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How to listen? Input learning | ||
Tags: Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Po-ru Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5472 days ago 173 posts - 235 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Spanish, Norwegian, Mandarin, French | Message 1 of 3 13 January 2011 at 1:12am | IP Logged |
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Out of all the polyglot study methods out there, I seem to relate most to Steve
Kaufmann's input learning methods on listening. Listening and understanding what's being said is probably the most important aspect of language learning. Speaking comes over long periods of time using the language but listening comprehension comes from pure practice. That being said, I am wondering how those of us who are input learners "listen". Steve Kaufmann says that he listens all the time. But what's the best way to utilize listening as a technique. What do you do if you come across a word you don't know, or a sentence you don't know, or even a whole paragraph you don't know? How much time do you dedicate to listening compared to to grammar and vocabulary study? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| namsskogan Newbie Norway Joined 5587 days ago 18 posts - 53 votes Speaks: Norwegian* Studies: German | Message 2 of 3 13 January 2011 at 8:42am | IP Logged |
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Here is a quote from Iversens excellent "Guide to Learning Languages", a five part guide which you can find on this forum:
"Listening like a bloodhound follows a trail. Let me understand this: you can pick out every syllable, but they don't combine into words? Not even if you actually know the words? When I ask this it is because one reason for being unable to understand spoken words from f.eks. TV is that people are obsessed with understanding what is being said, when the basic problem may be that they can't even parse the stream of sounds. Parsing is precisely the process of dividing the stream of sounds into syllables and words on the fly, and to understand this you must be able to perform the operation automatically. If you try to understand everything at this stage then each unknown word will block you, and you will loose the next couple of sentences. Therefore 'listening like a bloodhound follows a trail' can sometimes be a help, even though it goes right against all the other good advice about listening to films, music etc. However this only applies if your parsing isn't automatic, and therefore it is a problem that you say that you can catch the syllables, but not the words on the fly. But even in this situation it might be worth trying to separate the words without bothering about the meaning (even though this sounds crazy to many people). If you in fact can do this operation without problems then at least one possible cause for your problems can be eliminated. You can listen for meaning if you understand enough of the language, or you can just have something running in the background, which is the truly passive kind of listening. Then there is the L-R listenning where you try to follow a translation with the help of clues in the form of international words and proper names, combined with clues in the intonation (of course you can also use a transcript, but personally I prefer using a translation in this situation). And as the last form you can do active listening even with languages that you can't understand yet, provided that you know the written form. Here you deliberately don't care at all about the meaning, but try to parse the stream of sounds into sentences and words, following the speaker 'like a bloodhound on a trail'. As your vocabulary grows and you become adept at reading the language, you will discover that the meaning of the spoken form suddenly becomes crystal clear even though you haven't tried to understand it. When I have done this I have sometimes seen a string of grey words running across my inner field of vision, though blurred so that only the shape of the words is seen. At other times I just listen for the borderlines between words, phrases and sentences. In both cases you should focus on changes in intonation, pauses, words you have heard before and common endings and affixes, which means that all those things will seep into your mind. Then some day the meaning appears, and you will have learnt to understand that language without passing through the perilous stage of translation". END OF QUOTE. This technique has helped me a lot, and I hope you can benefit from it too. Good luck. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Sandman Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5400 days ago 168 posts - 389 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 3 of 3 13 January 2011 at 9:54am | IP Logged |
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Well, here's a method I've been using for a while and plan to keep up. I don't know if it's the greatest method or not, but it seems fairly efficient time-wise and I've been satisfied with the results.
Basically, I like to use potentially comprehensible input only when I'm listening. Streams of babble are fun, but I don't really seem to get much out of it, at least compared to the time involved in the listening. Therefore I've been using blocks of audio that I can learn all the words for and therefore theoretically SHOULD be able to understand (such as Assimil dialogues, Textbook audio sections, the pimsleur dialogues at the beginning of a lesson, easy children stories, etc). I then break these files up using Audacity into smaller audio clips, each containing about 5 new words that I haven't "listened" to before. These clips usually run from about 30 seconds of audio to 1 minute 15 secs or so although once I'm more advanced the clips would probably have to get longer. I then put the name of each audio clip into Anki (such as a card with "Assimil lesson 82 clip b"). Then as cards come up, I'll listen to the clip once or twice, and based on how well I understood everything I'll give it a difficulty rating just like I would with any other Anki card. I started doing this as a way to review my past listening audio without having to keep track of all the review times manually, and it seemed to me the forgetting curve concept would work as well with audio sections as it does with anything else that one might put into Anki. The clips you can hear and understand easily quickly get pushed farther and farther into the future, while things you have difficulty "hearing" are reviewed more often, or even daily until you get the hang of it. Edited by Sandman on 13 January 2011 at 9:58am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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