Wednesday, October 2, 2013

meaning - "You hear but you don't listen" or "You listen but you don't hear"?

My teacher introduced the quote:





  1. You look but you don’t see. You hear but you don’t listen.





But I also saw books saying:





  1. You look but you don’t see. You listen but you don’t hear.





So which one is correct? I am between a rock and a hard place.



In terms of grammar, I think the second one is right because it is more
parallel as look and listen are both intransitive while see and
hear are both transitive.



But the first one also sounds reasonable to me as listen implies the
person is doing the action intentionally. You can hear a foreign
language without knowing it but you can only listen to a foreign

language if you understand it, right?

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