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C1 Listening Skills - How many hours?

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16 messages over 2 pages: 1
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.


I do the bulk of my Japanese listening during my daily commute. It beats listening to the
radio by a mile!


1 person has voted this message useful



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.


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
1 person has voted this message useful



tarvos
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
China
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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.


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


That's one thing and the other thing is how do you measure what's useful?
1 person has voted this message useful



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.
2 persons have voted this message useful



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

1 person has voted this message useful



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.
3 persons have voted this message useful



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



Bao
Diglot
Senior Member
Germany
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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.

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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