#with french it was brutal BUT there's so many cognates

[rigelmejo]

still baffled and so happy my french reading skills just poof, became competent, over time, just from mostly forcing myself to read french i barely comprehended over and over. i sincerely doubt improving in chinese will be the same, but wow i hope it could be...

like. i remember when i actively had a plan for my french studies. first i read a grammar guide (did that in chinese too). Then I learned the 300 most common words (did that in chinese too), then i just started forcing myself to read. at first it was brutal. then it was manageable, and brutal if i picked something literary or in unfamiliar subjects. then it was manageable i just had to read slow. over time my reading speed got faster, with more struggling when the words were new. as expected, as soon as i could mostly give up using a dictionary - i did. 

Because i hate using a dictionary, so in the beginning i used it for words in context i KEPT running into and could not figure out the possible meaning of. Then eventually, i rarely ran into new words i needed a dictionary for just to figure out what the sentence might mean.

anyway... now in french, i can navigate a french site, read french comics, skim through a french book, read informational texts in french... I may need a dictionary for a new-topic text, but mostly i can just... handle french. I know where I still need to study: grammar (I need to do active practice grammar drills to improve my own writing/speaking for Active Use of the language), and listening comprehension (because I exposed myself to a lot of reading materials, but very few listening materials). Still - my goal had been to read my french books. So I have paused my french studies, because I can currently do what I set out to do in french. 

I am as usual a little in awe and a little bitter that French of all languages is the one I’ve had the most success studying and learning. 

Anyway I am... so freaking eager... to get to the point in chinese where i can just read and learn from context and minimal dictionary look up for the most frustrating words. I KNOW that if i’d like to learn that way... the most direct approach is just to make myself start reading. I know its brutal. It does work though...

I know each time I make myself watch a show without english subtitles, i improve (but wow does it Hurt My Brain while im doing it). I know when i sit down and make myself read, I improve (but wow does it Hurt My Brain). I know even if it’s just reviewing material i’m familiar with, my brain likes the context of the book/novel/show to help remember the new words. And the context makes stuff stick in my memory better than most anything else does. My memory in particular loves context. If it has context, it’s much better at remembering with less effort.

So just... exposure, along with grinding reference materials (for that initial exposure to a new word/concept), is what really cements things in my mind. 

[rigelmejo]

Dude... so many people disagree when you search difficulty of materials. Fascinating ToT

I’ve obviously looked up “easy books to start reading in chinese” and the little prince came up - as a novel with very few unique words. Actually reading it, I agree with this assessment.

With French? I just looked up “level to be in French when reading le petit prince.” You know, expecting A2-B1 as the recommended level (upper beginner/lower intermediate). Since that’s what it is for chinese for me (for other people I assume it’s a range of whenever they felt comfortable moving into non-graded readers in chinese). Well there were mixed opinions: some people agreed it’s doable at A2-B1 with a dictionary, or if you know the story already and sound words out if you need to. Others though said they did not read it until B2, that grammar and vocab still confused them at that point and they had to make use of a dictionary.

I see two things at play. One, is that just like with Chinese some people feel comfortable reading much earlier or much later in French. Me, and the people reading it at A2-B1, probably have higher willingness to read challenging material with less preparation? Versus people who choose to learn more first. Which also happens in chinese (people sometimes wait years to start reading until they’ve passed HSK 5-6, others start when they’ve learned HSK 4 or on the first year like me etc).

The other thing? Maybe part of the reason so many people seem to WAIT to read in chinese is i think there’s a difficulty tolerance you might need/might make life easier. French is so easy to read, I started reading within 3 months with lots of effort/dictionary, got comfortable with dictionary lookup when reading at 6 months, and got comfortable without a dictionary except for occasional use as desired by 1 year. I cannot imagine waiting 2 years to read something like le petit prince. I cannot imagine waiting that long to challenge myself, when with the way I approached reading I would’ve considered trying to read it when I hit the 6 month mark just so I’d feel more comfortable. I’m looking at it now and it’s easy to read if you know the story, and if not then with a dictionary. I do tend to think dense texts are actually easier to read sometimes when you don’t know the words - because you can find enough context to figure out the word. Whereas le petit prince is short enough that if you see a word like prey it might be an actual animal name, prey, you don’t necessarily know how specific the unknown-word is just that it was eaten. Like me in weibo having more difficulty guessing unknown words, compared to when I’m reading an actual dense novel with paragraphs to help frame what’s going on. So I do think it could be hard in that some unknown words have less context to figure them out (also the little prince isn’t logical so you can’t rely on standard story expectations to figure new words out the way you can in some stories).

