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Same audio 1000 times? | ||
Tags: Listening | Pronunciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4698 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes  Speaks: Czech* | Message 9 of 83 18 March 2012 at 2:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It's pointless. Just listen to 1000 minutes of material instead of listening to one minute thousand times. You won't get much from listening to the same recording more than 2-3 times. The problem is there is no variation. If it was actually recorded 30 times it could be useful to listen thirty times, but listening to one recording thirty times is not, it won't help you in figuring out what is the range of correct pronunciation. Edited by LaughingChimp on 18 March 2012 at 2:05pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4864 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 10 of 83 18 March 2012 at 6:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I listen to audio clips (or whole movies) until I understand them perfectly. Then I move on to another clip. How many times depends on the clip. I think I watched the Spanish soundtrack of the Disney movie Enchanted around 6 or 7 times (spaced out over a couple months) before I was able to clearly understand every word of it. The first Harry Potter movie took 3 or 4 times through, but part two of The Deathly Hallows took me a dozen times to really master.
Some simpler audios only took one time to get. More complex material like the audio book of Peter Pan I've listened to 10 to 12 times over the last few months and I'm still going back to it once a week or so because there are still parts that are difficult for me, and parts I don't get at all. Edited by fiziwig on 18 March 2012 at 7:00pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 11 of 83 18 March 2012 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If I can weigh in here, I would like to add that it makes a whole difference to have a transcript and a translation instead of having to figure it out. Right off the bat I know what to listen for and what the whole thing means. One of the most frustrating things is listening to something a dozen times and not being able to make out certain passages. Then a native speaker tells you what was said and Eureka you suddenly understand.
So, let's say you have this meaningful input. My own take on this is that the point of repeated listening is to really internalize the grammatical and phonological patterns so that you can regurgitate the same thing (or a variation thereof) nearly automatically. How many listens will that take? I don't know. I do feel that the number of repetitions will decrease as one gets better. How about 4-5 repetitions a day over two weeks? Or whatever it takes to feel that you know the material. In passing, I'd like to point to a website that I like a lot for French and Spanish (www.langcal.com) that just had a makeover. One of the things that they sell is a recording, transcription and technical commentary of a totally unrehearsed recording of a conversation in French. It's real eye-opener for anybody who wants to speak French. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5380 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 12 of 83 18 March 2012 at 9:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If you listen to a clip 1000 times... what do you actually hope to achieve?
If you want to improve your listening skills, then surely you will have understood the clip much earlier than that, and you'd be better off listening to something different or you're just wasting your time. If you want to improve pronunciation, I'd say 1) if you need to listen to the same clip 1000 times before you understand the sounds, then I suggest you simply give up altogether because that method just isn't working for you and 2) if you do know what the sounds are, hearing them more won't make a difference - it's production that you need to work on. I'm sure listening has multiple advantages but when it comes to pronunciation, it's production that's important. Most people who have studied any language for a serious amount of time can hear in their heads exactly how something is supposed to sound, the trouble is they can't produce it. Why? It's a mystery to me. My impression is that the average person lacks the ability to understand and control how they articulate sounds using their own vocal apparatus. In any case, that's what you'd need to work on -- not listening to the same thing 1000 times. You'll go nuts. I agree with LaughingChimp: 1000 different minutes would be 1000 times better than one minute 1000 times. The idea is that variety is what is going to allow you to determine where sounds start and end. You can't copy one sentence to perfection (or if you did it would have little effect on the rest of your production) because that sentence alone wouldn't allow you to determine exactly what it is and what it isn't. You can only determine those boundaries when you've heard similar things said in various different ways. EDIT: I just wanted to add two things. First, are you really sure Jerry Dai listened to the same recordings 1000 times? My instinct tells me that it seems like an awfully repetitive thing for a such a successful learner to do. Second, with all due respect, near-native pronunciation is not one of Moses' best skills. If anything, this should be a good indication that listening 1000 times doesn't yield near-perfect pronunciation on its own. Edited by Arekkusu on 18 March 2012 at 10:17pm 11 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5865 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 13 of 83 18 March 2012 at 11:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
Can you explain why it is such a real eye-opener, being only 4 minutes long and costing $14? Could that 4 minutes be expanded to something like 30 minutes and $40. and be really outstanding? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 14 of 83 19 March 2012 at 12:28am | IP Logged | |||||
Good question. I can't really answer the question of the value for the price for everybody. Nothing prevents a person from buying just the recording and doing their own transcription. Or for that matter making their own recording from the radio or the Internet. I listened to the recording with the transcript and the translation. When I said it is an eye-opener, I mean by that not only it was interesting to hear what real unscripted French sounds like, but also the linguistic commentary also pointed out many points of grammar and aspects of spoken French that I found very enlightening. There are two questions here. Do you need to have 30 minutes of the same conversation? As other people have suggested, maybe a two minute sample is fine in terms of linguistic content. I believe that a four minute sample is enough. Someone who listens to this sample many times would have, I think, quite a complete view of casual spoken French. I would go for more varied samples. The other question is price. I charge around $50 an hour for private coaching. You can also find a language buddy and do an exchange for free. My lawyer neighbour charges $425 an hour. If you go to Middlebury College in Vermont for a 7 week French language intensive, it will cost you around $7,720. Or you can spend 7 weeks at the library for free. I don't think that $14 for the recording, transcript, translation and commentary is expensive. I look at it in terms of value, what it gives to me. The way I look at it is more like, "How much would it cost me if I had to do it myself?" Where I live, going to a movie costs nearly that much. And my girlfriend just paid $128 to go a performance of a local comedian. I balked at paying that much because I felt that it just wasn't worth it. But she disagreed. I think that $14 for something that I'm going to read and listen to for weeks and really advance my knowledge of a language is nothing. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6438 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 15 of 83 19 March 2012 at 1:35am | IP Logged | |||||
I agree with Arekkusu. I've tried listening to sound clips of individuals words/minimal pairs a few thousand times: if they're a fraction of a second, this is achievable in a solid hour. At the end of that, I still couldn't pronounce them, and I still couldn't reliably distinguish the phonemes I'd need to to differentiate the minimal pairs. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5865 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 16 of 83 19 March 2012 at 3:27am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm not questioning the cost. I was more interested in what can be packed into 4 minutes that makes it so awe-inspiring. If you think that 4 minutes is enough, it must be great. I was more thinking that, yes, it is probably very good. But how can you pack everything into 4 minutes? It would seem that, if 4 minutes is so good, 10 of such 4 minute super tutorials, covering more of the spectrum, would probably really be worth much more and be well worth the effort to use it. Can these 4 minutes really give you a big advantage in learning the "huge" French language? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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