive reading while keeping up the sessions with tutors. I also practiced the characters a lot in the beginning, but more recently I have begun practicing handwriting more seriously and I find it also supports my character recognition while reading. Reading in turn has been found to be the most efficient method for accumulating vocabulary, which in turn aids speaking and listening skills.

 

 

tl;dr; The four skills are equally important and they mutually support each other to form well rounded language skills. However it depends on what you want to do.

[ablindwatchmaker]

I need to clarify my position a little more. 
 

In my opinion, any discussion of what is more or less important needs to take the following four things into consideration. 
 

1. How long it takes to develop a high-level of proficiency in the relevant aspect/domain. With respect to comprehension (listening and reading), this would mean being able to read native texts on a variety of subjects without recourse to a dictionary, and it would mean being able to understand things like podcasts, television shows, and audiobooks without the use of subtitles or transcripts. With respect to output (speaking and writing), high-level proficiency would mean being able to communicate ideas clearly using a broad vocabulary and proper grammar without strain to either the speaker/writer or the recipient. Defined as such, I think it is pretty evident that listening ability probably takes more time than any of the other three, by a pretty wide margin; reading takes a substantial amount of time, but less than listening. Speaking and writing, on the other hand, can be developed quite quickly if you have a solid foundation in reading and listening. You can find many, many examples of people who can speak and write decently well after an intensive study-abroad program, especially speaking, but still struggle to understand native content at a high level. I’m not even taking into consideration the fact that many of these people actually lack a strong foundation in comprehension before they are able to speak or write, yet still manage to pull it off. Speaking and writing, especially if you have a strong foundation in comprehension, take far less time than reading and listening. Listening takes longer than any of the other three to fully develop. 
 

2. How much the ability in question assists in developing the other abilities. In this case, reading and listening are closer, but I still give the edge to listening, though I could see an argument for reading. Speaking and writing are not going to improve your comprehension as much as your comprehension will improve your speaking and writing. 
 

3. Where you are in the process. If you’ve managed to acquire strong abilities in  listening and reading, then the obvious next step is to improve your output. Additionally, if you are in the target country/environment and need to be able to communicate, then speaking and writing become more of a priority. You still need to have decent comprehension, but past a certain point your output ability will become more important to develop further. 
 

4. Your goals. As @imron would say, you get good at what you practice, so if you want to be a good speaker, you need to speak. If you want to write well, you need to write. That said, comprehension assists in improving those aspects more than the reverse, so over the course of your studies, you will still have to put a lot of time into developing them. 
 

Taking all of these things into account, I maintain that listening and reading are the most important, followed by speaking and writing. This is why the traditional language learning environment is so poor for developing real proficiency. It’s 90% output with negligible focus on comprehension, and the results of this approach show. People in traditional classroom settings who don’t have the time to immerse have terribly low proficiency in the language and graduate with degrees that are worthless as indications of proficiency in the language. Ideally, you could spend most of your time immersing and then attend to class to clarify grammar and work on output, but most students are burdened with tons of unrelated classes and time-intensive output activities that really make it hard to immerse enough. 
 

Sadly, you will likely just have to stomach the nonsense and then when you graduate you can begin to actually learn the language, which is what I had to do. 

[Moshen]

Quote

However, because of how well listening ability transfers to the other skills, it also provides the greatest return on investment. 

 

I don't understand how listening practice would have any transfer at all to reading.  Please explain.

 

After all, if you never learned Chinese characters, you might be able to listen and speak but not read one whit.

[alantin]

On 10/23/2021 at 12:52 PM, Moshen said:

I don't understand how listening practice would have any transfer at all to reading.  Please explain.

 

After all, if you never learned Chinese characters, you might be able to listen and speak but not read one whit.

 

In my own experience reading skills transfer to listening more easily but not always.

There are English words that I thought for years were different words until at some point I realized that the real pronunciation was so completely different than what I had imagined countless times reading them that I had learned the "listening" and "reading" versions for them separately. I recognized and used the different versions happily for years but never realized they were one and the same word. Two examples that come to mind: "lingerie" and "queue".

