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How important is listening practice?

  Tags: Listening
 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center Post Reply
12 messages over 2 pages: 1
tarvos
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 Message 9 of 12
25 January 2014 at 11:00pm | IP Logged 
I'd also consider reading more NK sources then, because their use of Korean is a little
bit different from South Korean.
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emk
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 Message 10 of 12
25 January 2014 at 11:27pm | IP Logged 
Verikukko wrote:
emk wrote:
Or maybe you just want to read Korean, in which case you could skip listening comprehension entirely.

Thank you very much for your replies Emk, Dbag and everyone. The main reason why I am
learning Korean is to be able to read North Korean literature and news in their own
language. Your advice of skipping listening comprehension is very assuring.

Well, it's not really advice, as such. It's just one possible option.

Before deciding, ask yourself: Will you ever want to watch North (or South) Korean TV news, or perhaps travel there someday? If so, it's probably unwise to neglect listening completely. I've met people who've become fluent readers with no listening skills whatsoever, and they say it can be hard to add listening skills later. The biggest risk is that your "internal" pronunciation when you read may be all wrong, and that you'll burn your bad pronunciation habits into your brain. (My favorite example was a guy who could read Spanish quite comfortably, but who couldn't even tell the difference between spoken Spanish and spoken Navajo.)

One nice compromise would be to listen to Korean TV news—North Korean if it's available online, and South Korean if that's all you can get. If you're lucky, you may be able to find news podcasts with a written transcript. Then you can read the transcript, listen to the news, maybe loop the news in the background while you work on something else, etc.

This would allow you to build at least some listening skills, and make sure that the pronunciation in your head when you read is vaguely in touch with reality. The idea would be to avoid developing bad pronunciation habits and to lay groundwork for later studying if you decide you do need to listen to something.
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James29
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 Message 11 of 12
26 January 2014 at 12:59am | IP Logged 
If you like literature, you could listen to audio books of the types of books you are interested in. I neglected listening in my Spanish studies and regret it a little bit... but, I must say, it comes pretty fast if you have a good solid base of the other skills. I'd say do what you want to do and have fun. Don't do it because other people are telling you to do it.
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druckfehler
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 Message 12 of 12
26 January 2014 at 3:33am | IP Logged 
I think strong listening skills can help make Korean much easier... You could try things like TTMIK's Iyagi lessons (google them) which are geared at intermediate students and have transcripts.

If you detest all things South Korean (which is a bit of a shame, really. There's a lot of non-mainstream media you might enjoy), try the G.L.O.S.S. lessons for North Korean. If you don't know G.L.O.S.S., they are free practice lessons using real media - some TV, some newspaper - made by and for the foreign service institute. If you google G.L.O.S.S. you'll find them. I doubt that North Korean TV will be that much fun, but youtube is full of animations, songs and movies from NK. You could also try listening to South Korean news about North Korea - there's one segment (by SBS if I remember correctly) called 남북의 창. I enjoyed its segment 요즘 북한은 a lot - it introduces clips from NK TV about cultural and everyday life topics.

Have fun with Korean! North Korea is definitely fascinating, but the language isn't easy.



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