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Hours of listening to fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4535 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes  Studies: German | Message 17 of 37 08 July 2014 at 9:12am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Over the last two years I have tried a largely input based approach to German:
* +750 hours TV/Movies * +15000 pages In addition, in the first year I did +350 hours of Anki, and spent the first month reading through a grammar book to get a sense of the language. At this point I am in the B2 range for comprehension, but only in the B1 for speaking. As EMK's friend says, I can understand, but can't output grammatically very well. I think just by input my grammar will improve over time, but it's a slow process and you need lots of input. The reason I am having trouble outputting correctly is I think two-fold: first, the grammar you learn is implicit, intuitive - you say something and you have no idea that you are saying anything correctly - often you are, but often you make the same sort of mistakes children make learning a language, which is quite disconcerting when you speak as you have no idea how mangled the German you just said was - lately native speakers have been asking me if I am Norwegian or Dutch, so at least they don't think I am native English speaker, but still; second, the grammar you need to understand input is a subset of the grammar you need for correct output - so in German if I see der/die/das/die in a sentence I can approximate this as "the", so it doesn't matter if I see 'Der Buch', Die Buch" etc, but when I speak I need to say "Das Buch". The same is even more true for declinations of adjectives etc. It's not that you don't learn these at all, but it takes ages to really pick up these "subtleties" in the language. When you are reading/listening you are concerned about meaning, not grammar, so you learn things that effect meaning very quickly (vocabulary, some aspects of grammar - e.g., the genitive case), but other things that have a more fuzzy effect on meaning (declinations of adjectives, genders) much more slowly. I think this is why I can already pickup a contemporary novel in a bookstore and read it without a dictionary, but at the same time have trouble communicating for any long period of time grammatically correctly. Of course, a little work on the grammar would probably pay off very quickly, so it's not as if I have been wasting my time doing this - it's just not the full answer to language learning. Also there is a lot of synergy going on with this tasks: the grammar book helps the reading; Anki helps the reading/listening; reading helps the listening; the listening helps the reading etc. So effect of 300 hours of TV alone is not the same as the effect of 300 hours of TV with other activities as well. So the quick answer is that even if Spanish is a bit easier to learn that German, I'd still think 300 hours of only TV watching is not going to get you very far. Edited by patrickwilken on 08 July 2014 at 3:33pm 12 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5534 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 18 of 37 08 July 2014 at 12:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
How good is your current comprehension of Harry Potter and the audiobooks? If it's mostly "blahblahblah blahblahblah word blahblbahbah", extensive listening isn't going to be much help, especially extensive listening in the "background." As I mentioned before, extensive listening is really good for turning stuff you can decipher into stuff you understand effortlessly. But if you can't really decipher anything, then you won't make much progress. Lots of tricks can help you decipher more: 1. Listening/Reading and Assimil use parallel texts to give you a big comprehension boost. 2. Transcripts and subtitles let you read through at your own pace and learn vocabulary. 3. Repeated watching allows you get a little more each time. 4. Reading episode summaries on Wikipedia can help you follow the plot. 5. Reading and watching translations of your favorite English-language works can provide a huge boost. 6. TV series provide repetitive plot, vocabulary and voices, plus pictures. 7. Allowing some overly-difficult material to slip by allows you focus on stuff you can decipher, then gradually work up to the hard stuff. 8. Simply paying close attention helps a lot. So if I just sit down to watch talking heads on TV in Mandarin, I could basically listen for a thousand hours and learn only a few phrases. But if I were to do Listening/Reading in Spanish, the combined effects of the English text and my knowledge of French would provide massive context and I would learn quickly. Basically, if things like TV or novels are working, they're going to feel like they're working. You should understand a decent fraction of what's going on, and you should have lots of little moments where you go, "Oh! So that's what that means." Of course, 95% percent of your learning will be subconscious. But that leaves 5% of your total learning where it should be obvious that you're learning something. If you feel like, "I just spend 25 hours listening to this, and I'm not making any progress," then you're not making any progress.
If you start from a place where you can follow most of the plot of a TV show (maybe 40% comprehension for shows with obvious plots), and you use 300 hours well, it can take you very far. But you have to pay close attention and make clever use of your time to maximize the amount of "decipherable but not yet effortlessly comprehensible" input per hour of study. I watched TV at an almost ideal stage of my learning, and I did about 2.5 million words of reading, too. This took me from "Can kind-of sort-of follow the plot of Buffy" to "Can turn on the TV and have an 80% chance of understanding at least 80% of what I hear, sometimes much more." French movies still suck, but I can usually follow conversations between native speakers, especially if I've listened to them for a while and they have a reasonably standard accent.
