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Three rules for improving listening | ||
Tags: Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5418 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 73 of 105 17 December 2013 at 5:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Rather than let imposters and charlatans speak for me, I'll throw my own hat into the ring. Most of the advice
given so far is very good. What I would add is the importance of analytical listening. By that I mean not so much listening to understand what is said but more how it is said. When I'm listening seriously I like to analyze what I hear in terms of the grammatical and lexical components. For example, in Spanish I pay particularly close attention to the verb morphology. I make sure I can identify the form and why it is being used. I make sure I can identify fillers, crutch words and conversation markers. Idiomatic expressions are a partiicular problem. I look at discourse strategies, at how the speakers interact with each other, How they ask and answer questions. How to interrupt, interject, argue, agree, etc. Basically, I listen as if I were dissecting the sounds into the component parts. This, I believe, is the key to being able to reproduce similar phrases, which , it seems to me, is our goal. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5418 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 74 of 105 17 December 2013 at 7:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't understand this principle or rule. I can see the idea of listening to an audiobook with the text in front of me. But what if I'm watching a soap opera or a Youtube video without a transcript? When I run into all kinds of new words, I pause the video and look them up in a dictionary. It seems to me that listening is great for expanding one's vocabulary. As for understanding the written text, there is a problem with spontaneous native speech in the media: when written it is often incomprehensible because spoken language is very different from written language. Reading the transcript of a natural conversation gives only an imperfect comprehension because elements like prosody are missing and all kinds of seemingly extraneous elements are present. For this very reason most television shows and movies are actually poor representations of real spoken speech. Real people do not speak like actors. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6585 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 75 of 105 17 December 2013 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
TBH, in my experience it's not important to use the same text. If you do both listening and reading separately, you will improve. The main exception for me is GLOSS, where you read a text intensively (and perhaps skim extensively at first), do some fun exercises and optionally can listen to the whole text. I normally listen when I understand it in detail, much like Ari suggested in the original post. But it's not my main way of working with audio and I think that it shouldn't be. Edited by Serpent on 17 December 2013 at 3:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6897 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 76 of 105 17 December 2013 at 8:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Let's see if I understand your question.. Swedish and Norwegian are pretty close phonetically. There are supradentals, pitch accents, uvular R (in some areas) etc. Moreover, Swedes generally understand Norwegian quite well to start with (and vice versa), and therefore usually don't learn how to pronounce the other language, nor do they have to. But hey, that's why we understand each other. Swedes (usually) don't understand Danish as easily, probably because they don't know how to say the words themselves. So, in a way, this confirms what Tarvos suggests. Edited by jeff_lindqvist on 17 December 2013 at 11:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6585 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 77 of 105 17 December 2013 at 9:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Would you say that it's enough to have a theoretical understanding of the pronunciation? Also do you agree that if you listen a lot, you'll pick up the more subtle differences, even if you weren't aware of them, and if you try to speak after a lot of listening, you'll hear where you sound off?
Now that I think of it, my Spanish listening improved from playing around with a flash-based phonetics site. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4695 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 78 of 105 17 December 2013 at 9:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Only if you actually know what to listen for, and how you make that sound. I didn't distinguish between uvular and alveolar r until I consciously could produce an alveolar r in speech. You need to be able to produce the different sounds in another way (it doesn't have to be 100% accurate but "close enough"). More listening helps with decoding, yes, but you can't escape practicing the pronunciation. But you don't need a native speaker per se to do that, of course. I just do it in front of a mirror or my pc or whatever, and then when I want to speak I get it corrected. Mostly teachers correct instances of my phonemes when I don't know how to pronounce a word. They don't say "you don't pronounce the phoneme like that." Accents usually occur in my case but they tend to be suprasegmental, or limited to one or two phonemes which I can distinguish and do pronounce differently (but still incorrectly - my ich-laut isn't correct for example, it's slightly off). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6585 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 79 of 105 17 December 2013 at 10:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I distinguished between them long before I could actually pronounce the uvular, though :) In fact, I was never taught to pronounce it. However, once I heard it enough times in a language where I liked it (German rather than French :P) I suddenly realized how it's pronounced. And prior to the super challenge I did VERY little listening in German.
Also, some sounds (common examples: m p s o a j) are different subtly enough that an ordinary textbook will just tell you to pronounce them like in your native language. I never read about the Italian "u" being anyhow special for example. Basically I still think you don't need to open your mouth until you actually want to speak :P look at the LR method for example. or maybe Khatzumoto, who was the one to convince me that children aren't better at this stuff than adults, they just do significantly more listening. (and yes, children often get explicit corrections, and some get speech therapy too) Edited by Serpent on 17 December 2013 at 10:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4695 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 80 of 105 17 December 2013 at 10:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Of course you don't. It's about speaking better ;) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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