motorollin wrote:
Speaking, listening, reading and writing are all handled by different parts of the brain. That's why different types of aphasia affect different language modalities. It is perfectly possible for someone to have good reading/writing skills and not so good speaking/listening skills. You probably just need more practice at conversing in German to catch up with all the work you have done on your reading and writing skills.
For sure! unfortunately I'm much happier with theory than practice :-) It's the same with Music, I am happy to read a book and compose a piece of music... actually practising a piece to perform... gah, that's boring ;-)
It's odd though, as most musicians I know, actually enjoy the performance much much more than the theory... weird...
Also remember that spoken language is fleeting - once it has been said, it's gone and you have to process it mentally (i.e. remember it while you're translating it). And with spoken language you are under pressure to conform to the conventions of conversation - i.e. to speak fluently and not pause to work out what you're going to say next. At least with reading the words remain on the page indefinitely so you can take your time translating them, and with writing you can take as long as you want to work out the next word.
It's true! When reading German sentences I often flick back and forth picking up the nouns and verbs in the order that I expected them... It's only recently that I have learned to read linearly and build the sense of the sentence in my head... not easy given the length of German sentences :-D
I really enjoy reading and to a lesser extent listening to German... Writing I find difficult, but speaking is something that is still alluding me... My English gets in the way!