Anyway though my Point is, if someone thinks le petit prince is too intimidating even with a dictionary until B2? I think they might have a different perception of difficulty than I do.

And in chinese, that happens to matter. Because I really do think unless you can have a higher tolerance for difficulty and ambiguity, you really will end up waiting longer to attempt reading in chinese. In chinese you cannot wait for things to get very highly comprehensible to start unless you want to wait a LONG time to start.

So someone who would want to wait in French to read something until B2, if that is their ambiguity tolerance, then in chinese they would also need to wait for that degree of understanding (which will probably take longer because they’d also likely need more vocab since there’s less cognates to provide additional ‘free’ understandability). You cannot generally wait for a very low amount of ambiguity before you start trying to read chinese. Even if you hit HSK 6, you’re looking at around 50% incomprehensible words in 小王子, unless your known Hanzi are enough support for you to feel your ‘free’ comprehension is a bit higher and you can guess some new words with your known Hanzi (bringing comprehension up to a much more bearable degree). But you’re still likely not starting out with 98% comprehensible anything, at least not until you practice reading more, I’m guessing? And your tolerance is going to either rely on you feeling comfortable with known Hanzi as tools to refer to for context, or you going and learning even MORE words before even trying to read the story. So... you either tolerate more ambiguity then the ideal 98% comprehension, or you study even more words after HSK 6 (or wherever you’re at).

If you’re learning French, eventually that sweet spot WILL be reached - where you learned enough French words, and feel cognate ‘free’ comprehension is helping you enough, that enough is comfortably comprehended. If your ambiguity comfort is nearly-nothing ambiguous around 98% comprehension, you’ll probably get there with more ease/less time than a Chinese learner. Even if you need to get to the same level of “fluency” you probably don’t have to learn as many new words as them to have the same low ambiguity level when reading. But if you’re studying Chinese, and have this same low tolerance for ambiguity, then... it will take you longer to start reading/reach a level where you can bear the ambiguity still present.

I guess I just. Didn’t realize that? Ambiguity could be such a big deal. I mean it makes sense, I just. I think I knew it affected chinese, but I still wouldn’t really get why some people would make whole word lists to study and prep ahead of time to read a novel - when I’d read the same one and just look up words as I went (we’d both be studying the same new words but they’d have to do it in advance). But I think the answer is just ambiguity we can tolerate - they maybe couldn’t tolerate it Unless they prestudied the words? Whereas I can tolerate the ambiguity more at the start and just learn the words as I go through the text. It’s why in French I could start reading so early - 50% comprehension was enough for me to bear going though it with a dictionary occasionally, and once it got close to 80-90% I felt it was much more bearable to do regularly. So with Chinese? Of course I was used to tolerating more ambiguity, so I didn’t feel it was as hard to start trying early on. Or - it was still hard, and felt brutal, I just had the tolerance to start and continue doing it at that difficulty. So idk for me stuff only gets easier and more tolerable from there, and I’m used to an initial start feeling of intense ‘drain’ until I learn more? Whereas I think some people aren’t ok with tolerating those levels.

There’s not much point here, just some people are willing to or have a tolerance to ambiguity at higher levels. It doesn’t help much - as you still understand less than ideal, so you can’t learn as much from context as easily as when you comprehend 98% and it feels “easy” to read. But I imagine you can comprehend some from context (I do), and you also do have the benefit of using a dictionary as you read (which mainly just means learning words you need for reading AS you read compared to learning them Before you read, which I think affects how you do the activity but not how effective it is - good for me though because I have a low tolerance for word lists/flash cards and easily give up on them so if I try doing it the other way I might never read). I just find it interesting some people have low ambiguity tolerances for languages like French. It makes sense, but also I’m just surprised. With Chinese there’s Huge ambiguity, so of course some people can’t tolerate it until they understand more - and with Chinese, eventually you’re almost Required to tolerate some uncomfortable level of ambiguity. Because I even if you prep with all textbooks or courses available, chances are if you followed HSK you will still need to either pre study to lower ambiguity OR start tolerating higher ambiguity to wade into some target language materials. Whereas with French, there is so much in common with English in some ways that once you’ve learned to a certain level you probably have a guaranteed ambiguity under a certain amount (especially if you feel comfortable as long as there’s similarities to English cognates, and similarities to French words you already know). If you study French to a high enough level in a class, you can possibly ensure you never have to engage with any French material that is “too much ambiguity” for your preference. But with Chinese, it’s likely even if you study to a high level, you may run into more ambiguity than you would prefer for a while.

