Effective Communication Through Listening and Reading

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann.

Here I am again in Palm Springs. My wife and I bought a little house here so that we can come here in the winter. We have to come down now to fix it up. I want to talk about communicating, communicating and language learning. I read somewhere that they think language ability in humans was developed so that humans could collaborate in a hunt or whatever it was that primitive human beings did. The ability to communicate intelligently, in other words the language skill, gave them a tremendous advantage as a species. When we learn a language, communicating is what it's all about.

We learn in order to communicate and we learn by communicating. To me, communicating includes listening. When we're listening, we're communicating. When we're reading, we're communicating. When we're reading grammar rules, we're not communicating. That's not to say that we don't have to look at grammar rules to try to remind ourselves of how things work in the language, but the main way we learn is through communicating. In my own case, as you know, I put a lot of emphasis on input. I had an opportunity, two nights ago, to spend an evening with a delightful Russian couple who live in Palo Alto.

To me, it was almost like a reward for the years I've spent listening and reading in Russian. They invited me for a wonderful Russian meal and I'm going to post a link to the post that I made on Facebook showing a picture of the meal and a picture of the couple, Alyona and Anna Toile. I'm also going to post a link to a post on Facebook that Alyona made about my visit. I was visiting with them because, particularly Alyona, is part of a project called Mulbabar, which is a Russian project whereby journalists, including a very famous Russian journalist called Dmitry Yakovlev, want to create a new media which takes some of the tension and hype out of the present atmosphere of I would even say hate that seems to be prevailing in Russia; the hate and antagonism, specifically between Russia and Ukraine, but in a broader sense.

I very much support that initiative, but beyond that for me to spend an evening talking in Russian, eating Russian food, experiencing that Russian atmosphere that I so much enjoy was a reward. Just a final note: Communicating of course includes speaking, but it's not only speaking.

Just out of curiosity, I looked at my statistics at LingQ and I have read well over a million words in Russian, according to my statistics at LingQ, so I have read much more than that. Every day, just about, I download from Ekho Moskvy two, three or four interviews and each interview is 30-40 minutes long. I'm sure I've listened to six-seven thousand hours of Russian over the last nine-10 years. How much have I spoken?

Again, mostly I've spoken with our tutors at LingQ. We keep those statistics, I've spoken 150 hours. Throw in another 10 or 15 hours where I've met people like the other evening and spoken. So I have listened 50 times more than I have spoken. That's not because I don't want to speak, I just haven't had the opportunity, whereas there's ample opportunity to listen and read. Listening and reading IS communicating.

It's a wonderful way to communicate, it prepares you for those great opportunities when you can actually talk and use the language. And, of course, the more you talk the better you get at speaking, but listening and reading is also communicating. That's kind of the point I wanted to make tonight and I'm going to make another video on the subject of communicating and listening and what we should listen to and what we should read to make it meaningful.

Thanks very much, bye for now.