I’ve been reading a lot of material outside of LingQ without any audio content provided, and I’ve noticed an improvement in my listening ability consequently.
Now I’ve read that listening and reading are independent of each other, but I believe that reading can enhance your listening for a few reasons.
First, reading allows you to familiarize yourself with the sentence structure and composition of the language. As a result, when you’re listening, you can sort of have a script in your mind, and all of a sudden you can realize what’s been said, better.
These are just my thoughts, what do you LingQer’s think about my observation?
It is an absolute certainty. No doubt about it, reading and knowing words that way, attunes your mind to pick them up aurally. I have perceived this myself.
I agree and I think it must be a lot easier to do that when you’re learning a language that uses the same alphabet as your own native language, so you can easily imagine how the words would sound without actually hearing them. It must be very hard to learn a language where they use a different alphabet, such as Asian characters or Russian cyrillics where you’re not familiar with the pronunciation.
Of course, reading is very important.
Actually, you’ve named the reasons: you can familirize yourself with the sentence structure and composition of the new language. I can add: you can see the words in the context and guess a lot of them from this context or at least look up in the dictionary.
Listening is also important as a good exercise for the speaking in the future. But by listening we omit a lot - we can understand only the words and structures that we read before, the rest we omit because listening is a very quick process and our brains usually have not enough time to comprehend everything that we didn’t see before.
Agree completely @JerseyMark. If I were to approach Greek or Russian, the alphabet would be job #1. Asian languages I’m not so sure about, obviously with them it’s more of an ongoing process.
@williactv: you’re right: when you know a word, it’s easier to recognize it when you hear it!
At the same time, learning a language includes 4 skills: reading, listening, speaking and writing. The more you read, the more you’ll improve your reading skill; the more you listen, the more you’ll improve your listening skill, and so on. If you read a lot but don’t listent a lot, for example, you are likely to reach different levels in the two skills.