Reading or listening: what’s the best way to learn?

What's better for learning, listening or reading? I am currently reading a book about Central Asia, which I started into because I got the audio book and the audio book got me interested. And then I decided I wanted to buy the book because when I lie in bed before going to sleep, I don't want to be listening to something.

I want to read something. There are many strategic reasons why reading is better than listening. Although listening is easier, but let's go back to the beginning.

Obviously throughout most of. The history of humankind, we didn't read. And even up until very recently, only a very small percentage of people could read.

So there's no special, you know, evolutionary device in our brains that enables us to read, it's amazing that we're able to do this and we essentially, as I pointed out before, the brain uses essentially the same sequence of sort of locations for reading as it does for listening. But of course, there are differences. When you hear a voice, you have an emotional connection to the voice.

For that matter, if you're listening to a lecture and you see the professor, or if you're talking to someone, that's also a different experience than simply listening to a recording. And there are people who say that we will learn better if we face to face, talk to someone than if we just listen to a recording, all of which is true. However, it is a process of ingesting.

Information or being entertained. And as you look into it, there are a number of people who have different positions on the respective advantages of listening and reading for students and so forth and so on, and I will leave a few links here in the description box. But first let's look at this phenomenon.

Uh, audiobooks, first of all, if you look behind me, you can see two tall bookshelves for CDs, 10 shelves on each one or more full of audio CDs in Czech, in Russian, in Spanish, in French, in German, in Swedish. For the, you know, 20 odd years that I've been learning languages, whenever I'm in the country where there are audio CDs, I buy them typically, but not only fiction, but also nonfiction. And there's more.

I mean, I got Chinese ones here. Kai you know, Shi. Wai Na Amir.

This is a Czech version of War and Peace. Again, in, in, in Chinese, I have my Xiang Cha. I have to admit that I buy audio CDs.

And books at a much faster rate than I can consume them. My appetite is larger than my stomach, which is okay. Maybe one day I'll get to them, but I always feel if I'm in Riga, Latvia, and there are Russian bookstores and I can buy Russian language CDs that I can't get in Vancouver.

I'm going to buy them and the global market for audiobooks has been growing very, very rapidly. There seem to be all kinds of statistics out there, but it's billions of dollars and it's growing and it's growing because we now have iPhones or Androids and we can actually do our listening on our telephones. And so much has made it easier to learn this way.

And young people don't mind. Blurring this way. There's also been an explosion in eBooks, which again is in the billions of dollars.

And that's all part of this exploding availability of information and entertainment of which YouTube, Netflix is also a part. And so now we have different ways of accessing it. We can sync across different platforms.

All of these things have changed. But what about the fundamental issue of is it better to read or is it better to listen? I referenced one study here, which shows that.

So much depends on what we want to do and what kind of information we want to access. So for scientific information, apparently students that were allowed to read versus those that only listened, the ones who read got 80 some percent accuracy in their answers and the students who only listened got 59%. And obviously when you are reading, you have a different strategy.

You can stay longer on a particular section and you have trouble understanding, or you can, uh, skip to those. Sections that interest you. Whereas when you're listening, you tend to just listen through.

You tend not to flip back. You tend not to go forward. On the other hand, I can listen while doing chores around the house.

I can listen in the car. The Chinese, uh, history CD I've shown you, like drive a car and learn history. So there are different uses there.

But I think that trying to say that one is better than the other. He kind of misses the point to me. What matters is that they reinforce each other.

The fact that I found an audio book on the history of Central Asia, which I'm interested in because I'm learning Turkish, then I'm listening to this and it, he goes on and on and sometimes I think I would like to jump ahead to a different. Period in the history of Central Asia, I want the book and I want to be able to read it in my bed. So it drives me to get the book.

The other thing is whenever we do, whether we listen or read, we don't get all of it. And we certainly don't get all of it in the first pass. This is true in language learning.

It's true in acquiring any other information. It's true even in terms of trying to retain, based on my experience, fictional stories. And I have used fiction a lot.

Di Promessi Sposi, I use for Italian. I listen to the audio book and then I read the book. I harvest the words that link, so I increase my vocabulary.

And it's two different ways of connecting with the same material. And we can go back several times. Maybe listening gives us A bit of a head start, a bit of a sense of what's there.

And then when we read, we pick up more. Or if we have read ahead a little bit, then when we listen to it, we understand a little bit more. So the two are reinforcing.

I don't think it's an either or situation. If I'm studying for a science exam, even though my retention. Of science information won't be as good from just plain listening, but if I can find a podcast on that subject and I can listen to that while exercising or in public transit or driving, and then I go back and read that same material, I will understand more.

In fact, I always recommend covering the same material from different sources. Even two different books, three different books, audio material, it's all reinforcing. Even the eBooks, for example, Kindle apparently has like 80 percent of the market for eBook readers.

And I use Kindle on my iPad, but I probably do more reading in LingQ. That's certainly, I do more reading in LingQ than I do in Kindle. And I'm not a struggling reader in English.

But I am a struggling reader in just about every other language that I'm learning, maybe with the exception of say French, there are words that I don't know. There are sentences that I may know the words, but it's not instant meaning, clear meaning the way English is for me. Now it could be that, uh, struggling readers in English are in a similar situation and there I find that sometimes sentence mode, but not always sentence mode, looking up words, you know, having the audio timestamp to what I'm reading, all of these things.

And so the audio helps me read better. So there's all of this kind of mutual reinforcing going on. And I've often said, I think that in the sort of literacy strategies, there's too much emphasis on decoding strategies and inferring strategies and pre reading strategies and comprehension questions.

If people were allowed simply to listen and read, to combine those two wonderful ways of accessing information or fiction or anything else, it I think both improve. In fact, there is evidence that people who read more also understand better when they listen. So the the two are very much connected.

So I think we should be aware that this explosion of material via the internet, both audio and text, and the increasing variety of devices and the way the devices sync with each other, gives us a whole different approach to. Collecting information, learning, enjoying stories, and not to mention video. Like obviously if we're watching a movie, if we're just listening to the movie, that's a whole different sensation as compared to actually seeing the video itself.

So combine text, video, audio, combine it all as much as you can. Don't worry about what you forget, because you're probably going to forget. You're going to forget parts of the story you just read.

You're going to forget words. You're going to forget stuff you needed for your exam. But the more you go over and harvest the same material, the same information using different approaches, the audio, the listening, reading different books, all of this is gradually going to help you collect more and more of that information, as long as you recognize that perfection is not a realistic goal.

So those are my thoughts on audio versus reading, the importance of each in our learning processes and in our ability to enjoy information and entertainment. Thank you for listening.