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Listening Comprehension of French? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 12 06 June 2012 at 2:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think that you're doing great, given that you've only been studying French for a
year! If you've been studying French for a year on your own, you might about around A2, give or take a level. At this point, you would normally be able to have very simple conversations about concrete topics with a helpful native speaker. Some suggestions on how to improve: 1) Start practicing the major sounds in French, just to make sure you can produce all of them in isolation. Here are some great resources: Sounds in French Interactive IPA charts Pay particular attention to those rounded front vowels, the 3 or 4 nasal vowels, and the French R if you're an English speaker. You won't get all of these perfect when you actually try to speak, but you should be familiar with the sounds and practice them now and then, so your brain has some hooks for later. You can look up the pronunciation of individual words here, and get IPA symbols: Wiktionnaire 2) Start listening to lots of French in the background. I recommend music and news radio, or possibly audiobooks. The idea isn't to understand what they're saying (at least not yet), but rather to start breaking the sound into words and get accustomed to full-speed spoken French. Your brain will do most of this automatically, given several weeks of exposure. It will still be a blur, but it will be a blur of incomprehensible syllables and words, not a blur of noise. 3) Practice listening to texts you understand completely. This means taking something like an Assimil lesson or an article on LingQ, working with it until you can read it accurately, and then listening to it 10 or 20 times. At a minimum, you need a transcript, a dictionary and a recording. You can do something similar with a book and an audio book. If you've got a smart phone, and you like LingQ, seriously consider paying for the LingQ app, so you can listen to articles anywhere. This will give you a huge amount of practice with French pronunciation and listening, and your brain will start to rewire itself accordingly. It's very important to have lots of French audio in your life! When you're around A2, it's much easier to start from a known text and then listen to it. Watching a French movie without subtitles is often going to be a complete blur. (It still is for me, even though I understand news radio fairly well, and I can watch Buffy in French.) 4) Start reading online newspapers in French. Granted, this works best if you like news. But the vocabulary used in newspapers is often a bit formal and a lot more limited than you might think, so once you master it, you can start making real progress with news radio. News radio is much easier than TV or movies for many students, because it's spoken in a clear, standard accent, and it's always about the same 20 or 30 general subjects. 5) If your Alliance Française is large enough, try politely eavesdropping on cocktail party conversations between native speakers and more advanced students. The native speakers will speak a bit more slowly and clearly than usual, and you can try to follow along. If you have an opportunity to listen to French speakers interact with children, that's even better. I won't deny that French listening comprehension is a big project. But you're probably not far from your first major milestone: Somewhere around a strong B1 level, with a bit of practice, you'll be able to interact entirely in French. You won't understand everything someone says to you, but you'll be able to ask them what something meant, and understand the explanation 80%+ of the time. Practical one-on-one conversation (with anybody but a Parisian waiter) is probably the easiest oral skill to develop. Edited by emk on 06 June 2012 at 2:26pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5392 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 10 of 12 07 June 2012 at 11:19am | IP Logged | ||
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Lots of good advice. I'd add it helps to learn some key vocabulary as it will help fill in
blanks. At this stage the little connector phrases, expressions and conjunctions will be very useful, especially for news. I'd also add that working through intermediate level especially you'll find that you're surprised and proud when you realize you can understand only to be followed by not being able to understand anything. This is completely normal and is most affected by the type of audio you're listening to. For native audio pre-scripted news that's being read will be easier than an unscripted debate between speakers. For entertainment dubbed content is usually easier (except for shows that feature a lot of quickfire Adam Sorkin style dialogue), native French shows and movies will be harder (especially since a lot of French films feature lots of sitting and talking rather than a lot of plot). Plus entertainment has a lot of informal French which will be quite different from news. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6904 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 11 of 12 08 July 2012 at 12:45am | IP Logged | ||
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As a beginner, I very much enjoyed BBC materials
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/), especially the course "Ma France" (entertaining, lots of useful vocabulary, nice transcripts/subtitles both in French and English, clearly spoken and yet quite natural). "French in Action" is great for listening comprehension, too, as it has already been mentioned above. When you progress to authentic materials, documentaries and educational movies (with a narrator) are the way to go, as they're easy to follow and you can understand a lot when you just see it. Many French TV productions can be recommended, e.g. "Thalassa", "Des racines & des ailes" (documentaries, both quite easy and interesting) and "C'est pas sorcier" (educational magazine of a somewhat annoying convention but with tons of interesting facts, vocabulary and easy explanations). I also strongly recommend the exercises on TV5 Monde website (tons of videos with exercises on three different levels for each video, which show well that even if you don't understand everything, you're still able to understand something). http://www.tv5.org/TV5Site/enseigner-apprendre-francais/accu eil_apprendre.php 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4700 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 12 of 12 08 July 2012 at 2:20pm | IP Logged | ||
I don't know who told you that you should not worry about it, you should try to fix it as soon as possible. If you can't distinguish the words you know, your listening is not necessarily to blame. It very often means that you hear everything right, but your idea of how the words should sound is wrong. The sooner you fix the problem, the fewer words you will have to re-learn. Listen to native speakers, but stop trying to convince yourself that you hear something else than what you hear. Instead, listen carefully to how exactly the words actually sound. IMO it's better to listen to whole words or even a bit larger chunks of language instead of focusing on single sounds, the sounds can often change significantly depending on surrounding sounds and you can't do it with fast speech anyway. Once you hear the word several times from multiple speakers, you should get a good idea of how it sounds and you should have no big trouble recognizing it again. Edited by LaughingChimp on 08 July 2012 at 2:47pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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