[rigelmejo]

On a mildly related talk to all this reading practice stuff...

it really is a wild trip when I compare learning how to read french to reading chinese. >o> Yesterday I was reading some sites in french for learning chinese and like. For some background, back when I was studying french, about 3 months in I started reading technical texts like esperanto learning books, wikipedia, psychology books, linguistic books, and news articles... who even knows why. I just did. Maybe because I was reading that stuff anyway, so i figured I’d practice french at the same time. Maybe I was comforted by the higher chance of cognates in technical french writing, compared to like fictional stories. 

Either way, when I first went through that “brutal slog” of reading stuff I comprehended way less than 90% in french, it was informational technical texts galore. Also, eventually, I switched my french grammar study to reading sites written in french about grammar, at which point i pretty much never looked at a french learning book written in english again. So anyway now, years later, that specific kind of reading material is so easy for me I can skim through it for specific details, I can speed read it to learn stuff. 

With french fictional novels I’m not as competent, for sure. I can comprehend stuff though, which is all I really desire to be able to do in French. I should eventually read some more french fanfic though. I’ll improve where I’m lacking. (also you would not believe the amount of high quality Merlin/Arthur fic, and Root/Shaw from Person of Interest fic, that exists on ao3 it is phenomenal.... im talking multiple 100k+ Root/Shaw fics spanning many genres, pages of Merthur novels!) 

But anyway, one notable thing about french for me was... it was certainly a slog and brutally draining in the beginning. But the rate at which the difficulty lowered, and the amount of effort I had to put in for the difficulty to lower (and my comprehension to increase), is so much different than with Chinese. I would imagine a huge reason for the difference is simply that French is ranked as one of the easier languages that should take a shorter amount of time for native english speakers to learn (600-some hours), compared to Chinese which is ranked as one of the hardest languages to learn taking the most amount of time (2200 hours+) (source). So just, in general, one would expect reading level progress in French to take less time. The other big difference that sort of ties into that, is the character based writing system that I had no basis of prior knowledge for, and the lack of cognates to chinese compared to french. Which, I have noticed over the months, this problem becomes less as I learn more characters - knowing characters that make up new words is sort of, for me, like knowing a ‘similar’ word that makes the new word easier. Since the pronunciation is familiar, and since I at least am familiar with the parts the new word is made from. 

Sort of like seeing french words that look like cognates of english or that have similar endings/beginnings to english words, and those french words being easier to remember and learn. So... for me personally, I’m focusing a lot on characters and vocabulary in chinese right now, in the hopes that sort of similar-to-words-i-know feedback process happens more in chinese. Since I think it makes learning new words much easier, compared to learning words where I have no already-known information to connect to the new information I’m learning. In french, I felt a large portion of words could easily ‘connect’ to some prior english knowledge I had in my head... so learning words wasn’t too hard, and once I learned enough words, I had a lot of french words to also use as this ‘scaffold’ to help support me as I picked up more new words. 

But also, the amount of effort I put into French is just staggeringly less (to me). French was definitely difficult, still is difficult as far as purposely choosing to do stuff to speed up things I want to measurably improve in. But it just took a lot ‘less’ than Chinese to see improvement. In French, I genuinely only read once every couple of weeks. I rarely looked up words, after the first year (because I am immensely lazy). So a giant portion of my improvement in reading was just from me brute force trying to read with nothing to help me, once I knew some basics. And mostly, it worked? After a couple years I could read whatever I wanted in French, and at least follow the main ideas/main plot. Which was all I wanted. Then everything after that has mostly just been the process of reading getting easier (less focus required from me, speedier reading, easier to catch more details without sacrificing speed). Compared to my Chinese reading practice, I just generally had to put less time into french and less effort. I only had to intensively look up words in french for the first year of reading (around 9 months). 

