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Developing Listening Comprehension? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| drp9341 Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 4846 days ago 115 posts - 217 votes  Speaks: Italian, English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French Studies: Japanese | Message 1 of 15 15 December 2011 at 7:57pm | IP Logged |
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Hello!
I must preface this by saying that out of all the skills involved in language learning, the one I value the most highly is listening comprehension! And I was curious as to how you guys develop your listen comprehension abilities. What I generally do is start off by being able to read pretty good, (although from the start I am used to the general cadence and sounds of the language) And then once I feel pretty comfortable with the language, (like at a good A2-B1 level I start to watch TV shows with subtitles in the target language... that way the way the word sound gets aggregated to the way it is spelled, otherwise I would loose almost all of what was being said! Then I listen to music, and I also find conversing a bunch helps tremendously with listening comprehension, as the audio quality isn't an issue... because it's in real life! and because you know what to be listening for as you asked the question in the first place. Then once I can understand like 85% of a TV show, I'll start to watch them differently, and every time I don't understand something I will keep rewinding it and rewinding it until I can figure out what the actor said. I must say this strategy has done wonders for my understanding of Spanish TV. (Plus it gives your TONS of exposure to the language... so you will naturally learn the most used words and expressions, plus learn the way people phrase things!) But I can't help but believe that there must be better alternatives out there, so thus I've come to you guys! What are your methods that you use for developing listening comprehension skills? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6373 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 15 15 December 2011 at 8:24pm | IP Logged |
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My most effective one is Listening-reading.
I have lots of others, but none are anywhere near as effective (until you want to get to the point of understanding a language with lots of background noise/distortion/etc; then conversing in groups in loud environments and watching movies are helpful). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4799 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 15 15 December 2011 at 9:12pm | IP Logged |
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Aside from all the standard answers, here's one little trick I find useful.
I record a soundtrack and import it into Audacity (a freeware sound editor program). Audacity has a feature that allows you to slow down a playback without altering the pitch of the voice. I slow down the soundtrack by 25%. Much more than that and it really sounds unnaturally slow. At 25% slower it becomes much easier to pick out the words. Once I really grasp the whole thing at 25% slower I can go back and listen to it at normal speed and understand it much better. I do this a lot with the Spanish audio files from Albalearning. It really helps a lot to have the transcript to read along as I listen at 25% slower. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Jarvis1000 Diglot Groupie United States want2speakthai.com Joined 4822 days ago 74 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English*, Thai Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 15 15 December 2011 at 9:37pm | IP Logged |
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I have used audacity in another method. I will record the audio from dvd player in my computer and Then only listen to them....I know you can part of the meaning by watching, but I am trying to train my ears so I will take just the audio so I can train my ears to hear what is being said.
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| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5405 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 5 of 15 15 December 2011 at 9:43pm | IP Logged |
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This is also my most valued and elusive skill as my speaking ability has always outstripped my listening ability. I have no fear of speaking or making mistakes in public but do still have a fear of not understanding the response. Although there are some short phrases that I can say well enough to be sometimes mistaken for a native speaker, I tend to downgrade purposely the quality of output to avoid receiving a virtual torrent of native level speech in response - would like to stop doing this.
I am working on improving by listening to a huge quantity of input from various sources. I don't find actual conversation sufficient because I have never been able to achieve more than a couple hours a day and furthermore I am rarely certain that the other party is not accommodating my level either consciously or unconsciously. Audiobooks are no longer useful either as the speech is too clearly enunciated and too literary in style. Same with documentaries and news broadcasts, I can listen to these almost as if they were in English. What remains is to bridge the gap between these forms of speech and the informal register used in movies, tv programs and real life conversations. I am finding more and more that the speed of speech is largely irrelevant meaning that if I don't understand something and believe it to be too fast, quite often slowing it down does not help. Conversely, when I am highly accustomed to the vocabulary and grammatical patterns used, it does not matter how fast it is spoken. For this reason I like to listen repeatedly to some things even after they are well understood as it seems to "deepen the grooves" in the brain as Tommus described in an other thread. While using Yabla (french.yabla.com) to improve comprehension, there was sometimes a documentary style video that was easy to understand except for a brief interview with someone who spoke at lightning speed. I moved on to the next video despite still not 'hearing' all the words in that segment. Returning to review this video after studying a further 200 others I was pleased but surprised to find that that segment now seemed clear and I was sure I could hear every word. I am now, for the most part able to produce my own transcript if desired by repeated listening and intelligent guessing as to what a mystery word could be. This is one of the few nice aspects of listening comprehension, that the more you understand, the easier it becomes to understand what remains because of the increasing context available to you. It is actually the reverse of the usual law of diminishing returns where progress gets progressively harder. Edited by microsnout on 15 December 2011 at 9:49pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6531 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 6 of 15 15 December 2011 at 9:46pm | IP Logged |
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Seconding listening-reading.
