Inspired by guest Veronique Greenwood‘s three-part series (part 1, part 2, part 3) about learning a foreign language, some of the contributors to LWON volunteered for a week’s worth of essays about their own encounters with the challenges of linguistics.
When my younger son was in high school, my wife and I realized we would need to hire a tutor for his French class. Sometimes I would overhear their lesson, and I would think: He’s hopeless. I didn’t mean that word in a critical or disapproving way. If anything, I invoked it out of empathy. I had been hopeless with high school Spanish. How hopeless? To this day it’s the course I avoid attending in my version of the nightmare where you wind up one credit short of graduation.
I was perhaps less empathetic about my son’s reading habits. His school-issued paperback copies of The Odyssey and King Lear were full of doodles. I printed out an essay I thought he might like—all of two pages long—and left it on the living room coffee table, where it sat unread for months, until I finally surrendered and threw it away. He never read for pleasure. He’s the son of two writers: How dare he not read for pleasure? Your parents are pleasure-givers. Here’s a book. Have some pleasure. Are you experiencing pleasure yet?
One day I decided to accept the fact: His brain just doesn’t work that way. Mine certainly doesn’t. How many times have I felt frustration at the slowness of my progress through a book? How often have I found out after finishing a book or a short story that I’d missed a major plot point? How often—
Oh, wait.
I asked my son if he was a slow reader. Yes, he said. Then I asked him if frustration feeds his disinclination to read for pleasure. Yes, he said.
And then I asked myself: Does a correlation between reading speed and a facility for learning foreign languages actually exist?
I thought back on Spanish class, and a sense memory gripped me: the dark cloud in the head that came from trying to translate effortlessly. Vocabulary memorization and verb conjugations in the first year were bad enough; I couldn’t help noticing that some classmates were able to pull the past tense out of the air, seemingly without thinking. By the end of the second year most students were able to hold rudimentary conversations, seemingly without thinking. By the end of the third year nearly all students were conversing fluently, seemingly without thinking.
I tried to will myself to speak Spanish without thinking. Nothing doing. The dark cloud would appear in my head, the vast fog I was trying to bypass—the fog between English and Spanish. I stopped trying to bypass it, or cut through it, or whatever one does to get to the other side of brain fog, in the fourth year, when some of my fellow students started swanning into the classroom saying that they’d begun dreaming in Spanish.
Dreaming in Spanish? Chingate.
I resigned myself to having a brain that needs to hear the word in English in my head first. But now, thinking about the similarities between my son and myself, I realized that that’s how I read, too: I have to hear the words in my head first.
I asked my son if that was his experience. Yes, he said.
Surely the need to hear the word in my head in reading English and the need to hear the word in my head in translating into Spanish were related? I decided to conduct a wholly unscientific survey. I thought of my wife and older son: They both read quickly and pick up languages easily. I thought of a friend who is the fastest reader I know; he speaks French fluently, as in appearing-on-talk-shows-in-France fluently. I polled the eight students in a class I was teaching at the time: 100 percent correlation. When the members of LWON were considering a week of posts on linguistics (which is to say, this week), I mentioned the possible correlation in an email thread; within minutes came three responses:
“I too am a slow reader and struggle with languages. And my wife is the opposite.”
“Fast reader. I was good at languages, but I didn’t keep going with any and lost abilities over time.”
“I am a fast reader and awesome at languages.”
Does this correlation really exist? You tell me. Really. Please go to the Comments section below and say whether this correlation applies to you and to people you know. That survey won’t be scientific either, but at least it might get a conversation going—in whatever language you choose.
Let me be the first to spoil your 100%. I’m a fast reader, the words just flow into my brain, I hardly know I’m reading. I’m a mediocre language-learner; I’m slow and have the same mental fogbank you describe, and I have to translate every word I hear. The only time that meaning ever appeared effortlessly in my brain was when an Italian toddler said, “Guarda, Mama! Guarda la luna!” This did give me the hope that if I persevered, I could understand people other than toddlers. But I didn’t persevere. Anyway, I think my data point is around 50%.
My husband is the world’s slowest reader, but something of a language prodigy. I’m a fast reader and medium-ish language learner.
Another Ann who is a fast reader but terrible at languages.
I am truly the world’s slowest reader. This is know by all who know me. And yes, I need to hear words in my head! I often have to start a book reading it out loud before I can concentrate. But: I learn other languages easily, and am fluent in two besides the main one I’m writing in. Excellent post, all the same.
My experience correlates. I am a fast reader; after college I forced myself to hear words in my head as I read, to slow myself down, in order to enjoy good writing more. (It worked.) I’m quick to pick up languages.