And this is where I disagree with Krashen: comprehensible, "N+1" input is amazing, and it will work miracles. And I even believe that there are people like Richard Boydell who learn to produce excellent output using nothing but input. But I disagree, strongly, that everybody is like Richard Boydell. I've seen enough heritage learners in bilingual households to know that even children can have solid comprehension but only rudimentary output, and if anything, this is actually the most common outcome. In general, lots of these children won't start speaking their second language until they actually need to. But once they start speaking, they have a huge advantage: they know what native speakers are supposed to sound like, and they have a huge database of fragments to assemble. I have acquaintances who say things like, "Oh, yeah, our kids understood Hebrew but they barely spoke a word until we spent 3 months in Israel; now they speak it all the time." So if somebody has good understanding but limited speaking skills, the most likely cure is to throw themselves into situations where they need to speak and write. This might not be the only solution—Khatzumoto once recommended pressing ahead with listening until you have 100% understanding of both parliamentary discussions and the hardest pop-culture material, and said that speaking would eventually follow. But that seems like a long time to wait if you actually need to speak. And again, kids who actually need to speak a language will speak it quite well long before they understand every single word they hear. Edited by emk on 08 July 2014 at 12:44pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 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 19 of 37 08 July 2014 at 2:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The question is whether they are as bad as they say. Having good listening skills gives you very high standards. Are those who speak from day one/do Assimil/etc any less rudimentary for the first 3-6 months of their speaking? They can simply be more confident due to knowing the rules explicitly. But I think this attitude is not an inherent trait. Also, my experience is that both reading and listening are essential. You lose a lot of benefits if you don't do one or the other. Do you know heritage learners who read a lot in a language but can't speak it? Edited by Serpent on 08 July 2014 at 2:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 20 of 37 08 July 2014 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think this post summarizes very well the difference between learning to understand and learning to speak. Input is necessary for understanding and understanding is necessary for speaking but lots of input does not automatically lead to good output. There is a link between input and output. I wouldn't call it a missing link, but to speak well, the learner must be in a situation where all that input can be transformed into output that is solicited and corrected in some way. This is the hard part. As emk pointed out, heritage speakers have a huge leg-up when they are placed in immersion situations because they have early years of input that they can bring to the fore. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| glidefloss Senior Member United States Joined 5970 days ago 138 posts - 154 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 21 of 37 08 July 2014 at 7:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I was doing mostly L-R and listening to audio in the car, but I started becoming a little more aware of the
differences in regional accents, and thought I might test the Mexican waters with some Audio Latino Simpsons. The L-R for me, at least with Harry Potter, is no longer 'bla bla bla word bla bla.' I don't know the %, but sounds more like 'Hermione bla in the common room bla bla with many tables of books bla bla bla the Dementor lessons Harry Had with Lupin on Tuesday bla.' After 3 seasons of Latino Simpsons (my audiobooks are from Spain), it no longer sounded like 'bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla Homero bla bla,' but I was picking out whole phrases here and there. Of course, I already know the plot (and much of the dialogue) from watching it years ago in English. With Seinfeld, I probably already know 80% of the lines in English from repetitive viewings. A brand-new-to-me show, Vecinos (Mexican version), was much harder to understand, and the accents sounded rougher and different, and while I knew the gist from body language, I barely picked out any phrases or words. Patrick, that's sort of what happened to me when I was studying French. Things like word endings seemed just like small minor modifications on the meaning, so those would be the last to learn, like you said, whereas in the class room, you often learn those minor things first. I had a very hard time knowing if what I was saying was correct, especially because I ended up practicing in Morocco, where I could never figure out how well the other person knew French. Did you do about an hour a day of German? Edited by glidefloss on 08 July 2014 at 7:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5534 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 37 08 July 2014 at 7:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
My data here is unfortunately very limited, but as far as I can tell, two things are true: 1. It's possible to have high-level passive skills without ever actually producing anything more than isolated words. 2. When people with high-level passive skills need to produce output, I've heard of them improving very rapidly. To my mind, this makes a sort of sense: High-level passive skills are only possible if most of the language is already in the brain, somewhere. But output is a new skill, and for many people at least, it still requires practice to reorganize that knowledge so that it can be used for speaking. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6911 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 23 of 37 09 July 2014 at 3:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I agree - I can for instance watch a movie in Norwegian and understand basically everything, but that doesn't mean I can speak Norwegian. This confirms #1, and what stops #2 from happening anyday soon is the very fact that I don't need to speak Norwegian, (possibly) not even if I moved to Norway.
A post from the 26th of July, 2009:
Last time I saw him (earlier this year), he still spoke only American English. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 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 24 of 37 09 July 2014 at 4:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Do you read in it though? And do you think you could speak fairly clear Norwegian to a foreigner who's reached a decent level but has had literally zero exposure to Swedish?
Also, my Norwegian friend regularly helps me both with Danish and now also Swedish. Of course translation is a limited test, but we're yet to come across anything she can't translate INTO these languages. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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