I myself watch a lot of football (soccer) matches in my target languages, usually at least 1-2 a day on weekdays and 7-11 over the weekend. I've really taken to the idea of starting with listening, since children's acquisition starts with that and so does the language itself. i did a lot of listening in Italian and Spanish before starting to do anything else with them. if you do find that your reading is better than your listening, i recommend simply listening to an audiobook while following the text. oh and music helps as well. i try not to check the lyrics as long as i can, and if possible i find different versions/covers of the same song to make out more without seeing the text. reading aloud has been adviced recently, i'm going to try that with Danish (as I understand more in writing than when listening... i also understand Swedish best while singing along to karaoke on Finnish TV haha) I think shadowing also helped me with listening comprehension (did it a lot in Finnish and a little in Portuguese). in general, i like Cainntear's idea of dividing the skills into phonology, morphology, syntax and orthography, rather than the traditional division. getting better at all of them improves your listening (yes, even the orthography in some cases! at least in Russian references to the spelling are sometimes made in colloquial speech to resolve ambiguity - and informal orthography can also help you a lot with listening). oh and another trick, when using software that plays a sound when something is completed, i used to listen to something while waiting for the beep, trying to catch the last word before it. this resulted in me understanding the whole thing better, heh. not sure how to adapt this now... edit2: and now that I think of it, reading aloud a whole Ukrainian book must've helped me more than I thought it did with listening comprehension. Edited by Serpent on 15 December 2011 at 11:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6637 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 7 of 15 16 December 2011 at 12:28am | IP Logged |
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Whenever this problem comes up I recommend doing sessions where you don't listen for meaning, but for structure - i.e. you try to parse the stream of sounds into words and phrases. If you do understand a word or expression then its meaning will automatically pop up into your brain. If you don't know the meaning then ignore it - here the object is not learning something about the world, but just learning to deal with the sounds of a language. It is fine if you can read a transcript first, but I would not even recommend looking at it while you listen, because otherwise your concentration will be diverted towards the printed page which normally is easier to deal with. I call this listening technique "listening like a bloodhound follows a trail" in reverence for the utter concentration of such an animal in action. Edited by Iversen on 28 December 2011 at 12:48am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Scorpicus Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5269 days ago 27 posts - 46 votes Speaks: English*, ItalianB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Russian | Message 8 of 15 18 December 2011 at 6:04pm | IP Logged |
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I think a good strategy is to be selective of the native material you're listening to so you start from the easiest stuff and work your way up, developing your listening skills along the way. The easiest native materials will be stuff made for kids entertainment, so get hold of the dubs from Disney movies etc (I did watch the Lion King in French an embarrassing amount of times...). These films are designed to be followed by people with a rudimentary grasp of the language (i.e. children) so are ideal for someone whose just reached an 'intermediate' stage with a language. Plus, you already know the story inside out, so you have no need for subtitles.
After kids films, the next step up would be watching your favourite adult movies or TV shows dubbed. The language is more complicated, but again you have the advantage that you know the story inside out. TV shows are convenient as in their 30 minute format you can fit an episode ss part of your study session every day to train your ears. Whereas to watch a whole film is a much bigger time commitment. The next difficulty layer is to start watching films/TV created by your target culture (yay, finally!) that you have never seen before. This means you're having to understand without knowledge of the complete context as you have when you watch a film you already know well. Myself, I will watch the film first without subtitles to see how much I can understand, having read first a little blurb on the film so I at least have a bit of context of what the film is about. I then watch again this time with the subtitles on, preferably in the target language, and note new words and puzzle over idioms. I then watch again with the subtitles turned off. For extra listening, I will rip the soundtrack and put it on my IPod, so I can listen to it on my walk to university/work that way utilizing time that would otherwise be wasted. The step up from films of any sort is radio or audio-only podcasts (real ones for natives, not those that teach the language). They are more difficult in the sense that with these you don't even have visual clues to give you context. They are however a fantastic free resource to get listening practice. Podcasts that are of between 10 to 30 minutes of length and that release a new episode daily are ideal. I think its very possible to be able to understand easily an academic debate in your target language, but be lost when it comes to the language of the street and vica versa, so you need to get practice of both. When training my French ear I would listen regularly to a 10 minute review of the daily news, a 30 minute podcast that would interview various people on various subjects (French doctors in a mental asylum to participants in the Tunisian revolution) and a weekly half hour political debate. Regular daily exposure to the spoken language in this way improved my listening skills immensely - the trick is picking the material that is at your level and working up to more difficult stuff, and I suppose comes under the “comprehensible input theory”, if you want to be technical about it. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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