Making language comprehensible (Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies) Language Learning Forum

Making language comprehensible
Tags: Comprehension/understanding \| Listening \| Learning Technique/Method
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Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies

15 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

Iversen
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Message 9 of 15

01 July 2013 at 10:52am | IP Logged

If I had a transcript then I would use that to learn all the words before I even listened to the audio. And at that point I would put the transcript and my notes somewhere just beyond my reach and start listening with closed eyes. By then the speech ought to be comprehensible, and if not I would take one more round with the transcript and then press the repeat button. If necessary I would listen sentence by sentence, checking the transcript before each sentence, and if that wasn't enough I would go down to half sentences or sincle words.

However once I had made sure I could understand the speech word for word and sentence by sentence I would take one more extensive round where the only important thing was to hang on in spite of unknown words or woolly pronunciations. This would give me the sensation of having conquered an obstinate piece of babble.

I suppose this puts me somewhere between A and B. However in practice I would spend most of my time on reading and writing and studying vocabulary in the beginning of my study to prepare me for the far more scary act of listening ( <-- irony, but also my earnest opinion). This would shorten the time I would need to get to grips with the spoken language.

Edited by Iversen on 01 July 2013 at 10:56am
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emk
Diglot
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Message 10 of 15

01 July 2013 at 1:19pm | IP Logged

ihoop wrote:

Option A: Download a podcast/tv show with transcripts. Listen until you don't
understand a certain word or phrase. Look up said new word and/or keep the phrase on
repeat until you understand it perfectly. Once you feel that the new phrase has become
comprehensible move on to the next one.

Option B: Actively listen to a radio program or watch a TV show. Maintain as much
concentration as you can on what is being said. When you don't understand something
just let it pass but maintain your concentration.

I'm studying French, which means that Option A is generally a huge pain in the neck. Most of the stuff I want to listen to has no transcripts or subtitles, and even when it does have subtitles, they often have a extremely vague relationship to what's being said on-screen. (There are exceptions. The wiki has a list of native materials with accurate subtitles.)

So I've mostly gone with option B, and it has worked very well for the effort invested. To help you compare my results with other approaches, I'm going to describe my starting point, my methods and my results in quite a bit of detail.

When I started the project, here's what I had going for me:

Quote:

a. I could almost completely understand my wife speaking French to our kids, and I generally understood other French speakers when they spoke to me slowly. But beyond that, I was generally lost—I could sometimes understand professional radio news announcers, but TV, movies and conversations among natives were well out of reach. In CEFR terms, I was about B1, eventually reaching weak B2 comprehension of news sources only.

b. I had already read a couple thousand pages of French when I started, and I continued to read heavily. Currently I've read 7,700 pages for the Super Challenge and another 1,000 or so before the challenge started.

c. I had an average of 45 minutes per day to watch TV with my wife. This was relaxation time, not study time. If I wanted to, I could pause a few times per episode and ask her to repeat what somebody said.

d. I found some French series that weren't too hard, and which I enjoyed enough to watch even with partial comprehension. One of these series had a transcript available online.

Starting with those resources, here's what I did:

Quote:

1. I went through the transcripts for the first two episodes of Buffy, looking up any unknown words and making Anki sentence cards.

2. I watched those episodes several times, reading along with the transcript.

3. By the third episode, I merely listened intently. This means: (a) I gave the TV my undivided attention. (b) If I missed something, I would sometimes rewind two or three times to see if it would become clear. (c) If my wife was present, I would very occasionally ask her to repeat something slowly for me. But I tried not to do this more than a few times per episode.

4. Every once in a while, I'd do a little bit of intensive listening. For example, I fed about 30 minutes of Amelie and Taxi through subs2srs.

Over the course of about 150 hours of listening to native media (mostly television) and 6,000 pages of reading, I went from understanding maybe 40% of Buffy to understanding 80–90% of about half the shows on French TV (given an episode or two to "tune in"). A few shows are still very difficult, as are many French movies.