For Chinese, if my current reading level if anything to go on, I’m looking at at least another year of intensively looking up words if I want to keep making substantial progress, and likely years of looking up words every few minutes (to improve comprehension, and pick up new words regularly). Whereas in French, after 1 year I could switch to looking up words every few minutes/occasionally, if I wanted more context and more detailed understanding or to learn a new word faster. 

But I could also just... not look up any words, and still managed to keep improving. I am not sure if me learning 2000-3000 characters would make a difference for Chinese, and make it easier for me to learn more words from ‘context’ in chinese at a bit of a faster rate then I currently can. By learn from ‘context’ I mean, that I’d be able to remember words more easily, figure out their meaning in show subtitles and books more easily, and generally just work less hard to learn them. Compared to now, where many new words contain at least 1 new character, so I’m usually SRS flashcard studying them and drilling them ALONG with reading them in context and looking them up over and over (because I’m struggling to recognize them when I see them again). 

Then there’s also the matter of me wanting to read more complicated material in Chinese then I ever wanted to read in French. In French, mainly I just wanted to be able to read my historical books and theatre-play books. Occasionally I read a fiction novel in French, but its never particularly important to me to catch the details. The only time it is, is when I’m reading a fanfiction I really like (and when that happens, I do actually look up words sometimes - even though with most other french reading i no longer bother). Whereas in Chinese, I have a lot of authors I’m specifically interested in, specifically because of writing style nuances and details they choose to use. And because I want to read content of theirs that is only available in Chinese - so a decent portion of the material I’m not going to have backup English context to lean on. So alongside Chinese just taking over 3.7x more work (roughly 2200 hrs/600 hrs) than French to progress the same amount, I also want to end up being at a higher reading level in Chinese then my goal was for French. 

It’s all just... interesting to me. Studying and improving in any language takes a lot of time and effort. And for me who kind of just threw myself into reading, it’s brutal in the beginning sort of no matter what. And it gets easier, over time. It’s just a stark contrast when I think about it. People always like to say the ‘easier’ languages for english speakers to learn are significantly easier. But of course, starting out, any language is ‘difficult’ to improve in. Over time it is always going to be considerable effort to improve in. So to someone with no prior-language study experience, it’s all a long consistent amount of effort so it’s not like the difference in ‘difficulty’ should be anyone’s deciding factor on what they study. I can say though, when studying French and Japanese at the same time, it really slapped me in the face how true the ‘difficulty’ levels thing is. Something I’d learned in French would take me 4 times as long to learn in Japanese. And because Japanese took so long to improve to the ‘same level’ compared to how quick my French improved, it was so easy to get demotivated. It’s easy to get demotivated when progress is slow. With Chinese the difference has also been stark. But unlike Japanese, with studying Chinese I’ve really buckled down and studied a lot to try and ‘make up’ the time difference it takes to learn things a bit more. So, I study Chinese a lot more than I did with Japanese - but the payoff is I’m improving a bit faster, seeing results a bit faster, and I’m more motivated. I’m still taking significantly longer to learn something than it has taken to learn it in French. But instead of seeing no light at the end of the tunnel, the extra time and effort I’m putting in means that my Chinese is always at least improving fast enough to see the hint of light. If we’d assume French is always right by it, reaching it pretty fast, and my Japanese is lagging in the back of the tunnel wondering if it picks a direction if it will ever find a way to get through this tunnel ever and make any progress at all... (the tunnel being some x noticable progress in the language). 

So like... Chinese takes 3-4 times as long to improve in as French? I compensate by grinding words with SRS to really speed up my vobulary acquisition (compared to french where I just looked at word lists, occassionally looked up words, and generally took a lazier approach). I compensate by spending more time studying Chinese - usually at least a half hour a day, sometimes a few hours, and way more active immersion then I ever did in french. In French I did it once every few days somewhat leisurely, to every few weeks intensively in short bursts, in Chinese I did it at least once a week intensively, a lot more for ‘leisurely.’ (’Leisurely’ being looking words up once in a while, and consuming content for a decent chunk of time instead of only a few minutes). This all does make me wonder... how much better could I be in French, if I started doing this stuff for French? How much faster could I have gotten at French, if I’d been working this hard?

It doesn’t really matter now, since i can do what I wanted to in French... if I ever want to do other things better in French, at least now I know a solid plan to make improvements fast... 

