Language skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing

How the skills depend on each other

The skills are taught as separate subjects and behave like one system. Each feeds the next:

• Pronunciation feeds listening. A sound or tone you can produce accurately is one you hear more reliably. This is why pronunciation and tones come first for Mandarin, Cantonese, Thai and Vietnamese.
• Listening feeds speaking. You can only say what you have heard often enough to have a model for. Speaking practice without input mostly rehearses your own mistakes.
• Vocabulary feeds everything. Without words there is nothing to hear, read or say, and vocabulary in turn grows fastest from reading and listening. The dependence runs in both directions.
• Reading feeds writing. Nobody writes natural sentences in a language they have not read a great deal of.
• Grammar is the glue. It is learned best a little at a time, when you meet a pattern you could not decode.

Which skill to prioritise at which stage

For Asian languages Kungfucius recommends this order of emphasis. All skills run all the time. Only the weight changes.

Stage	Main weight	Why
First weeks	Pronunciation, the sound system, the basic script (kana, Hangul, Pinyin)	Errors made here are the ones that harden later
Beginner	Listening and core vocabulary in phrases, simple speaking	Builds the ear and a stock of ready-made sentences
Lower intermediate	Reading, with characters added steadily, and more speaking	Reading is where vocabulary starts to grow quickly
Upper intermediate and beyond	Wide reading and listening, writing, precision in speech	Output now exposes the gaps that input alone hides

Two points are specific to this part of the world. In Chinese and Japanese, reading lags behind listening for a long time because of the characters, so do not wait for one to catch up with the other. Korean and Vietnamese are the opposite case: the script takes days, and listening is the slow skill.

Handwriting characters is the one sub-skill that can safely wait. Typing covers nearly all real use, and the sage's own handwriting is not offered as a model.

If you have an hour a day, a sound default is half on input (listening and reading), a quarter on speaking and pronunciation drills, and a quarter on vocabulary review and grammar. Adjust when one skill is clearly holding the others back.

The layer underneath: language and culture

Below the skills sits one more layer that no exam tests: culture. You can have flawless grammar and still get the room wrong.

• Humour. What is funny differs from culture to culture. Wordplay and puns travel well in Chinese, where homophones are everywhere. Dry irony and sarcasm, a staple in much of Europe, are easily taken literally in East Asia. Self-deprecation can read as modesty in one place and as weakness in another.
• Taboos. Every culture has subjects that are not raised lightly: politics and history between neighbours, money, age, family matters, death, and numbers or gifts with unlucky meanings. Which of these is delicate, and with whom, changes from country to country.
• Politeness. How directly you may refuse, disagree or ask for something is part of the language. In Japanese and Korean it is built into the grammar.

Kungfucius's advice: learn the culture alongside the skills from the start. Watch what people laugh at, notice what nobody mentions, and ask a friend before you try a joke on a stranger. The culture section is the place to begin.