Sup doods?

I could just have well written Italian comprehension, Greek comprehension and so on.

Comprehension.

The elephant in the room.

The big k.

There is  often a focus on speaking within the language learning circles. But perhaps going against the flow here, I think that comprehension is a more difficult skill to master.

If  you want to start talking, start with these five hundred sentences in your preferred language, and then, well … talk.  There is no need to buy expensive courses etc, although (again swimming against the tide) I would also buy a grammar book and dictionary.

However, learning these 500 sentences won’t enable you to understand much, even though you can talk a bit about yourself. (They are based more or less on conversation topics that have come up over the years in language exchanges that I have done).

Understanding native speech takes time, and I don’t so much mean face to face conversation (where with luck your conversation partner will modify their speed if you can’t understand), but the television, a film or the radio.

I have Afrikaans radio on in the background (I can’t stand silence), and understand not a word.

My current language experiment is to slowly work my way through an Afrikaans audio book (Kobra if you must know), and at the end, see how much of say the radio, that I can understand.

It might be a crazy experiment. We will c.

Baci,

MF