What 80% comprehension feels like

seriesofnonsequiturs:

jellyfishdirigible:

allthingslinguistic:

deutsian:

I know I should be on my hiatus but this is something I really need to share with you all; those who are intermediate can relate. Some guy called Marco Benevides visually demonstrated what it’s like to only understand 80% of a text

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Here is 98% comprehension

You live and work in Tokyo. Tokyo is a big city. More than 13 million people live around you. You are never borgle, but you are always lonely. Every morning, you get up and take the train to work. Every night, you take the train again to go home. The train is always crowded. When people ask about your work, you tell them, “I move papers around.” It’s a joke, but it’s also true. You don’t like your work. Tonight you are returning home. It’s late at night. No one is shnooling. Sometimes you don’t see a shnool all day. You are tired. You are so tired…

bold = uncomprehended 2%

Here is 95% comprehension

In the morning, you start again. You shower, get dressed, and walk pocklent. You move slowly, half- awake. Then, suddenly, you stop. Something is different. The streets are fossit. Really fossit. There are no people. No cars. Nothing. “Where is dowargle?” you ask yourself. Suddenly, there is a loud quapen—a police car. It speeds by and almost hits you. It crashes into a store across the street! Then, another police car farfoofles. The police officer sees you. “Off the street!” he shouts. “Go home, lock your door!” “What? Why?” you shout back. But it’s too late. He is gone.

bold = uncomprehended 5%

Here is 80% comprehension

“Bingle for help!” you shout. “This loopity is dying!” You put your fingers on her neck. Nothing. Her flid is not weafling. You take out your joople and bingle 119, the emergency number in Japan. There’s no answer! Then you muchy that you have a new befourn assengle. It’s from your gutring, Evie. She hunwres at Tokyo University. You play the assengle. “…if you get this…” Evie says. “…I can’t vickarn now… the important passit is…” Suddenly, she looks around, dingle. “Oh no, they’re here! Cripett… the frib! Wasple them ON THE FRIB!…” BEEP! the assengle parantles. Then you gratoon something behind you…

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And this really sums up how ***** annoying it can be to be an intermediate speaker. To be able to get the basic of gist of what’s happening, but never be able to get any kind of finer detail. I don’t think I’ve seen such a good illustration of intermediacy in a long time.

Source: http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-comprehension-feels-like

This reminds me of how I found reading A Clockwork Orange an interesting way of practising reading when you don’t know all the vocabulary. I haven’t done the numbers, but I’d say the first paragraph is between 95% and 80%, maybe around 90% comprehension: 

‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie,
and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our
rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though
dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers,
have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these
days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much
neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no
licence for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the
new vesches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with
velocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other vesches which would
give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy
Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you
could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, and this would sharpen you
up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what we
were peeting this evening I’m starting off the story with.

The interesting thing is that, because the book is a fictional version of English, you can trust as a reader that the author will make the story somehow comprehensible even though you don’t initially understand some of the words. (Although the book has been out for a while and I’m sure someone has made a glossary by now, that wouldn’t have initially been available.) 

Whereas with a book in a language you’re still learning, you’re used to understanding basically everything when reading in your first language, so sometimes you’re tempted to go look every single word up, which takes ages and makes the story less fun. 

So reading Clockwork Orange many years ago was the thing that made me stop reading books in French with a dictionary in hand. Instead, I started reading a chapter or more at a time and then going and looking up a much shorter list – the words that had appeared often or importantly enough that I still remembered them and yet hadn’t managed to figure them out from context. It was much easier to retain these words because by the time I looked them up, I already remembered what they looked like in French and had formed a couple loose hypotheses about their meanings. The ones that didn’t stick in my mind by the end of the chapter, I probably wouldn’t retain them even if I did look them up.

my copy of Clockwork Orange had a glossary included in the back, it wasn’t a first ed but it was a pretty early printing so that’s been included since way back, which doesn’t detract from the relevance at all it’s just… where’d you get a copy without the glossary

Science fiction and Fantasy readers have to learn a lot of slang and vocab from context. They have to learn cultural norms of the fictional world from context. I strongly believe that speculative fiction prepares those who read it for making connections from context in real life that is very useful for traveling or even just starting a new job.