So why did I get decent results with very little actual "studying"? Here's my theory. Between my reading and the pictures on the TV, there was quite a lot that I should have been able to understand. And by paying serious attention to the TV for an hour or more at a time, I could temporarily elevate my comprehension. And by listening constantly, I gave myself lots of opportunities to cement those temporary gains by sheer repetition, which would in turn bring new material within reach.

Now, all this might be less efficient that, say, Iversen's approach (and he certainly speaks far more languages that I do). On the other hand, I made very real gains while reading science fiction novels and watching people kill vampires on TV, and most of this came out of my "goofing off" time, when I didn't have the mental energy for intensive methods.

Edited by emk on 01 July 2013 at 1:31pm
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Iversen
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Message 11 of 15

01 July 2013 at 2:55pm | IP Logged

I would use an accurate transcript as I described if I could get one. But as Emk points out this can be difficult - transcripts are rarely precise enough. But as I added at the end of my message above I tend to spend most of my early study time in a language on written sources, and once I have built a decent vocabulary and some feeling for the grammatical structures I'll have an easier time with spoken sources.

And besides there is the usual trick when dealing with incomprehensible speech: stop listening for the meaning! Listen for words boundaries and phrases, and when you can do that then listen for the words you understand and ignore the rest. If you can't hear words as words and you can't catch those words you already know then you lack the fundamental prerequisites for listening to streaming genuine speech. And in that situation you can either find something extremely simple to listen to or train your fundamental listening skills.

Both A and B in the original question assume that you are fairly close to being able to understand the speech, and so does my idea of switching between the study of a transcript and listening. If you can't get a transcript then you need either something very simple to listen to or more vocabulary from other study techniques.

Edited by Iversen on 01 July 2013 at 3:53pm
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sans-serif
Tetraglot
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Message 12 of 15

01 July 2013 at 4:50pm | IP Logged

Extensive listening is what I prefer and what's worked for me. Looking up words takes a lot of time and, personally, I find it immensely frustrating. If you only have an hour per day, I'd make sure to use all of it on concentrated listening.

Now, you may start out understanding next to nothing of what you hear. If that indeed is the case, it's best to find something that comes with a transcript. Such podcasts exist but they're few and far apart. Movies and TV shows also work if you can find ones with (sufficiently) accurate subtitles. The most reliable option, in my opinion, are audio books: as long as they're unabridged, an accurate 'transcript' always exists.
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montmorency
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Message 13 of 15

02 July 2013 at 1:24am | IP Logged

sans-serif wrote:

Extensive listening is what I prefer and what's worked for me.
Looking up words takes a lot of time and, personally, I find it immensely frustrating.
If you only have an hour per day, I'd make sure to use all of it on concentrated
listening.

Now, you may start out understanding next to nothing of what you hear. If that indeed
is the case, it's best to find something that comes with a transcript. Such podcasts
exist but they're few and far apart. Movies and TV shows also work if you can find ones
with (sufficiently) accurate subtitles. The most reliable option, in my opinion, are
audio books: as long as they're unabridged, an accurate 'transcript' always exists.

My approach with audiobooks (and real books usually) has been to quickly scribble down
words without stopping, and looking them up later. Sometimes I will put them into a
proper word list, or a Gold List, and sometimes I don't, and sometimes I don't bother
to look them up. (They will come round again).

Just recently I've been experimenting with Readlang (which has been the subject of a
thread on HTLAL), and that's a pretty good approach if you have an e-book version of
the book that you can convert into plain text with Calibre. You can then translate
words at the click of a mouse (and they are automatically saved), or you can choose not
to translate them if you so wish. When you review them (if you review them) you see the
word in the context you met it). Also, after you've translated you can immediately re-
click to go back to the TL word (if you wish). There is scope for some added features,
but it's a great little tool even as it is.

