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Improvement in Audio Comprehension without Audio input | ||
Tags: Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 4085 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes  Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 1 of 8 09 July 2014 at 9:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Improvement in Listening Comprehension without Audio input.
At the beginning of this year, my listening comprehension to the audio in coursebooks was terrible. Then, I spent about 14 weeks working with Hugo German in 3 Months, and a glossary book with exercises, both without audio. I was just trying to improve my German. I made significant progress. During this time, I had almost 0 German audio input. I did not talk to anyone in German, or hear any German. At the end of this period, I had to take a test, and to my surprise, I found the listening portion to be easy. The sentences consisted of words instead of just noise. The jump in parsing ability was huge. These sentences of course had words I did not understand, but I would go "Got this word, got this word, dunno what this word means, got this word...". Earlier, I had not been able to figure out the words in spoken German. Anyone else experienced this? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Michel1020 Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5020 days ago 365 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Dutch | Message 2 of 8 09 July 2014 at 10:05pm | IP Logged | ||
Maybe it was indeed very easy. Edited by Michel1020 on 09 July 2014 at 10:05pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| napoleon Tetraglot Senior Member India Joined 5019 days ago 543 posts - 874 votes Speaks: Bengali*, English, Hindi, Urdu Studies: French, Arabic (Written) | Message 3 of 8 09 July 2014 at 10:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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Reading does help. I've found the more books I read in French, the more I understand spoken French. And I'm talking about plain old fashioned reading, not about LR.
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| luhmann Senior Member Brazil Joined 5336 days ago 156 posts - 271 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: Mandarin, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Persian, Arabic (classical) | Message 4 of 8 10 July 2014 at 12:02am | IP Logged | ||
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I used to watch lots of Chinese serials, I took a brake from it, and worked with reading for a while. When I got back to it it felt wow, my listening comprehension was noticeable better than when I left it.
Another similar experience with Persian. I used to study lessons and SRS single words. When I switched my SRS system to sentences instead of single words, my listening comprehension skyrocketed in just a few weeks. Logging long hours of listening is inefficient, the law of diminishing returns quickly takes its toll. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Astrophel Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5735 days ago 157 posts - 345 votes Speaks: English*, Latin, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Cantonese, Polish, Sanskrit, Cherokee | Message 5 of 8 10 July 2014 at 8:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Part of listening comprehension is separating one word from the next one. If you don't know the words,
you don't know where the word boundaries are and it's just a stream of meaningless syllables, even if you could transcribe the syllables you hear. So it makes perfect sense that after learning words your listening comprehension would increase. Seriously, try transcribing a language that's 100% unfamiliar (don't worry about spelling), vs. a language you know about 10 words in. In the second, even if most of it is meaningless gibberish, you'll CLEARLY hear the words for things like "hello" and "and" when they occur. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 8 10 July 2014 at 12:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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As Astrophel writes: part of listening comprehension is separating one word from the next one. And I can't really see how you can improve that without listening. But after that there is a long phase where the limiting factor is lack of vocabulary (and to some extent: shaky morphological skills). And you can definitely make progress on those two points without actually listening.
As readers of my log may have noticed I'm in the middle of a wholesale Serbian vocabulary exercise where I simply go through the alphabet letter by letter. And besides I have now finally got both a Serbian and a Croatian TV channel. The irony is that I still have problems understanding the speech there, but when I then try to find out what went wrong then I more often than not end up with an unknown word from the part of the alphabet I haven't reached yet. So far I have finished O so there are still a few letters left, but I can already now feel that my comprehension level is closely tied to my vocabulary size, which luckily has an upward direction right now. I could parse the speech of both Croatian and Serbian into words and phrases even before I started this exercise, but now all progress is based on knowing the words those people on TV say. It would of course also be nice to have time to learn to speak Serbian, but so far I'm more interested in being able to understand it (or its near relatives). Edited by Iversen on 10 July 2014 at 12:41pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4311 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 7 of 8 10 July 2014 at 1:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Since reading still gives an "echo" of the sounds of the language, I think that reading
still contributes to listening skills to a significant degree. The only problem is that you're being reinforced by a possibly inaccurate model, since it's your "echo". So in order to feel secure about your self-reinforcement via reading you would have to be confident that you're not "fossilizing" ugly phonological errors, which would be detrimental to your listening skills. So I personally am wary of studying any text without close reference and practice with a recording until I'm at an intermediate level, and once I feel that pronunciation issues that I have are minor (though tough to judge, of course). For German I broke with audio recordings for extensive reading just recently at about 750 hours. For Spanish I'm going to be less conservative and start reading a bilingual text within a few weeks when I hit 600 hours. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 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 8 of 8 10 July 2014 at 1:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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Reading aloud has helped my Ukrainian listening a lot.
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