Today, I want to give you seven reasons why I think we should
listen first before we read.
Now, I often talk about the importance of input, and I think many people
recognize the importance of input, but they sometimes wonder, is it
better to read first or listen first?
I believe everyone should do what they enjoy doing, because if you enjoy doing
it, you're likely to continue doing it.
So I will tell you what I do, and I will tell you the reasons why I do it.
I listen first.
And there are seven principal reasons, which I've.
Jawed it down.
Before I get into that, by the way, I looked up the perennial question of which
comes first, the chicken or the egg.
And there is an explanation online that the egg comes first because the egg
evolved from a reptile's egg, which then became a chicken at some point
in the evolutionary process, which to me doesn't really answer the question
because then all you're doing is Pushing back to the reptile, which comes first,
the reptile's egg or the reptile.
But anyway, leaving that aside to me, the first reason why listening comes first
is because it's the easiest thing to do.
It's the first thing I do in the morning.
I don't wake up and start reading and say Persian, which I'm learning now.
I get up and I get some audio, something that I'm listening to.
It might be something out of Radio Fardo.
It might be something from Link.
I start listening.
So it's the first thing I do.
It's the easiest thing to do.
You can do it wherever you are.
I can do it while preparing breakfast.
I do it in the car.
I do it if I'm going to clean up the garage.
It's just so easy to pick up some audio, put the AirPods in and listen.
And I do make an effort to listen in LingQ cause then at least I get
credit for those listening hours.
Whereas if I'm listening on some other app.
I'm usually too lazy to manually add those listening hours to my statistics.
Now, somewhat related to that is the idea that listening is something
you can do while doing other chores.
It's the same idea, but the benefit is different.
It's not because it's, it's the easiest thing to do, but it's because very
often when we're, Studying languages.
We kind of think, gee, I wish I were doing something else.
Whereas with listening, you can have the feeling that you are
killing two birds with one stone.
And you don't have to understand everything you're listening to.
But again, it's part of this idea that it's, it's easier to do.
And also part of the fact that again, and I'm going to get into exercise,
but first thing I do in the morning is I grab my Persian listening and I
grab my app that I have for exercise.
And I think the, the fact that I can listen to my Farsi
motivates me to do my exercises.
And the fact that I'm doing the exercises motivates me to
do the Farsi or the Persian.
So there's a symbiosis there, a synergy.
And so the multitasking capability strengthens our willingness to do both.
And so therefore, to my mind, the listening comes first.
The third point is exercise.
I wanted to delve a little more deeply into exercise.
There is research that shows that first of all, exercise
increases our cognitive ability.
It might have to do with blood flow or whatever, but that's not the point.
That is a fact.
And not only during the exercise, but after the exercise, if we increase our
flow of blood, or if we're engaged in exercise, we are able to learn better.
But there is very specific research that has been done on learning vocabulary,
which showed that if two groups are exposed to new vocabulary, And one group
is on a, say, stationary bicycle, and the other group is simply sitting there,
then the group that's on the stationary bicycle will learn the vocabulary better.
So I've actually experimented with this now, and I'm going to perhaps do
another video on the different ways you can exercise and study languages.
But apparently this works.
So exercise improves your ability to learn and to remember.
Number four.
Another reason why listening comes first.
It's because the listening will trigger the curiosity
from a number of perspectives.
So you're listening to something.
Maybe you don't fully understand it.
There are many words that you don't understand.
Maybe it's an interesting story.
You want to understand the parts that you missed so that you can
better understand the whole story.
So the listening is going to trigger you to do other things.
It's going to trigger you to read that story.
It's going to trigger you to look up words, possibly review the words.
So again, the listening.
It starts the process and triggers the curiosity, and that's very important.
Anything that keeps you going on your learning tasks is good.
Now, number five is that listening gives you a sense of familiarity
about the subject matter.
You may find in listening to something new that you're not
interested in it, or you may find that you're very interested in it.
But the listening creates the atmosphere.
You can't smell the smells, but you can feel the atmosphere of
whatever it is you're listening to.
I still remember when I listened to, you know, Russian novels or Italian novels,
you know, Atzi Dzieci in the case of Russian, while jogging around the field
here, or while, uh, you know, listening to I Primasi Sposi, pardon me if I like
19th century literature, while learning Italian, it gets you in the mood.
And once you have that mood and familiarity, it's so
much easier then to read.
Again, number seven, it's sort of related to this idea that you gain
some familiarity with the subject matter, but it's more than that.
It's this idea that you gain momentum.
So you have heard it.
You've heard the rhythm of the language and phrases and words have bounced
around in your brain and you've got the intonation and you've heard the
person's voice and all of that gives you momentum so that when you go to read.
Because when we read, inevitably we sub vocalize, you've got some
of that momentum, that intonation, and it pushes you forward.
You're not fighting inertia.
You've got some momentum going in your favor if you have been listening first.
So that's the seventh reason why I think listening comes first.
Now, people are going to say, when I listen, I can't maintain my focus.
That's all true.
And our ability to focus varies according to many different factors.
I, for example, find that I am least able to focus if I just sit in a
chair and don't do anything else.
I can't just sit there and listen.
I gotta do something.
Now, how much am I able to focus in?
It's going to depend on my level in the language, on my interest in the
subject matter, the audio quality, the narrator's voice quality.
All of these things affect how much you're able to concentrate.
Also, I Certain activities lend themselves more to staying focused.
So I'm able to focus quite well while driving.
If I'm exercising or lifting weights, or even trying to organize my garage, it's
much more difficult to stay focused.
It doesn't matter because if you can listen to a lot, you're getting this
rhythm, the intonation, as I've said, all those good things, but you're
also picking up words and phrases.
And you may not get them all, but whatever you do get goes into your
database, into your reserved memory.
And when we are reading or listening in the language, we're constantly predicting
what's going to happen in the language.
This is based on MRI research.
So we're trying to predict what's going to come at us.
We don't know.
To what extent these little bits and pieces of words and phrases that we
noticed while listening, even though we weren't totally focused the whole
time, to what extent is our ability to predict what's going to happen
influenced by these little bits and pieces, these words and phrases.
Similarly, when we go to speak, we know from research that we tend to
grab words That we are confident, confident we can use or grab structures
that we're confident we can use, and we kind of shape our utterances
around things that we're comfortable using, or we think are going to work.
And again, it's this error driven process.
It's either confirmed as being, you know, is going to working or not working.
But in many cases, I think, again, we will grab some of these words and phrases that
for whatever reason we heard or noticed while listening, even though we were
sort of fading in and out of the content.
While listening.
So I think people shouldn't take the position that I'm only going to
listen if I understand everything.
That's not how listening works.
You're going to understand better sometimes than at other times.
And you're going to be able to focus better in some situations
than other situations.
So to summarize, input is so important, listening and reading.
Obviously, we all want to get to speaking and we want to speak a lot, but we need to
have that listening and reading to give us the weapons, the words, the phrases, the
familiarity that we need in order to have successful interactions in the language.
If we listen and listen a lot, it's going to improve our ability to read.
It's going to improve our ability to learn from our reading.
And because it's easy to do, it's going to keep us going.
So I'm not saying that listening is more important, but if I'm
asked, which do I start with?
Then I start with listening for all of the reasons that I outlined.
And I'd be interested in hearing your views on the subject.
