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Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5668 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin
| Message 1 of 83 17 March 2012 at 8:31pm | IP Logged |
I find that audio content is essential to my language learning. Listening to the same audio repeatedly is even better. However, after hearing something a few dozen times at the most I am sick of hearing it and never listen to it again. Recently, though, I have been wondering if this is a mistake.
A while back I remember reading about Jerry Dai, who has learned English to an extraordinarily high level, with a near-native accent. Apparently, he listened to the same audio more than 1000 times, fine tuning his listening and speaking skills along the way.
More recently, I have seen videos of Moses where he discusses listening to short audio clips (e.g. course dialogues) at least 1000 times each.
Now, if I listen to a two minute dialogue 15 times, I feel "hardcore" having devoted a whole half hour to it. These guys, though, would be devoting more than 30 hours to that same two minute clip.
If I spent 1000 hours on listening to a new language over an intensive year, average 15 repetitions of each audio clip, I would cover 2000 different audio clips each two minutes long. This seems like massive extensive immersion to me.
The 1000 repetitions advocates, though, would only be able to listen to 30 different audio clips over that year, representing just one hour of actual different content. That seems a very narrow intensive focus - but I am sure they would know every tiny nuance of that content at a very deep level.
My question, then, is ... have any of you folks tried this 1000+ repetitions approach, and if so, why? In addition, are there any studies on this and the effectiveness of the approach?
Edited by Splog on 17 March 2012 at 8:43pm
7 persons have voted this message useful
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5452 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin
| Message 2 of 83 17 March 2012 at 8:54pm | IP Logged |
Splog wrote:
My question, then, is ... have any of you folks tried this 1000+ repetitions approach, and if so,
why? In addition, are there any studies on this and the effectiveness of the approach? |
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I know that I'd be bored to death if I tried.
3 persons have voted this message useful
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6701 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese
| Message 3 of 83 17 March 2012 at 9:59pm | IP Logged |
1000 times seems a bit excessive, but it seems like a listening parallel to the intensive/extensive reading method. I've certainly found that if I listen to a certain passage a number of times that it's stuck better, especially when twinned with shadowing of some sort. I think the max that I've ever been able to repeat a single dialog has been 30-40 times, and that occurred over a period of a couple months. While I'm sure listening that many times would pound it into your head, I'm also sure that you'd hit a point of diminishing returns somewhere along the way. You'd have to figure out a better sweet spot, me thinks.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 4 of 83 17 March 2012 at 11:08pm | IP Logged |
There may well be some songs I've heard 1000 times, but other than this, no. I'm picky and for me even listening 5-10 times is like scriptorium and requires this something to be special. It has to be worth repeating/copying.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Kyle Corrie Senior Member United States Joined 4828 days ago 175 posts - 464 votes
| Message 5 of 83 17 March 2012 at 11:40pm | IP Logged |
My preference is to watch a movie in English so that I'm aware of what's going on. Then I
find that movie dubbed in the target language and rip it to an MP3 and listen to it over
and over. Each time I usually pick up something new and and learn how things are
expressed based upon how they'd be said in English.
I have entire movies memorized in the target language simply by having listened to them
30 or 40 times and because movies aren't so audio intensive such as a book.
A movie exposes you to much more natural dialog in my opinion and is much more
entertaining.
My two cents.
10 persons have voted this message useful
| Michael K. Senior Member United States Joined 5728 days ago 568 posts - 886 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto
| Message 6 of 83 18 March 2012 at 12:16am | IP Logged |
Professor Arguelles advocates listening to an Assimil lesson until you can repeat it without looking at the text. I think that would take a few dozen times, maybe up to a hundred times.
I don't think you would need anywhere near 1,000 times listening to the clip to memorize it. It also sounds extremely boring, and 1,000 is a pretty big number, and 2,000 minutes (33 1/3 hours) is a long time. I think you could get to A1 in the amount of time it would take to listen 1,000 times. It doesn't seem like a very good use of study time, unless all you could do is listen.
I'd say listen to it until you have it memorized, and maybe a little bit more just to be sure.
All Moses pretty much does is study languages (I don't think he has an outside job besides his FLR business), so I could see him getting to 1,000 listens in a a few weeks, depending on how many languages he's focusing on. I've never heard of Jerry Dai, but if English is the only language he's studying and he's focused on getting the perfect accent, it might be a good strategy.
1 person has voted this message useful
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jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6908 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map
| Message 7 of 83 18 March 2012 at 1:26am | IP Logged |
If I'd spend anywhere in the neighbourhood of 1000 times on a certain piece of audio, it would have to be "short but rich". Short enough so the repetition becomes beneficial, and at the same time rich enough regarding phonology/prosody. Think of it like a scale exercise. As a musician, I wouldn't practice scales because they're useful per se, but because they make the fingers used to various positions.
2000 two-minute clips sounds VERY useful to me (that's about 2000 Assimil lessons, and that's ~1900 more than offered by any course). By then, one would have been exposed to just about any strings of sounds available in the target language, and a fair share of vocabulary.
2 persons have voted this message useful
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4670 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 8 of 83 18 March 2012 at 6:10am | IP Logged |
The following is purely from the standpoint of maximizing listening comprehension. For me, when it comes to
repetitions, more is not necessarily better. When I'm just starting in a language I might get some good out of
listening to some really simple stuff several times. But after that stage, 2 or 3 times is optimal. More than that,
and my mind doesn't pay nearly as close attention. I want my mind to stay alert and work hard, so fresh material
is very important. I listen the 2nd time because I can almost always understand more than the first. But after that,
there is little if any change, so it's time to move on.
7 persons have voted this message useful
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