[rigelmejo]

it is really... not even an understatement... that the me from august 2019 would be blown away at the progress i’ve made in just a little under a year.

in august 2019 i definitely did not think i’d be able to watch and comprehend the main plot of a show in only chinese, within a year. i literally only knew the greetings, thank you, and the numbers 1-10 in august 2019. 

congrats me from august 2019, i am glad i accomplished one of your goals. you can now go watch guardian again and see how much better you’ve gotten at chinese since august. ovo)/

---

i am sure a part of this quick progress has been due to me having studied languages before, so i personally know what study methods work the most efficiently for me. i’m sure another part, is due to the existing knowledge i had of japanese, which admittedly i do think helped with my ability to learn hanzi. another large part is just how determinedly adamant i am to want to read chinese novels and watch chinese shows. So utterly determined. So completely determined, that I actually tried to do it from month 3 onward, repeatedly. Even though for much of the time I attempted to do this, I sucked so much that it was a draining slog and I struggled to get through a few paragraphs and then a few pages. I struggled to get through more than a few minutes of a show. And yet I kept making myself try again, and again, with small noticeable progress each time. 

I am well aware that I never tried so adamantly to attempt to understand japanese, especially so early on and so frequently. Because... it is an absolutely brutal experience lol. And it is the most brutal in the very beginning, when it’s also the easiest to get demotivated! That’s why with japanese... I didn’t even try to read SIMPLE things like tweets and titles, or watch SIMPLE short youtube skits in japanese, until I had studied for an entire year! In japanese, I did not even try to slog through mangas until 1.5 years into studying. Precisely because the slog is really so brutal, and I got so demotivated whenever I tried to engage with target-language-only material in japanese. It probably wasn’t even until 2-2.5 years of studying japanese... that I even attempted trying to read through manga chapters just trying to comprehend the main plot points. 

Meanwhile, in chinese? I tried to read through comic panels by like month 3, and got a bit decent at it by month 6. Now I’m like 11 months into learning chinese, and I feel comfortable enough with comics that I could skim through one if I wanted and translate a decent bit of it (which took OVER 2.5 YEARS to do in japanese). 

I am certain that part of my rapid progress has been my kind of intense determination to try and comprehend chinese NOW, to keep trying every so often. Even though my language skills aren’t ‘good enough’ yet. I only attempted to do this in chinese, because when I did it in french it seemed to help a lot... and I figured I might as well try it out in chinese and see if it helps too. I think it’s almost as difficult as doing it with japanese was. The main difference is I am more willing to feel confused/frustrated/drained trying to read/watch chinese content. With japanese, when I got frustrated/drained, I would give up for months at a time before trying again. As a result, I saw quite slow progress, and it took 6 months - 1 year at a time for me to ever notice significant improvement. With chinese, I have actually been using these ‘attempt’ activities to gauge my progress. So I kept doing them every couple of weeks, despite how intensely hard they felt to do. So with chinese, I have seen noticable progress every couple of months. Which is, expectedly, slower than my progress was in french. But it is, thankfully, quicker than my progress in japanese.

Again, I think the other big reason my chinese improved more ‘rapidly’ than I expected, was also just me having a study plan already tested and ready to utilize since I’ve studied other languages before. So I didn’t waste a lot of time figuring out HOW to study for my goals, whereas with japanese and french I definitely wasted more time figuring out how to study to meet my goals, and which study methods helped me most personally. So I got to skip a lot of the figuring out what methods to use portion of the learning process. My japanese study experiences helped me come up with a plan for studying chinese that helped account for the special difficulties of characters and lack of cognates. I didn’t have that experience to help me when I started studying japanese.

A little timeline comparison for myself:

French progress: bare minimum reading skills - 3 months. read simple stories/comics and grasp main ideas - 6 months. read general content, grasp main ideas - 1 year. read most content, at least grasping main ideas - 2 years.

Chinese progress: bare minimum reading skills - 6 months. read simple stories/comics and grasp main ideas - 11 months.

Japanese Progress: bare minimum reading skills - 1 year. read simple stories/comics and grasp main ideas - 2 years.

So for me, chinese is taking about twice as long as french to learn to read. japanese has taken 4 times as long as french to learn to read. 

I speculate that if I had not had such a solid study plan, and had not engaged so frequently with chinese content, then chinese would probably also be taking 4 times as long. Hopefully, if I got back into studying japanese, the study methods I’ve utilized me would allow me to speed up my improvement compared to how slow it took me to improve in the past. 

