What's the most important skill to develop as you begin learning a language?

Question

Language learning is typically divided into four competency areas: reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

Each one of them is obviously important, but of these four do you believe is the most important to start on developing from the very beginning and why?

Answer 1

AAssuming that you hope to achieve a level of fluency, the most important competency, in my opinion, is listening. They are various reasons for this that I will list below:

1. Listening helps you grow your language naturally, developing an understanding for vocabulary and grammar structures through context, not translation.
2. Listening also helps you become familiar with the sounds of the language. Spanish and English practically share an alphabet, but that does not mean this sounds represented by the letters in the Spanish alphabet are pronounced the same way that they would be in English. In fact, most often, they're not.
3. In the real world, most communication is speech-driven. Many students are encouraged to learn phrases like "me llamo......", "cómo estás?" or "llevo dos años estudiando español y me gustaría practicar un poco contigo si te parece bien" that they might be able to learn and repeat flawlessly, but once the other person replies, they're either met with vocabulary that they don't yet understand or more often a speaker that they cannot comprehend. Exposure through listening can fix both these problems..
4. Lastly, during my classroom years in middle and high school there was nothing more nerve-racking for me and my classmates then in the listening portion of any exam. Looking back, they wouldn't have been so difficult had we spent more time being encouraged to listen.

Obviously, when preparing for tests, presentations, and writing assignments all of the other competencies will become critically important, but as I like to remind all of my students developing real world fluent in a language does not begin or end with what you are asked to do in the classroom.

Answer 2

I agree with Alan S. on the importance of developing your listening skills from the very beginning.

However, to go beyond just familiarizing yourself with the sounds of the Spanish language, I would recommend combining this listening with reading. This would be particularly helpful to a beginning language learner. 

For example, you could just listen to an easy podcast in Spanish, and you may be able to pick up a word or two. However if you read along with the podcast, you would notice many more words that are familiar to you but that you didn't recognize by just listening. You could then listen to and read the same podcast several times to familiarize yourself with the pronunciation and the vocabulary. 

When you're starting with a new language, or even if you have been studying for a while, things like differences in accent or speed of the speaker can throw you off, and having something you can read along with is very helpful.

Combining the two skills of listening and speaking can work very well even at the beginner level, so long as you are listening and reading at a level that is not overly challenging. It’s important to use resources based on your language level for this type of practice, otherwise, you may become overwhelmed.

Having said this, all learners are different; some language learners just need to write things down others are happy to just start talking. Figuring out what kind of language learner you are might be a good way to figure out what skill to start with.

Hope this was helpful.