I’ve wanted to record some casual reflections on my experience learning and getting better at Mandarin Chinese, particulary as someone whose productive language skills (namely, speaking) far outpace the receptive skills (listening). When learning a language, there’s a point when your command of it reaches an operational level, such that you can make your way through casual, day-to-day conversations. While graduating to this range of proficiency represents a significant milestone on the path towards mastery of the language, it also brings a new challenge: you can no longer have high confidence about exactly how much you understand of what is being said.
In the early stages of learning, when your listening ability is weak, you have high confidence that you understand almost nothing. When you hear an utterance in the language, you can make out almost no words, and so you have high confidence in your incomprehension in that moment. Perhaps you were able to make out just a few words in the entire sentence, and in this situation, most reasonable people would draw few conclusions about what is being said, or they would do so conservatively and cautiously.
When your listening ability reaches an operational level, and you start recognizing far more words in a conversation—say, 40% to 90%, depending on the context—you begin to face new threats to comprehension, brought on by mechanisms in the brain that previously lay dormant when your listening was weaker. Firstly, the totality of what you do manage to understand—despite it being incomplete—is enough for the brain to piece together cohesive thoughts and meaning. Your mind attends to this meaning automatically and eagerly, giving you the subjective experience of comprehension, even if it happens to be missing some important bits. This produces a kind of attentional selection bias that amplifies the illuminated areas of meaning, while pulling cognition away from what remains in shadow. Secondly, the brain is known to do a decent job filling in gaps wherever it encounters them, and so too in these situations, your understanding of what is being said might be supplemented by automatic inference, where the surrounding pieces of comprehended language are used to draw conclusions about what was missed. Although far better than random guessing, our powers of inference in these situations are imperfect.
These processes can happen either consciously or unconsciously. A conscious observer of this internal processing (with a healthy respect for the ambiguity it introduces) will rightly be left in a state of uncertainty and possible confusion about what was said. While a beginning language learner and a native speaker experience opposite extremes of confidence—one being sure of their lack of understanding, and the other certain of their comprehension—an intermediate learner has the burden of assessing the correctness of whatever meaning their language faculties cobble together. This is an experience marked by anxiety and skepticism. Perhaps more dangerously though, the listener who is oblivious and momentarily careless may walk away from the conversation with delusional confidence in the wrong idea.