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C1 Listening Skills - How many hours? | ||
Tags: Advanced Level | Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6097 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 1 of 16 22 January 2014 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Assuming you’re listening to increasingly challenging audio, how many hours of intense listening would you think it takes to develop C1 listening skills ? Obviously this figure will differ depending on the language. If you’re starting from an English base from scratch, how much listening would it take to reach a decent C1 listening ability in Spanish, Russian, and then Mandarin ?
My estimates would be, Spanish: 700 to 900 hours pure listening Russian: 1000 to 1300 hours pure listening. Mandarin: 1500 to 3000 hours pure listening. My figures assume you’ll also do a lot of additional study to learn grammar and vocabulary. Are these figures to high ? Do you think it can be achieved quicker ? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4479 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 2 of 16 22 January 2014 at 3:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've done about 500-600 hours of listening now in German and am strong B2 now. However, I have also done a lot of reading over the same time. I am not sure it's so easy to talk about "C1 listening" independent of your other skills. Clearly my listening ability is strongly influenced by how strong my vocabulary/grammar is.
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| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4617 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 3 of 16 22 January 2014 at 4:51pm | IP Logged | ||
Totally agree. You might be able to say something like "on a level playing field, it takes three times as many hours to reach C1 listening in Mandarin than it does Spanish", but I don't think you can come up with the actual numbers. For overall language learning, we have the FSI Chart 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4653 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 4 of 16 22 January 2014 at 5:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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My listening is fuelled by my experience, vocabulary but also understanding of
pronunciation, sentence melody, and that sort of thing... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7151 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 5 of 16 22 January 2014 at 6:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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A good student in the FSI is looking to achieve S3/R3 or better.
This chart mapping FSI to CEFR scales suggests C1 is about this level. I would think if one is a diligent studier, like an FSI student, one would hit C1 listening in less hours than it would take to bring Speaking and Reading up to that level along with Listening. But I'm with patrickwilken and others. You really need to know where the student is on reading/speaking and possibly writing to some degree, as these skills will influence listening ability. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4390 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 6 of 16 22 January 2014 at 11:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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Personally I do agree that it is more important for you to spend time listening to audio recordings, news
broadcasts, TV shows in a particular language than just studying from a phrase book. The number of hours you spend is rather superficial. One has to make a distinction between passive and more active listening. You can listening to a Pop song in a language because you like the tune but you don't necessarily pick out all the words & phrases that was said. I prefer a pre-recorded movie, TV show or news broadcast that you can playback as many times as you wish. When you have trouble hearing a word / phrase you rewind the recording and listen more intensely until you get it. And if you need to, write the phrase in your notes for future reference. If you are watching a foreign film and most of the time you rely on the English subtitles then having the volume on doesn't serve a lot of purpose than adding sound effects. Edited by shk00design on 23 January 2014 at 10:30pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4653 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 7 of 16 22 January 2014 at 11:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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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. 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tanya b Senior Member United States Joined 4724 days ago 159 posts - 518 votes Speaks: Russian | Message 8 of 16 23 January 2014 at 2:30am | IP Logged | ||
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Unfortunately, listening skills may be the hardest to acquire.....
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. When I started studying my 2 TLs I just concentrated on vocab and pronounciation, so when the time came to actually start listening, I wouldn't experience the frustration of not understanding. I purposely avoided Armenian and Russian TV news. Because I was well-prepared, I only needed to watch TL TV for 20-30 hours, and my comprehension was quite good. Not perfect, but it was a springboard to future success, and equally important, I no longer lived in fear. I once talked to French teacher who learned French that way, who said that his level was excellent because he caught all the "key words" of any given sentence. I took him at his word. If language learning is both a science and an art, then the science is vocab acquisition, and the art is discerning the key words, and not being so hung-up on the small stuff. You can deal with that later. It's a classic "fake it till you make it" strategy. I am studying Persian for 18 months now very methodically, learning 5-7 new words a day, and making speeches to an audience of none. Last year, I stumbled on to a Farsi TV show, and I understood 90% of it, because they were speaking slowly, and the subject happened to jive nicely with the vocab I had already learned. No, I don't assume it will always be that easy. On Spanish vs. Russian, I can understand a fair bit of Spanish TV, just recognizing the cognates and international words. That would never apply to Russian and certainly not Mandarin. For example, take Russian numbers and fractions. The Russian case declensions won't even leave them alone and let them just stay in the nominative. So comprehending numbers in the TL can be the most challenging and if you want to understand stock prices in Shanghai or sports scores from Moscow, you bloody well better have those numbers down. Edited by tanya b on 24 January 2014 at 9:27pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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