To Improve Comprehension DON'T Try to Understand

[0:00]experienced language learners accept uncertainty, accept that they don't fully understand, and yet they keep going. Hi there, Steve Coffin here today and today I want to talk about comprehension. To understand more, don't try to understand too much. And I'll explain. But first of all, if you enjoy my uh videos, please subscribe, click on the bell for notifications. And if you follow me on a podcast, please leave a review. I do appreciate it. So, to I mean listening comprehension, reading comprehension, comprehension to me is the most important goal in language learning. If we understand well, we will eventually speak well, eventually, as we have more opportunity to speak. If we don't understand very well, we can't have meaningful conversations, we can't enjoy movies, we can't enjoy books. We can't do all of the things that are going to improve our skills in the language. Of course we all want to speak well, but we need to speak a lot in order to speak well, but that comprehension is so key. And I know a lot of people struggle with comprehension. So, um, I want to give you a a hint, a tip about comprehension. And that is, don't try too hard to understand. In other words, accept the fact that as you are progressing in the language, there are a lot of times when you are not going to understand. And you still have to keep going and don't try to nail down what it is you're studying, say a lesson. Accept the fact that it's 60%, 40% comprehension and move on to the next. Uh and I I often mention Manfred Spitzer, the German neuroscientist who said the brain needs repetition, but the brain needs novelty. And I was talking to my brother who my gave an iPad to and who's working on link and he he says I always forget. I study the sentence and I keep on forgetting and I thought to myself, yeah, you're not supposed to try to totally understand and remember that sentence. You're supposed to just allow the language to kind of enter your brain and let the brain get used to it. And so my brother said, it's a bit like mowing a lawn. If the grass is high, then you have to set the lawnmower at a higher level in order to have an easier first pass through mowing the lawn. The second time through, you can set the blades a little lower. If you try to force yourself to push that lawnmower into very high grass, uh, you're not going to get there. It's going to be very hard work and you won't, you won't be able to to get the job done, depending on how long the grass is. Now, in theory, if you have to mow the lawn twice, you would think it's going to take you twice as long. But if in fact there's just too much resistance and you can't mow the lawn, you're not going to get the job done. So it's far easier, and I've had this experience and I'll show you the picture of my lawn and my lawnmower and how I adjust it. And it's much easier for me, particularly we've had a lot of rain, I haven't been able to mow the lawn. And so when I go in there, I have a first pass at a higher level, and then I have a second pass at a lower level. Every pass I pick up a little bit more. It's the same with the content that I learn from, listen to, read. First time I go through, I don't fully understand it. I may listen a second time. I may move on to other lessons, then I come back. And even on something as basic as the mini stories, I always pick up something the second, third, fourth time through. So, every time I mow that lawn, even I'm I'm flowing through it, I'm pushing the mower through it easily, but I'm getting a few more blades of grass. And on the, in that way, we will gradually enable our brains to get used to the language. Don't force yourself to try to understand if you can't understand. Move on to new material, bring in new words, bring in new context, some of which again, which you will understand, some of which you won't understand. Uh and I think it's very important that we have that sort of an attitude. I've said in other videos, uh experienced language learners accept uncertainty, accept that they don't fully understand, and yet they keep going. Push yourself forward, and then you can come back again for a second pass with the lawnmower. But I think very often the, the attempt to nail things down to fully understand is a major obstacle to comprehension, whether it be listening comprehension or reading comprehension. And the two do reinforce each other, as does the study of vocabulary. The goal of course is to understand everything or as much as possible, but before we get to that perfectly moan, lawn, we have to make quite a few passes and so we should be easy on ourselves and not be too demanding, you know, not expect perfect comprehension. And if we keep moving forward, we will eventually have better comprehension, understand more and if we have good comprehension, we will eventually have good speaking skills. So, thank you for listening and I have spoken before about comprehension, so I'm going to leave a couple of videos here that I did earlier on the same subject. Bye for now.