And, for fun, a comparison of my speaking skills, and listening comprehension:

French progress:

speak about really simple topics - 3 months. 

speak about things on my mind in at least a basic way (like a 9 year old, with worse grammar probably) - 6 months. 

speak about things on my mind in some detail - 1 year.

write letters, speak on a somewhat specific topic with someone - 2 years (highly dependent on the topic, on if i’ve refreshed my french recently since i only use french every few months now, and if i’m allowed to use a dictionary to look up words i might want to use)

can listen to simple conversations - 6 months.

can listen to shows/videos and get the gist - ahahahah no. i need french subtitles.

can listen to audio only content - i have never tried.

(Can you tell I almost exclusively studied french to read?)

Chinese progress:

speak about really simple topics - 5 months.

speak about things on my mind in at least a basic way - 8 months (I joined HelloTalk and I credit that to my improvements in this area, it forced me to use chinese to write and speak a lot more... if I go back to studying french with the goal to speak/write, I’m going to do that with french).

speak about things on my mind in some detail - 11 months+ (I’m in a grey area right now... I can write about most topics if I can look up words to use, and I can speak about my life/interests without a dictionary and have an exchange with someone. If speaking, I can speak about most ‘tangible’ topics like what is happening/who feels what/what is something - it’s concepts like ‘the idea that the political system is blah blah’ or ‘my meaning is that...’ which I struggle to talk about, because I don’t know very many ‘concept’ words.)

currently I cannot write about any specialized topics. i can write about most things in a broad way though, granted there will be a plethora of grammar mistakes and i may need a dictionary if i need to say something detailed. my writing skills are only comfortably able to discuss everyday kind of ‘chat’ topics like what’s happening, how people are feeling, what they’ve done/plan to do, what they like. I am not adequate at discussing topics such as ‘how do you feel about politics/this theory’ or like poetic language like fiction. 

can listen to a simple conversation - 6 months. (I think it improved better than my french to be honest, because it’s much easier for me to listen to chinese. I’ve practiced listening in chinese from day 1, I... rarely ever practice listening to french and it shows in my pathetic french listening skills).

can listen to shows/videos and get the gist - 8 months. (if we are talking bare minimum, I could probably start managing to follow the main ideas back at 8 months it was just... such an intensive difficult task. it is getting easier.)

can listen to audio only content - not there yet. (at my current 11 months, I can comprehend audio only graded-reader type content and learner podcasts - which is barely anything but way better than my french listening comprehension. I can also currently follow audio only content if i have some kind of transcript to refer to for context first... I’m going to make a guess that this skill will take me 2 years to get to any comfortable level of ‘catching the main ideas’ at. Based on the assumption I never practice/study listening comprehension enough, and on the fact chinese is more difficult for me than french. Then I’m going to guess it will be a minimum of 4 years until I’ll actually feel like it’s not draining, to listen to chinese audio only. I might manage to progress a bit faster, depending on how often I study this skill.)

And, for fun, Japanese progress:

speak about really simple topics - 6 months. (I took an intensive japanese class in college, and used the Genki books, those first months).

speak about things on my mind in at least a basic way - never got to that point. (after the intensive japanese class, I switched to focusing on learning vocabulary/kanji/grammar patterns with the intent to learn to read, and never actually practiced speaking again). 

speak about things on my mind in some detail - never got to that point.

write letters, speak on a somewhat specific topic with someone - never got to that point.

can listen to simple conversations - 1 year roughly. 

can listen to shows/videos and get the gist - no. maybe 2 years for the ability to only catch some very main ideas (I can get the gist if they’re about simple life/job/interest topics, otherwise I am useless without a dictionary. Sometimes I can watch youtube japanese videos about daily life/humor/politics/culture/fandoms and follow along from context, but it can be draining depending on how long I do this, and I only catch the very narrow main ideas... I miss many details unless I use a dictionary). 

can listen to audio only content - no. (Like the other two languages, I can mostly only listen to slow paced audio only content about subjects I know very well already. In japanese, that’s mostly daily life related audio. My chinese is better hands down than both other languages. My japanese listening comprehension is better than my french though - I am very good at listening and recognizing japanese words I know, whereas in french I am very bad at that. )