Ears Don't Have Fingers

2025-05-19 (Mod: 2025-06-12)  |   4 minutes

While conducting my road tests recently, I had a bit of an epiphany: my Norsk reading skills went from zero to B2 level (advanced intermediate) in 3 months, but after spending a similar amount of time focused on training my ear, I’m still at A1. I think it’s time to change gears…

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Of course, I’m aware that 3 months isn’t very long when it comes to learning a new language, but I have a nagging feeling that this is something else. When I was working on reading, I would get regular hits of “microprogress” - little mental jolts of achievement when I realized that I was understanding a new word or phrase that I hadn’t understood the day before. And now that my vocabulary is so much richer than it was then, I would expect to be getting more such jolts, not fewer. After all, I already know the word. Now I just have to recognize it.

So yes, this might all just be in my head. Maybe the ear parsing part of my brain is weaker than the reading part and this is just as fast as I’m going to get. But then again, what if it’s not? It’s possible that the problem isn’t with my brain, but with the tools I’m using to train it.

To test this theory, I’ve decided to switch gears. The end of June will mark the end of my first year studying Norwegian. Until that anniversary date, I’m going to try a radically different approach for ear training. No apps. No fingers. No translations. Not even any speaking. It’s a passive process called Automatic Language Growth (ALG) and I find it intriguing.

To the extent that I’ve been able to examine my own cognition as I’ve been studying, I think I’m seeing that I continually interrupt my own thinking. Rather than concentrating on the language, I’m still busy poking buttons and jumping back and forth between different versions of the sentence - including the English translation - so I’m not forcing myself to rely on my Norwegian ear. I need to take English - and my fingers - out of the process.

While ALG is not widely accepted in the language learning research community, that appears to be because it doesn’t mesh well with the usual way language programs are evaluated - not because it has been evaluated and discredited. But academia aside, ALG aligns better than any other program I’ve seen with the way I think humans acquire language. So naturally, I want to give it a try.

The tricky part of ALG will be tracking progress. Since you’re not supposed to try speaking or translating, the usual methods of demonstrating progress are out of bounds, which is one of the reasons it hasn’t been studied much.bBut I don’t need to prove my progress to some third-party peer review panel - I just need to track it for myself. To that end, I’ve created a simple scheme to assess how completely I understand the materials I’ll be listening to. Each time I go through a show or podcast, I’ll rate myself on this scale:

• 0: It’s all just mouth noises

• 1: Can understand mood and tone

• 2: Can understand some words

• 3: Can understand some complete sentences

• 4: Can understand subtext and nuance

• 5: It’s just like listening to English

I’m also going to use a fractional scale to estimate where I am between the two extremes of any given level.

For reference, when I started watching Bluey a few months ago for ear training, I was at about 2.2, and today I’m around 3.2. The question I’m asking now is, “Can ALG get me to level 5 before the year is over?”

Frankly, the prospect excites me. I can relax my grip on the stick and just enjoy the material instead of consciously studying it, which gets to the very heart of ALG. Little kids don’t study their native language to learn it - they just live in it. So that’s me now, being a kid again and free to just explore materials suited to my ability.

The only catch is that just about everything I’m doing with Frankie is a violation of the ALG process. So until I’ve finished this experiment, I’m going to press “Pause” on that work.

I’ll see you on the other side.