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Comment by _puk | Hacker News Reader

> Listening comprehension is always the last of the skills to kick in

Is that actually the case?

I've always found it easier to follow a conversation in a language I am learning than to speak it.

You get an awful lot of context when listening, only need to put a few words in the right place and suddenly what you're hearing makes sense. You can get away without literally translating everything.

Speaking on the other hand, you can't converse properly without being able to find the right word at the right time and in the right place.

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Understanding spoken language means building a representation of the current sentence in your mind. For all but the shortest sentences, this can't be done word-by-word or even phoneme-by-phoneme. Humans have a working memory of 7+-2 items, and it gets quickly overloaded that way.

When we know a language well enough, we actually compress the sentence to a mental model that takes a lot less space in that working memory. But this only works when we know every word of the sentence and understand the grammar involved. Even one unresolved word often means the sentence expands from one chunk to at least three chunks.

Of course, your speaking skill also improves all the time. But at least in my case I feel like I can usually speak better than listen, in a new language (and I've had a few).

> I've always found it easier to follow a conversation in a language I am learning than to speak it

Absolutely not. I have lived abroad half of my life (sometimes with a language reasonably close to my mother tongue and sometimes very far)

Speaking is always easier. I can make my own speed and I never use an unkown word. Sometimes I have to be a bit creative how to explain things if I am lacking a word.

Following discussions is hard. People use words I don't know all the time. Slang, dialects, accents on top of that. And many of them just speak too fast. This can take many many years and might never disappear when certain speakers are involved.

News speakers or documentary movies might be a different story.

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