When I was young I had a lisp. As a child a lisp is not a serious problem. But as I entered puberty it became a liability. I remember my mom sending me to speech therapists with no success. Then one day I met a therapist that worked at my high school. In 30 seconds she showed me something that instantly corrected my lisp. With that new knowledge I went home and practiced my new speech. I never again lisped.
What she did that no other therapist had tried was use a model to demonstrate to me correct speech. She removed from her bookshelf a molded plastic design of the mouth and tongue. The model was human-sized and bisected vertically. When held from one side it looked like a head. When held from the other side the viewer could peer into the mouth and see positions of the teeth, tongue, and lower jaw. She showed me where a tongue was supposed to be placed when making a proper ‘s’. I could replicate that. I could finally speak normally. I was 15 years old.
I think of how simple the solution was and how strange that it was untried by therapists before. Each person’s cognitive style is different. Previous therapists had given me drills and worked on my psyche and described things in ways that I obviously did not understand. And one person came in with a different approach. A spacial model that resonated with my unique kinesthetic style. And it worked.
This story occurred to me on my way home from Chinese class on Tuesday. We had our first listening quiz and I scored 20%. I know I have one of the best vocabularies among my classmates. And I know my pronunciation is among the best in the class. People see that and they assume I am being falsely modest when I say I do not understand people when they speak Chinese. But Tuesday’s 20% grade shows that my problem is not an inflated sense of modesty.
One of my previous Chinese teachers told me of his own cognitive challenges. He has studied English for 20 years and by any judgment would be called fluent. Yet he shared with me that he only understands about 20% of television news programming. Something about the pace of speech combined with use of unfamiliar political or geographical terms disrupts his understanding. Like me, he hears one word he does not understand and focuses on it. As we focus on that mysterious word, searching in our memory for its definition, we miss entire sentences and lose track of the content. We have a cognitive style that struggles with real time information sprinkled with undefined components.
I see that great linguists listen with soft ears. They are able to hear sentences, casually dismiss the portions they do not understand, and infer the speaker’s meaning. I guess my hard hears–my sharp listening–is a detriment in language study. It is greatly impeding my studies.
So on this past Tuesday afternoon, taking the train home from my morning classes, I remembered my youthful struggles with speech and how a single person instantly corrected my impediment and changed my life forever. Is there an analog for a listening impediment? Is there a person that could explain better to me this idea of soft listening? That could help my reason incorporate unfamiliarity while extracting meaning? I hope so. I have a life to find this person and receive that single lesson.