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Improve my Russian listening & speaking

  Tags: Listening | Speaking | Russian
 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center Post Reply
11 messages over 2 pages: 1
QiuJP
Triglot
Senior Member
Singapore
Joined 5708 days ago

428 posts - 597 votes 
Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French
Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese

 
 Message 9 of 11
11 December 2013 at 6:53pm | IP Logged 
After some weeks of drilling with my methods and listening to Russian radio, I have identify two major problems in listening:

1) I have problems identifying the word boundaries, especially in the case of a preposition joining up with the word following it. For example: за столом, обо мне etc.

2) There is still a lot of gaps in my vocabulary. For the listening in Assimil, I can understand without the text, because I am familiar with the vocabulary in the book already. But for a news telecast, I could not understand most of it. Although, I have been working on my Russian vocabulary, It seems that I have not covered to a satisfactory level to understand even the gist of a radio broadcast.

What will be an effective way to overcome these difficulties?
1 person has voted this message useful



geoffw
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4541 days ago

1134 posts - 1865 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish
Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian

 
 Message 10 of 11
11 December 2013 at 11:32pm | IP Logged 
Regarding point 2):

If you are failing to understand the spoken broadcast because of a lack of vocabulary, presumably you also will fail
to understand written news for the same reason. If so, practice reading the news and looking up unknown
vocabulary. Once you can recognize the written version, you just need to train yourself to recognize the sounds
that are spoken as corresponding to the words they represent. But you need to realize that this also is a skill that
takes a little practice to master.

If you are getting tripped up primarily by the speed with which you can perform the audio decoding step (as
opposed to an absolute lack of vocabulary), it can be very useful to find SLOWER audio. Ideally, you would listen to
the fastest audio that you can ALMOST follow, and practice listening until you follow, and then listen to something
faster.

Another problem that occurs in decoding fast audio is, e.g., what you note under point number 1): word
boundaries are blurred, words are run together, some sounds (especially endings) are dropped, and your brain
needs to fill in the gaps. This only can be done by PREDICTING what is SUPPOSED to be in that gap, which requires
a higher level of understanding. This is in fact an active skill, not just a matter of decoding what you hear. To
improve this skill, 1) practice, practice, practice listening, but also 2) improve your overall familiarity with the
language through reading and listening to easier audio if you can find it.

Good luck!
3 persons have voted this message useful



QiuJP
Triglot
Senior Member
Singapore
Joined 5708 days ago

428 posts - 597 votes 
Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French
Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese

 
 Message 11 of 11
02 January 2014 at 5:56pm | IP Logged 
Thanks for the advices,. I have already applied some of the suggestions mentioned here in to my learning.

I have attempted to read news articles in Russian to find out my level of vocabulary. The verbs and the specialized vocabulary used in the articles are giving me the problems in understanding. In addition, I also realised that I have words that I recognise when reading but not listening. So I need some advices:

1) Should I vary the ways I learn vocabulary? Right now, I am using thematic lists with exercises and have not cover a lot of thematic areas yet.

2) Is there a better way to associate my visual memory and my hearing memory, so that my understanding of Russian words is the same for both fields?


1 person has voted this message useful



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