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I don't really know which is more difficult for English learners, learning to listen and hear English or learning to speak and write English, but in my personal experience with learning Japanese, the listening and reading part was the more difficult part of learning the language. I speak and write Japanese at perhaps a grade school level, being able to form and use sentences with relatively simple grammar and vocabulary and I can write Hiragana and Katakana well, but Kanji presents quite a challenge. But when it comes to listening, I've found that I have a hard time following Japanese conversations. Often people will assume that because I can ask for directions in Japanese that I can understand their responses easily. I often find myself relying on the phrase \"Yukuri hansashite kudasai,\" which means \"please speak slowly,\" more often than I would like and it makes me very self-conscious to admit that I have a hard time understanding. And since much of their written language uses Kanji, of which there are thousands, it's difficult for me to read things. I can only imagine the difficulties people face with English, particularly since there are so many different dialects and accents to try to sort out, from American to Australian and from British to South African. Just visiting Singapore, you're likely to run into a dozen different dialects and accents just on one tiny island. For a beginning learner, I imagine it's daunting and somewhat difficult. Hearing an accent that one is unfamiliar with might just cause a person to clam up and be afraid to speak for fear that they might not understand the response. While training to be a broadcaster, one of the things that I was drilled on repeatedly was enunciation and another was pacing. I pride myself in the fact that most Japanese people that I spoke with said that my English was very easy to understand and that I didn't speak too quickly, but that I still sounded natural. I think that in this way, maybe I could help to put students at ease. Another thing I was taught was to avoid using words that people would have to look up in the dictionary, no slang, no jargon, etc. This also makes it easy for people to understand me, and since most radio DJ's are trained this way, you would not believe the number of Japanese people who listened to our little military radio station on American Forces Network to practice listening to English. It made any AFN DJ a minor celebrity in western Tokyo and many of my Japanese friends would tell me about it any time they heard me on the radio. You could see the excitement when they would summarize whatever news story they heard from me on the radio. I found that that ability to speak in such a way that people could easily understand and absorb you're saying is a very powerful one early on in my time over in Japan.