 

However with Chinese I find that listening does help guessing words when you know one character but are a little vague about the other. In these cases it is often easy to guess the right pronunciation of the other character based on the first and the overall context if you are familiar with the pronunciation and the meaning of the word.

[phills]

On 10/23/2021 at 5:52 PM, Moshen said:

I don't understand how listening practice would have any transfer at all to reading.  Please explain.

 

After all, if you never learned Chinese characters, you might be able to listen and speak but not read one whit.

 

From my experience, there are 2 parts to reading.  One is decoding the characters, second is understanding what is said.  Decoding is not that hard once you've solidly memorized the characters.  After you get comfortable with decoding, you're sometimes going to be better at decoding than parsing the sentences & understanding what's being said (depending on the type of text naturally).

 

After reading, say, your first couple million characters, you'll run into situations where you can turn a wall of text quickly & (mostly) correctly into a wall of sounds.  But then you realize you don't understand those sounds at all, thus forcing you to treat it as some kind of puzzle and to try to transform the sounds/text into something comprehensible in your head.

 

If you want to read fluently, you need to be able to do the puzzling-out part as fast / error-free as possible, without tiring.  Same with listening -- you decode the sounds but again you need to parse it and puzzle-out what's said.  If you're good at the second part, that'll transfer to your reading, and vice versa.

[Moshen]

Quote

After reading, say, your first couple million characters, you'll run into situations where you can turn a wall of text quickly & (mostly) correctly into a wall of sounds. 

 

I'd like to hear about this from those who can read a foreign language but not speak it whether or not they indeed create a "wall of sounds" when they read.

 

I'm not sure I even do this when I read English very quickly.

 

In short, you have a particular theory of reading, and I'm not convinced that it is correct.

[alantin]

On 10/23/2021 at 11:25 AM, ablindwatchmaker said:

I maintain that listening and reading are the most important, followed by speaking and writing. This is why the traditional language learning environment is so poor for developing real proficiency. It’s 90% output with negligible focus on comprehension, and the results of this approach show. People in traditional classroom settings who don’t have the time to immerse have terribly low proficiency in the language and graduate with degrees that are worthless as indications of proficiency in the language. Ideally, you could spend most of your time immersing and then attend to class to clarify grammar and work on output, but most students are burdened with tons of unrelated classes and time-intensive output activities that really make it hard to immerse enough. 

 

I find it is also orders of magnitude easier to put in quality time listening, reading, and even writing, than it is speaking. I have had several one hour conversation practice sessions each week with online tutors for about two years now. I record the tutors' voices during the sessions and then cut out the silences to end up with recordings that I can listen to later. I usually end up with about 20-25 minutes of the tutor speaking with the rest being me speaking for probably about 30 minutes and the remainder being silence or me fumbling for words. This gives me about 30 minutes of focused speaking practice per each one hour conversation class. I have two or three classes every week on average, which gives me about 5 hours of speaking practice per month. In contrast I can easily get 5 hours of reading practice in a weekend if I'm in the mood to dig into a book and countless hours of listening hours listening to my recordings and other material. Even writing practice beats speaking for me if I write 15 minutes every day.

 

This is quite little speaking practice compared to the other skills and I believe I'm someone who focuses on speaking/conversation practice quite a lot. When I'm focusing on conversation practice, I can have up to six of these classes a week! Even for someone living in China, I don't believe they will be regularly spending more than a few hours every day actually actively producing spoken Chinese. Though they will likely have the practice spread out more over the day.

 

This leads me to believe that speaking is something that you will pick up relatively easily once your foundation is laid down properly with the input from reading and listening and my own experience learning English seems to confirm this. I didn't really have any trouble beginning to speak English after studying it in school for ten years, reading dozens of books, and spending countless hours playing computer games and watching television in English when I was a kid. I began studying English when I was nine, but I didn't really have anyone to speak English with until I was an adult.

