Native and Fluent Speakers May Read Silently

You can write an email message in only a few of the languages.

Why?  Because most of the languages that have ever existed are spoken languages, and they have never taken on written form.  Humankind was communicating verbally for thousands of years, and in hundreds of different languages, long before anyone figured out how to use written symbols and letters to communicate.

Indeed, I expect that the majority of languages in existence today are verbal languages and have never been written down.  (Not sure about that because anthropologists have for many years been working furiously to document and code in written form the world’s remaining languages to prevent any more from disappearing).

The point is that language, our means of communication, has always been first and foremost nonverbal (womb, warm, hugs, kisses, milk) and verbal (hear sounds, make sounds, hear words, make what sounds like words, hear words, say words, and so on and so forth).  I was participating in conversation just fine for about the first 4 years of my life before someone stuck a pencil in my hand.  (I remember those early pencils, it seems that I was made to write for days, and those pencils would wear a groove in my middle finger between the first and second knuckles).

That brings me back to the title of this blog article:  Native and Fluent Speakers May Read Silently.  That is, they are the only ones who are permitted to read silently.  For the rest of us schmucks that are learning another language and are not yet fluent, we should not be reading silently.  Wherever and whenever possible, we should be reading ALOUD the language we are learning, and we should be saying ALOUD the language we are learning.

Say it ALOUD, and hear yourself saying it ALOUD, in order to accelerate your progress at learning a new language.  And when you’re tired of talking to yourself, or when you think you’ve been talking with yourself too much, or when society is concerned that you’ve been talking with yourself too much, get out there and talk with someone else in your new language.  You need to hear it and speak it, ALOUD, to best train your ear to hear it, and to best train your tongue to speak it.

Remember!  If you are a native or fluent speaker, you may read silently.  If not, let’s hear you!