My husband was dyslexic and a slow reader. He tried much harder to learn languages, than I did. He found it extremely difficult and had little success.
I fit the pattern (fast reader, languages come fairly easily) but neither of my children do. One reads fast but struggled with Spanish grammar (she’s actually a reasonably good communicator with decent vocabulary, but fails to get verb tenses, subject-verb agreement, or gender/singular/plural agreement right very much of the time), and the other reads slowly but is a whiz in Mandarin.
I’m a fast reader, and very good at languages. However, I still hear the words in my head when I read. I just hear them very quickly. My husband is a fast reader, but he’s less good at languages. I think he’s still better than the average bear at languages, though. I mutter to myself in French when I’m annoyed in public, and he often guesses what I mean even though he only had a year or two of French in high school.
I am a very fast reader but hopeless at other languages.
Slow reader. I love learning a second language now that I’m kinda immersed in it. But man, I’m terrible at it. It’s an eternal struggle for me to think outside of English.
I read fast, usually in gulps of two or more words at a time, and have to force myself to slow down to catch the meaning of every word. I used to learn languages very easily but haven’t tried to learn a new one in a long time. I actually think it has more to do with my ability to mimic new sounds than with my reading speed.
“I resigned myself to having a brain that needs to hear the word in English in my head first.” YES! One thousand times YES. I am dyslexic, a very slow reader, a very bad language learner. Other people’s brains fascinate me. In college I once sat across from a study buddy who read two or three pages for every one I read, and I finally asked her how she did it. When she shrugged and couldn’t answer, I asked instead if she could read to me out loud at the speed at which she reads in her head. I got a long, unblinking stare. She then politely explained that reading in ones head is not, in fact, like reading out loud. Apparently the trick is to take in three or four words at a time. So how could anyone read that quickly out loud? You can’t say two or three words at once. It has more to do with seeing the words as shapes, digesting them through a combination of contours on a page. Didn’t I realize my question was silly? Wasn’t the answer obvious? Well, no! I literally have a little narrator in my head when I read. The narrater is usually me, but I can change it to David Attenborough or Morgan Freeman or The Dude in The Big Lebowski if I want to, but no matter who it is, there must simply always always be a narrator. Maybe I missed that day in preschool when they taught how this whole reading in your head thing works?
I am good at languages and pick them up easier than most people. I read in several ways – when I am reading for pleasure I make myself slow down and “listen” to the text. When I am reading something I have to read but in which I am not that interested, I read in chunks (and likely miss a lot).
What I HAVE noticed is that there seems to be a correlation between pitch and the ability to carry a tune and language acquisition. Most of my friends who can sing are good at languages and most who can not are not. Thoughts?
I’m a slow reader and had trouble learning Spanish. But I did get to a point after five or six years of learning the language where I could speak Spanish pretty fast and with barely any thinking. (It was helped by a weeklong exchange program where I was forced to speak and listen to Spanish all the time.)
Responding to Kurt’s suggestion: I don’t fit your pattern. I’m very musical. I sang in a semi-professional chorus for 10 years.
I don’t fit the profile. I am a fast reader who is not good at learning foreign languages. But: my hearing is bad, at least in terms of distinguishing sounds, including English. I haven’t tried to just learn to read a language, but it would be easier than learning to speak/hear. I think the ability to distinguish sounds is an important component to learning a language.
Add one more where it’s correlated. I pick up languages pretty easily and read fast. I even have my Audible books sped up because they move too slow. 🙂 Like your co-worker, the ability definitely dissipates over time (I can’t figure out more than half of what my native speaker friends are saying on Facebook), but I’ve found it can come back with a few days of practice. @Kurt, add another correlation with music, too, I minored in vocal performance.
I’ve never thought about this before, very intriguing connections!
I am a fast reader and I can pick up languages fast. However, I cannot perform the simplest comprehension tasks if read to (ie, audio books) and dislike conducting any business via phone call as it takes a ridiculous amount of concentration/energy. I believe the key is how I think (ie process incoming information). I think verbally to myself. If I get a string of verbal instructions or anything that goes on too long/complex, they start competing with my internal voice which is trying to keep up. Similarly, I am very poor at thinking out loud to work my way to an answer, I must write things down, so that I don’t get in the way of my own ideas. Yes, my head is a very noisy place. 🙂
I imagine that a visual thinker could have totally opposing views to the above.
Thanks for participating, everybody. You might be interested to know that based on your feedback, I wrote a follow-up post: https://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2016/05/09/you-call-that-science/.