My wife criticised me for not understanding a word the she thought I should know how to use and she laughed me to scorn when I said that when I understand 2500 words I will be at Intermediate level 1. She asked me if there were 10 intermediate levels!
So to prove to her that I could understand some of what was said to me I asked her to read a text of 172 words from my Russian textbook. There were 11 words that I didn’t quite remember, so I refreshed my short-term memory with those. I asked her to read 4-5 words at a time. The first three words were “Yesterday was Saturday.” When she spoke them in Russian, it sounded like “white noise”. I had to ask her to repeat them. After that I made good progress in translating the sounds I heard her speak, with a couple of repetitions of some of the phrases.
I realised that when I read a Russian text that what I hear in my brain is not exactly the same sounds as when my wife speaks them out loud.
My wife apologised when she realised that I was making progress in understanding Russian even if my speaking is not as good as she would like.
On the question of listening and reading,my stats received this morning show that my reading level is high, but my listening stat is pathetically low. So, I need to do much more listening. This is the only way to get through the white noise phase to the comprehension phase.
