dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4656 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 9 of 16 23 January 2014 at 9:24am | IP Logged |
tanya b wrote:
I am the laziest distance language learner around because I have the
"save the worst for last" philosophy. For me, "the worst" is 1000-3000 boring hours of
listening where I am totally overwhelmed with how much I don't know.
Because it's so frustrating, it can be a total morale-killer. |
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I do the bulk of my Japanese listening during my daily commute. It beats listening to the
radio by a mile!
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FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6856 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French
| Message 10 of 16 26 January 2014 at 12:00am | IP Logged |
tarvos wrote:
I don't know how y'all are counting these hours.
Perhaps it's easier to say "a shitload, and a shitload more if you don't know how to
guess the words from scratch.
At the moment where I have to check whether I spent 1100 or 1200 hours to get it right, I
give up and go do more of it. |
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I think its not just a question of number of hours, its whether you are actually doing anything productive in those hours. 1 hour spent doing something useful is better than 5 hours doing something that doesnt work
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tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4698 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 11 of 16 26 January 2014 at 12:02am | IP Logged |
FuroraCeltica wrote:
tarvos wrote:
I don't know how y'all are counting these hours.
Perhaps it's easier to say "a shitload, and a shitload more if you don't know how to
guess the words from scratch.
At the moment where I have to check whether I spent 1100 or 1200 hours to get it right,
I
give up and go do more of it. |
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I think its not just a question of number of hours, its whether you are actually doing
anything productive in those hours. 1 hour spent doing something useful is better than
5 hours doing something that doesnt work |
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That's one thing and the other thing is how do you measure what's useful?
1 person has voted this message useful
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culebrilla Senior Member United States Joined 3988 days ago 246 posts - 436 votes Speaks: Spanish
| Message 12 of 16 26 January 2014 at 1:08am | IP Logged |
I find that listening is hardest in my one meager foreign language, Spanish. Harder than the other skills, I mean.
You can't really get C1 in listening and not reading and writing (possibly speaking too), obviously, since you have to know the word to understand it. The only way you could get C1 in JUST listening would be if they explained every single word that you didn't know on the audio. But the only way they would know that you didn't know it would be if you asked what a word meant. You could probably get a C1 in listening if you had a very basic A2 in speaking and B1/2 in reading. You don't really need to speak well to understand, as the many receptive bilinguals that don't speak their immigrant languages well illustrate.
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Javi Senior Member Spain Joined 5972 days ago 419 posts - 548 votes Speaks: Spanish*
| Message 13 of 16 26 January 2014 at 10:46pm | IP Logged |
It took me about 1000-1200 hours for English, and listening and reading were my strongest skills when I got the certificate. I think they still are.
Edited by Javi on 26 January 2014 at 10:51pm
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chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5180 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish
| Message 14 of 16 27 January 2014 at 1:34am | IP Logged |
Next time you listen to recorded audio, try transcribing a portion. Keep replaying it until you think have the transcription down (even if you don't understand all the words you have written). You'll be amazed at how quickly your comprehension skills progress if you do this once or twice a week. I discovered this while subtitling foreign films.
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Melya68 Diglot Senior Member France Joined 4282 days ago 109 posts - 126 votes Speaks: French*, English
| Message 15 of 16 04 February 2014 at 5:32pm | IP Logged |
I'm not sure 1,000 hours is enough in any language to get to C1. Maybe for Italian or Spanish it's enough if you already know a lot of words as these languages are quite logical when it comes to pronunciation.
1 person has voted this message useful
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Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5757 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin
| Message 16 of 16 04 February 2014 at 6:45pm | IP Logged |
tanya b wrote:
I am the laziest distance language learner around because I have the
"save the worst for last" philosophy. For me, "the worst" is 1000-3000 boring hours of
listening where I am totally overwhelmed with how much I don't know.
Because it's so frustrating, it can be a total morale-killer. |
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It helps to find a speaker who sounds really, really nice, so you don't mind listening to the same audio again and again until you actually understand most of it. And, it also helps to concentrate on the things you understand now that surely, you didn't understand a week ago, a month ago, a year ago. And not on the massive amount of things you still don't understand.
1 person has voted this message useful
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