It works for web articles as well of course. It doesn't have to be an e-book.
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sans-serif
Tetraglot
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Finland
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Message 14 of 15

02 July 2013 at 10:25am | IP Logged

@montmorency:
I'll readily admit that this "never look up any words" attitude of mine is somewhat counter-productive in the grand scheme of things, and I have tried to develop a more moderate approach--with mixed results. It's a bit of a slippery slope for me: if I open myself to the idea of noting down interesting words, things tend to spiral out of control rather quickly, and I soon find myself underlining every other sentence because they contain some slightly unexpected usage. :-)

The least intrusive way for me has turned out to be scribbling a little dot next to a line that contains something I'd like to be reminded of, later on. Every now on then I flip through the pages I've read and remind myself of what caught my attention on each of the marked lines. If something is both interesting and potentially useful, I might enter it into the vocabulary list in my Dropbox folder, the contents of which I SRS with varying degrees of dedication. Usually not too much, though. The very act of writing these things down tends to suffice to make them stick passably well.

Returning to the original topic of the thread, I do think it pays to concentrate on the listening. In my experience, listening comprehension--especially in the early stages--is very fickle and a lot of the challenge lies in going into 'listening mode' and staying there. It's as if the brain takes a while to calibrate its antennas, and while it does get easier to dip in and out towards the end of a session, I think it's best to avoid doing so. It's hard enough to deal with the unknown words without the added distraction.

Readlang, by the way, sounds interesting and I should go check it out.

Edited by sans-serif on 07 July 2013 at 3:12pm
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montmorency
Diglot
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Studies: Danish, Welsh

Message 15 of 15

02 July 2013 at 3:48pm | IP Logged

sans-serif wrote:

@montmorency:
I'll readily admit that this "never look up any words" attitude of mine is somewhat
counter-productive in the grand scheme of things, and I have tried to develop a more
moderate approach--with mixed results. It's a bit of a slippery slope for me: if I open
myself to the idea of noting down interesting words, things tend to spiral out of
control rather quickly, and I soon find myself underlining every other sentence because
they contain some slightly unexpected usage. :-)

The least intrusive way for me has turned out to be scribbling a little dot next to a
line that contains something I'd like to be reminded of, later on. Every now on then I
flip through the pages I've read and remind myself of what drew my attention on each of
the marked lines. If something is both interesting and potentially useful, I might
enter it into the vocabulary list in my Dropbox folder, the contents of which I SRS
with varying degrees of dedication. Usually not too much, though. The very act of
writing these things down tends to suffice to make them stick passably well.

Returning to the original topic of the thread, I do think it pays to concentrate on the
listening. In my experience, listening comprehension--especially in the early stages--
is very fickle and a lot of the challenge lies in going into 'listening mode' and
staying there. It's as if the brain takes a while to calibrate its antennas, and while
it does get easier to dip in and out towards the end of a session, I think it's best to
avoid doing so. It's hard enough to deal with the unknown words without the added
distraction.

Yes, I really am a big fan of listening myself.

I just noticed that you, too, are learning Danish. I must admit my Danish has got a
little derailed recently (or perhaps shunted off into a siding, to continue with the
railway analogy), in favour of German, and I really want to get back to it.

I've been watching series 3 of "Borgen" with Dutch subtitles, and I watched some of
series 2 dubbed into German, as well as watching it with English subtitles when it was
on BBC. I also have "Those who kill" lined up for a re-watch.

I also have a queue of Danish audiobooks lined up, for which I fortunately have e-book
versions, and e-book translations in either German, English, or both, so potentially a
lot of comprehensible input there.

And now I've discovered Readlang, I think I could get into a very comfortable way of
working, mixing in some of the benefits of L-R, SRS, comprehensible input, and a few
other things we regularly talk about on HTLAL, which would improve my Danish, and still
keep my hand in with German. And hopefully enjoy the process along the way.

Quote:

Readlang, by the way, sounds interesting and I should go check it out.

Well you should you know, because he is going to have to start charging for it at some
point, but has promised free membership to those who register for it while it's still
in "Beta"! :-)

No, seriously, it's very good.

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