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How can I piece together spoken German? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Tollpatchig Senior Member United States Joined 3953 days ago 161 posts - 210 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Maltese | Message 1 of 13 23 January 2014 at 4:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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My listening comprehension has significantly improved but unfortunately, while I can distinguish individual words from one another I can't understand them as a whole. I can't tell if this is in part because most times I don't know the meaning of the words or if it's because my brain simple cannot register the string of words as a comprehensible sentence. I often get the gist of some spoken German (DW podcasts z.b) but never exactly know what's being said unless its a construct I've heard time and time again.
Is this a normal part of listening comprehension? If so, does the brain sort itself out or is there something I need to be doing to help it out? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5478 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 13 23 January 2014 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | ||
Actually, I think you've already got the solution, right there. :-) Your brain is trying to do too much, too quickly. Finding the words, finding the cases, assembling everything into sentences, extracting the meaning, and so on. But when you've already heard something a bunch of times, your brain can say, "Ah, OK, that whole chunk is familiar" and deal with it quickly. So to understand spoken German better, German needs to become more familiar. And you can do this largely through exposure to interesting, mostly-understandable German. At some point, you'll have heard most things time and time again, and your understanding will cover much more of the language. Of course, it doesn't hurt to spend some time looking stuff up now and then. At the intermediate level, it's possible to make noticeable progress with one book and one season of television, and it's possible to make huge progress with, say, 10 easy novels and a half-dozen seasons of various TV series. All you need to do is find some way to mostly understand something, and go from there. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5208 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 3 of 13 23 January 2014 at 5:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Training listening takes time. Have a look at leosmith's excellent post Listening from the beginning and Ari's Three rules for improving listening.
My advice is to make listening part of your everyday routine. Try to listen to something, an appropriate audio book, a newscast, a song, a podcast- something for at least 10 minutes a day sometime in your day. If you have a transcript, even better! You can use a transcript in many ways- as a check against your listening oomprehension- read first then listen- listen first, then read, then listen again- listen while reading, the combinations are many. What I wouldn't do is become too dependent on the transcript or subtitles. Real people don't come with those. This isn't going to be easy- know that from the start, but it will get easier the more that you do it. The news is something I use. If you like the news you'll know what it is in English, so you have more of a chance of figuring out what's being said in German. Yes, it's more formal language and more clearly annunciated than real life native speech. If you don't like the news, then don't use it. Do find something that you can make use of, that you'll like and keep with it despite the hardship. That's the key. When I first started intensively working with a Brazilian TV novela, I went through the 35 minute episode 4 times, stopping it and going back over it when I had to. I wrote a thorough review of what was going on in each scene of the episode, including quotes at times. I had a private tutor who also watched the episode and had access to it and would fill in the gaps with my time stamp. Sometimes, it's really good to spend some money. You can do something similar if you have a transcript as your backstop. Edited by iguanamon on 23 January 2014 at 6:00pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6855 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 13 23 January 2014 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's easier to understand what you hear if you know what to expect. It's OK to listen many times to the same content, to listen to material for which you have a transcript (podcast+text, audiobook+book, etc.)... Being good at pronunciation may also help.
Have a look at this recent thread: C1 listening 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6543 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 5 of 13 24 January 2014 at 5:02am | IP Logged | ||
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Music shouldn't be the only thing you listen to, but http://lyricstraining.com/ should be useful :))) Also, read Ari's whole thread and not just the opening post. Edited by Serpent on 24 January 2014 at 5:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5337 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 6 of 13 24 January 2014 at 6:10am | IP Logged | ||
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As others have just said, it's something that takes practice and exposure. It helps a lot if you find some audio to listen to more than once (sometimes even just a second time will do the trick). In addition to the challenge of it still being a language that you're learning, our attention spans just tend to wander naturally. You may not notice in your native language because you can bring it back easily and understand almost immediately like you never missed a thing, but in your L2 understanding the context is of paramount importance and zoning out for just one word or one introduction of a panel member will unravel your entire ability to comprehend. Watching televised news (or anything else) can help keep your focus and give you visual clues (plus for politics and whatnot you'll start recognizing the key players - ministers, members of parliament, leaders of political parties, major union representatives, etc). Getting this background cultural/societal knowledge is really important for being able to follow the news. It's really worth it to educate yourself on the structure of the government, main figures, major laws, economic policies, some of the major companies (including utilities and such), major nonprofit groups, the social programs, etc.
Taking notes as you're listening can help you stay focused. It can be just writing down an interesting word here and there or names, etc. A guy I met at a language Meetup who's teaching himself French has a pretty elaborate technique for note taking/sketching as he's listening to help him with comprehension and retention. As he talked to me about places he went and described them, he took out a notebook and started drawing maps and filling in words and writing down any words I offered him while helping him through his narration. He says he turns on French radio and does just that while listening to the programs. I don't know if you can relate, but I often felt (and still do sometimes) that even though I was comprehending something at 100% (or close to it), it seemed like I had no long term memory - it was all in one ear and out the other. I think as my brain was working on keeping up with the language (with names of people and entities being mixed in to make it challenging), it wasn't focusing at all on context or trying to retain information. And since this is pretty mentally fatiguing - processing a stream of language for no apparent reason as I'm not retaining anything that's communicated - it's much easier to start zoning out a lot. Taking notes as I was describing above ought to really help with this. Edited by sctroyenne on 24 January 2014 at 6:34am 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 7 of 13 24 January 2014 at 8:10am | IP Logged | ||
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One of the basic skills you need as a language learner is to accept you won't understand everything you read/hear. I've watched over 300 movies in German, and throughout that time I have seen a systematic improvement in ability to understand, but often still have these apparent aphasic moments.
I had a weird experience a little while ago while watching the 2nd Matrix film. During the film the conversations were absolutely transparent, until the scene where Neo talks to the Architect about the philosophy of the Matrix, and suddenly my German mostly dropped out presumably because my vocabulary couldn't keep up with what they were saying. My first exposure to German was South Park without subtitles. I actually watched a couple of seasons when I was still A1. Since then everything is easier. To generalize a bit, the easiest things to watch are: tv series - the vocabulary is repeated; shows where you have a good idea of what is going on - it can help to watch a German version of a movie you've already seen in English; subtitles can help - but I generally don't use them as find it distracts from listening, but there were times when it was amazing how I would pick up words once I had seen them written down; dubbed films seem easier than non-dubbed films - I was recently at a party and native Germans said the same thing - not sure why that is; films in which the visuals match the plot closely (action films). You may also want to consider looking at audio books at some point to hear German while reading. You might want to check out Deutsche Welle. They have lots of audio on the site aimed at all levels, including a super-slowly spoken newscast (but this B2 level). My wife spent a year in Naples working in a neuroscience lab in Naples as part of her masters. When she arrived, she found that no-one other than her boss spoke English (forget German). She said what really helped her Italian was having the radio on in the lab 24/7. She said after some weeks Italian just clicked in her brain. Bottom-line: Don't discount listening to things even if you don't understand them. Edited by patrickwilken on 24 January 2014 at 8:29am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Tollpatchig Senior Member United States Joined 3953 days ago 161 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Maltese | Message 8 of 13 24 January 2014 at 2:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Oh trust me Patrick I'm an avid user of DW's offerings. I prefer ZDF's logo Kindernachrichten to DWs slow
news. It is entirely too boring. I do make it a point to listen to podcasts at as many points in the day as possible. I think thats why I've gotten better and like igunamon said I'll start taking advantage of the transcripts with my podcasts. Thanks for the great tips and threads everyone. Keep it up with your personal experiences. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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