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Learning to listen? | ||
Tags: Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 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 9 of 15 27 March 2014 at 4:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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Try GLOSS for detailed listening, they have lots of lessons on various topics.
And see this article about using music in your learning, especially the lyricstraining site. don't replace your normal learning with music, but use music to be able to spend even more time with the language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Tyrion101 Senior Member United States Joined 3911 days ago 153 posts - 174 votes Speaks: French | Message 10 of 15 27 March 2014 at 8:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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So I decided after reading the first couple of posts, that I'd try watching a few kids cartoons in French, since that to me would be the absolute easiest thing to understand, since those usually don't use big words, or complex subjects. I didn't mean to give the impression that I was learning by listening only, I'm learning the words, and grammar as well. My understanding isn't at an adult level yet, or at least I can't listen at an adult pace. I would like to say that the kids cartoon worked, I understood maybe 8 words in 10, and apparently even kids talk really fast too occasionally, so I missed a few, but was still able to get the gist of what was going on. Thank you. All of this has been really useful and interesting.
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 15 27 March 2014 at 11:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah, anybody who loves news as much as you do should definitely listen to tons of it, of course. :-) It's not that news is bad, or that TV is good—it's about finding things that make a reasonable amount of sense (even if you "cheat" shamelessly with transcripts and context), paying close attention, and then doing a lot of listening.
This is really awesome news. If you can follow 80% of a kid's cartoon, then you're actually in great shape. Just keep digging for cool stuff that mostly makes sense (assuming you pay attention), and keep listening. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4826 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 12 of 15 28 March 2014 at 12:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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Yes - paying attention is half the battle - and not as easy as it sounds.
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| ChronoC Newbie United States Joined 3899 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes | Message 13 of 15 29 March 2014 at 5:52am | IP Logged | |||||
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Some of my more recent french lessons have involved me repeating what was said without having the text
as a reference, another problem I seem to have is that I seem to not hear some words at all, and I don't know if that is because I'm new to listening to french or if it's a case of me trying to speak a few new words as well as remembering what was said? I might hear the entire sentence but miss nous, which in some cases could be rather important. Most times though I miss a "le" or c'est. I was wondering if the french occasionally just don't use le or la, like we don't use the dog every time we say it? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4442 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 14 of 15 29 March 2014 at 4:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The problem in the beginning is that we haven't train our ears to the specific sounds of a language.
Individual words we may be able to figure out but when we listen to sentences, it gets more challenging. 6 months ago I was still working on my Chinese. A lot of TV programs especially those from Taiwan have Chinese character captions. Some have both captions and English subtitles. I find it much easier to read than listen. In the beginning, instead of listening to a radio program regularly, I would be cutting off many of the English TV programs I'd normally watch except the news and watch more Chinese programs with captions. When choosing a movie on DVD I make sure it has both English & French with captions in both languages. I can take my time watching up to half-hour of a movie at a time with the captions on and then the captions off. Many French words have silent sounds that may be hard to follow at first so reading off the screen would be easier. A typical French word to buy: acheter would sound like ash-tay with the middle syllable silent. In the first person present tense would be achète and sounds like a-shet. If you don't know a word or phrase, it is much easier to look up a dictionary when the correct spelling is on the screen. Another alternative would be listening to pop songs. Many come with lyrics so you can read while listening to a song. Edited by shk00design on 29 March 2014 at 4:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| soclydeza85 Senior Member United States Joined 3905 days ago 357 posts - 502 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 15 of 15 15 April 2014 at 1:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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For German I listen to a podcast called Slow German. It's basically just a lady reading German articles slowly (not too slowly, but not fast either). I found that this has helped me tremendously with my listening; even if I don't know every word that's being said (and I definitely don't), my mind learns to pick up on key words and fill in the blanks and I'm getting really used to "listening in German". I'm sure there is something like this for French.
Another thing I use is the audio from Assimil. Sometimes when I drive I listen to the same 4 or 5 lessons over and over again and it really gets me used to actually listening in the target language without being discouraged. The trick is to find dialogues/stories in the target language and just listen, listen, listen, even if it's the same thing over and over again. Movies and radio are great, but they are a bit advanced and can many times be discouraging. Good luck bud. Edited by soclydeza85 on 15 April 2014 at 1:37am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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