 

So maybe I'll change the order of my list of importance to Reading, Listening, Writing, Speaking. ?

[Guest realmayo]

On 10/23/2021 at 11:25 AM, Moshen said:

In short, you have a particular theory of reading, and I'm not convinced that it is correct

 

We “hear” written words in our head
Sound may have been the original vehicle for language, but writing allows us to create and understand words without it. Yet new research shows that sound remains a critical element of reading.

...

In other words, Broca's area responded to silent reading much in the same way auditory neurons respond to text spoken aloud—as if Broca's area was generating the sound of the words so the readers heard them internally. The finding speaks to a debate about whether words are encoded in the brain by a neural pattern symbolic of their meaning or if they are encoded via simpler attributes, such as how they sound. The results add to mounting evidence that words are fundamentally processed and catalogued by their basic sounds and shapes.

From:

- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-we-read-we-recognize-words-as-pictures-and-hear-them-spoken-aloud/

 

 

Personally, I'm increasingly convinced that a negative effect of characters is that, if we learn new vocabulary from reading texts and dictionary definitions, we never 'force' that word into our heads as a sound unit - but just as a viusal code that we must decipher to discover its meaning. I think that's a problem. So these days when I'm learning new vocabulary, I'll make sure to test myself on pinyin->word and English->word as well as the more traditional 汉字->word.

 

 

[ablindwatchmaker]

@Moshen

 

Listening definitely helps with reading, for several reasons: 

 

1. Listening allows you to understand what is being emphasized where punctuation and grammar are lacking or inadequate. When I was reading and then listening to the same book, I often noticed that sentences that confused me while reading became clear after listening, because the speaker’s intonation was enough to clear up the ambiguity I had when reading. 
 

2. Deconstruction of meaning. As @phills suggested, beyond decoding there is comprehension speed—decoding is only a small part of the battle.  Listening enables you to increase your comprehension speed, which very obviously translates to reading, once decoding is no longer an obstacle. 
 

3. As @alantin said, when you learn words through listening and then encounter their written form, if you know one of the characters you can often learn the other. 
 

4. Listening improves your anticipatory skills while reading. Language consists of many repeating patterns, and if you have been exposed to these patterns through extensive listening, you will have less trouble with your processing speed while reading. 
 

Heritage speakers with a strong foundation in listening who have no prior exposure to the written word learn how to read much faster than non-heritage counterparts. I’m not sure if there are any studies on this, but I would be shocked if it weren’t true. It has certainly been my experience over the years. 

[Guest realmayo]

Found this elsewhere:

 

Psychologists have become increasingly interested in the phenomenon of ‘inner speech’: the internal conversation that occupies many of our waking moments. Reading colonises that inner dialogue in varied ways. If you are asked silently to read words with long vowels (as in cape) you will do so more slowly than if the vowels are short (as in hat). If you are told about a certain fictional character who speaks fast, you will read their speeches more quickly than those of a character with a more leisurely speaking pace. Such findings show that you as a silent reader are nevertheless sounding out the words: you are not processing the text purely at some abstract level of meaning, but rather are articulating those voices for yourself in your head.

[alantin]

On 10/23/2021 at 1:37 PM, realmayo said:

Personally, I'm increasingly convinced that a negative effect of characters is that, if we learn new vocabulary from reading texts and dictionary definitions, we never 'force' that word into our heads as a sound unit - but just as a viusal code that we must decipher to discover its meaning. I think that's a problem. So these days when I'm learning new vocabulary, I'll make sure to test myself on pinyin->word and English->word as well as the more traditional 汉字->word.

 

If word can be encoded in the brain as a sound unit, why not as a visual unit as-well? How about people who are deaf from birth, use sign language as their first language and learn to read the same script as the rest of us. How do they encode word in their brains?

Sound may be the primary attribute for storing words most people, but is it the only one?

[Guest realmayo]

On 10/23/2021 at 11:51 AM, alantin said:

How about people who are deaf from birth

 

Some stuff on the internet suggests that if they use sign language, they see hand shapes.