Hacker News Reader

Comment by least | Hacker News Reader

I in fact did indicate that reading is the easiest in my post.

Speaking is harder than listening because it requires you to produce language and convey ideas from your own mind, with proficiency in pronouncing it in such a way that a native speaker might understand you. Things like idioms you may be able to infer meaning from interpretation when you are listening or reading but you will never use them in speaking unless you really truly know them. You’re correct that the variables of listening are out of your control (which is what makes it so difficult as compared to reading), but that does not make it harder than speaking.

In the military where the DLPT actually tests all three categories for proficiency, speaking is consistently and universally, regardless of target language, the one language learners are least proficient at.

View on HN

According to the test specifications.

You will not speak what you don't know. There is no such limit when others just say things in accents, speeds or using words you have no knowledge of.

Starting to speak and be correctly understood felt much easier than accurately understanding others in my two secondary languages, and the same for my fiancée who is a native English speaker with one secondary language.

> According to the test specifications.

...Which define proficiency nearly identically between the different skill sets. Your relative proficiency for speaking is expected to be worse until you reach native proficiency, where you are still worse at speaking than reading or listening, but it doesn't very much matter in most situations.

> You will not speak what you don't know.

Yes, and what you don't know with speaking is invariably greater than what you don't know with listening and reading, hence why everyone scores lower in proficiency with speaking relative to their ability in listening or reading.

> Starting to speak and be correctly understood felt much easier than accurately understanding others in my two secondary languages

If all my utterances in English were "I go school," "I eat pie," "I clean teeth," native speakers will easily understand what I'm saying. That doesn't mean I'm proficient or that it's easier to speak than it is to listen, just that I can create coherent and correctly understood sentences in English.

Re-read the thread.

Test results and fet experience are not connected.

Felt experience is not relevant. Your own evaluation of your speaking vs listening skills is incredibly irrelevant.

I'm surpised this is getting downvoted. The OPs assertion that listening is easier than speaking makes sense in the context he describes, a closed testing environment. In a more practical setting, as someone who is living in another country and learning the language, it is far easier for me to convey my meaning with limited vocabulary, than to listen and interpret another speaker, and especially a group conversation.

Certainly listening is easier than me speaking at the same proficiency as the other speaker, but in terms of what matters for using the language on a day to day basis, it is the other way around.

I'm a native Russian speaker but have forgotten most of it since I moved away from there. One thing that makes listening so much easier than speaking is that I can often infer context of a sentence based on just a few words, even if I don't know what the other 5 are. With speaking, I might know what I want to say but I get stuck on the one or two words that I just don't have in my vocabulary, and it crushes my ability to communicate(in Russian).

Obviously, everyone's mileage varies, this is just an anecdote :)

When we're speaking of proficiency and comparing them between reading, listening, and speaking, you look at them through a similar lens. How well can you understand or communicate ideas in the language? Can you convey complicated and nuanced thoughts in your target language? Can you understand those? How would your speaking ability compare to a well educated native speaker? How does it compare against a less educated native speaker?

You feel more fluent in speaking because you're only working within your own ability while listening you'll encounter things you don't understand or situations where it's difficult to understand things all the time. That doesn't mean you're more proficient at speaking and in most cases you aren't going to be nearly as proficient at speaking as you think.

Well apparently reading isn't so easy either since so many missed what the points being defended were.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com