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Listening comprehension, systematically | ||
Tags: Comprehension/understanding | Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| MaksR Newbie Russian Federation Joined 4633 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Studies: English | Message 9 of 17 20 January 2012 at 6:43am | IP Logged | ||
Yes, I agree. TV and movies are very difficult for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5142 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 10 of 17 20 January 2012 at 12:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Listening comprehension is one of my best abilities, and I found that the best way to develop it was the graduated approach as opposed to diving in at the deep end. As people have said, some materials are much harder to understand than others - even some films and TV shows are far easier than others. So you focus on fairly easy material, and once it starts feeling very easy, you move onto more difficult material, and repeat.
An example progression: - Basic learning material, spoken deliberately slowly (the early recordings in most courses) - Faster learning material (dialogues in courses) - TV/radio news (depends on the language; French news is pretty easy but I hear Spanish for example isn't so much so...) - Audiobooks and podcasts - Videos made for learners (French in Action etc.) if available - Easier TV shows (talk and game shows, documentaries, dubbed American series) - Conversations with natives - More difficult film and TV (comedy, drama) Target language transcripts/subtitles are extremely useful "training wheels" for improving at each particular stage - I found that connecting the spoken words with the written ones helped my comprehension a lot. They can be hard to find at the more advanced levels though. Also, repetition of the same material is good: once you've understood the gist of it, on subsequent listens you start to pick up the details you missed the first time round, and it all starts to get easier. And needless to say, the more interesting and enjoyable the material, the better as you'll be more keen to understand and so pay more attention. And paying attention is important; listening to things "in the background" helps very little if at all. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6555 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 11 of 17 20 January 2012 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Somewhat to my surprise, I found listening-reading to be very helpful - almost magical - in the way it improved my listening skills. Before trying it, Japanese was mostly a blur to me. Afterwards, I find I'm really hearing it. I can't say my actual listening comprehension is all that great, but at this point, it is more a problem of lacking the necessary vocabulary. When I do know the vocabulary, I can usually understand. Before listening-reading I had trouble even then. In my case, I used it when I already knew a couple thousand words and had a fairly decent understanding of the grammar. I don't know how it would be to use it in the beginning stages, but according to the original thread, it can be used even then.
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| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6517 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 12 of 17 20 January 2012 at 6:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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The method that really works for me requires audio with corresponding transcription. Read through the text and make sure you understand it completely. Look up words, ask people, read up on grammatical expressions and whatnot. You need to be able to understand what everything means and how it means it.
Now listen to it and follow along with the text. Get acquainted with the sounds. After once or two listen throughs, you should be able to follow along without the help of the text. Next, shadow the audio. This means speak it as you hear it, at the same pace with the same intonation, lagging behind the audio by as little as possible. When you can shadow the audio and understand it as you hear and speak it, add it to your "finished" playlist. During the day, spend a lot of time listening to this playlist. Start working on a new piece of audio. As you progress, your playlist will grow and the clips you use can get longer and more complex. After a while, you might not even have to have a transcript. The point is that you collect this ever-growing library of spoken audio (with natural speed and intonation) that you know very well and understand as you hear it. In this growing library, you have words being encountered in different contexts and this will make you more and more familiar with them. The important part of this method that I think is often lacking in other people's methods is repetition. Work with it until you understand it completely. Don't get used to listening to a lot of audio and skipping the bits you don't understand. You don't learn anything from hearing a word you don't understand. What you need to do it to learn the word, which creates a neural pathway, and then reinforce it by hearing it again and again. What I have realized is that you can get pretty far by just hearing the word again and again in the very same sentence. You'll need to encounter it in other sentences, too, of course, but if you just listen to it once and then move on with new stuff, you're constantly restarting. There's a lot to gain from a single piece of audio. Listen to it until you can understand it effortlessly as you hear it, THEN move on. 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5894 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 13 of 17 20 January 2012 at 7:57pm | IP Logged | ||
So when it comes to listening comprehension, you don't adhere to the idea of 80/20. You instead go for 100% comprehension before moving on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5233 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 14 of 17 20 January 2012 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | ||
I'd like to fully support this. Edit @ Snowflake: 100%, well, who knows. A clever person will know what he does not want to know. If a text/audio lists the 50 rarest birds in Australia, then I don't need this vocabulary. An ornithologist may make an instant backup copy of the file, because the risk of losing this precious information is unbearable to him ... Edited by lingoleng on 20 January 2012 at 8:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6517 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 15 of 17 20 January 2012 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes, but with two caveats: 1) Sometimes I don't. I'm not a terribly consistent person, but 100% is the aim. If some parts are terribly difficult, I'll usually move on. I'll still put it in my "finished" playlist, though, and sometimes after a couple more dozens of listen throughs and after I've worked on other material, the difficult parts get cleared up anyway. 2) I also do other stuff, like watch movies and listen to online radio. But that's mostly for enjoyment. I've still found that watching the same movie several times and listening to the same radio show (for example as a podcast) again and again makes me improve faster (but at the same time it's less fun). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4636 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 16 of 17 20 January 2012 at 10:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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I started transcribing dialogues today, translating them into German, then back to Japanese (like how Luca does it, but with different material.. not Assimil, but JapanesePod).
The translating back thing is a fun method in itself. Just going back to the original wouldn't provide real differences, but switching gender-wise or changing the politeness level makes one use their brain. The transcribing process made me listen very closely. I hope this will train my listening comprehension, if done often enough. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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