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Products for improving listening skills? | ||
Tags: Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Neil_UK Tetraglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5265 days ago 50 posts - 64 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto, Welsh Studies: Polish, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Scottish Gaelic, French | Message 1 of 21 22 August 2011 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've noticed there are very few, if any, language products on the market that are
specifically geared towards training up a learner's listening comprehension skills in a language. There are millions of products teaching people to speak/read/write in a language....but hardly anything for training up listening comprehension. I've searched Google extensively for listening training products and only found 1 or 2 average products at most. It seems like most language learners get good at speaking, and maybe reading and writing...but the last link in the chain is being able to understand what they hear from real natives speaking at full speed. I've heard people say you should just listen to radio and watch tv in the target language, and then gradually over time you'll train your ears up. I tried that, but it didn't work for me. I liken it to music...as a musician, you cannot simply just listen to music in order to train your ears. You have to actually follow an ear training program in order to train your ears up on recognising all the different intervals, chords etc in music. Being a musician myself, I did ear training years ago, and it worked wonders. After I'd trained my ear to recognise all the patterns of music, by doing extensive drills, I could work out any piece of music by ear without even trying. You can buy products that train up your ears so you're able to recognise anything you hear and then reproduce it on your musical instrument right away. I can comprehend any piece of music I hear and immediately know what key it's in, what the chords and notes are etc. I've got fully developed perfect pitch and relative pitch, and to me the language as music is as natural to me as the English language is for me to speak. Now, if I was able to do that with music, then I want to reach the same level with languages. I want to be able to hear anything in the languages I've learned, and understand it immediately, just as well as I can in English. My thoughts are that somebody needs to create a product that drills you on the main sounds and patterns of a language, so you're able to recognise what you're hearing immediately. Not just speak, but COMPREHEND anything. So, just like there are ear training products for musicians, there should be ear training products for language learners. It is not enough to simply 'listen to the radio and watch tv in a language'. You need to train your ears up on the patterns/sounds in the language FIRST, THEN you can go and listen to the radio and watch tv. Otherwise your ears will just be lost in the sound. So, then, does anyone know of any language learning ear training products that will get me to that level? If so, I'd love to know about them. The languages I'm looking to improve my ears in are Spanish, Italian, French, German, Polish, Russian, Welsh, Esperanto, etc. If you're a person who's mastered the listening comprehension of a foreign language, how did you do it? Edited by Neil_UK on 22 August 2011 at 10:06pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| LittleKey Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5955 days ago 146 posts - 153 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Japanese | Message 2 of 21 23 August 2011 at 8:21am | IP Logged | ||
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Well listening to radio/tv/etc. is how to train your ears to recognize sounds and patterns, I think. But I agree that simply doing that doesn't work too well and there's probably a better way to be found.
Right now, I'm trying to find places where I can hear native audio (preferably news programs) along with transcripts, so I can fully connect the words with the sound. I think it also helps to realize how the different sounds and words glide into each other in natural speech. Listening comprehension is my most difficult challenge when learning languages, so I definitely understand your problem. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jazzboy.bebop Senior Member Norway norwegianthroughnove Joined 5421 days ago 439 posts - 800 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian | Message 3 of 21 23 August 2011 at 2:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would think it very difficult to produce a product to really prepare your ear to cope with native speed speech when learning a language. I wonder how far current products actually take you. Even in ear-training for music, a course can only take you so far. After it you have to practice your skills and keep transcribing and tackle progressively more difficult material before you can listen to pretty much anything (at least for non-microtonal music) and be able to instantly understand and transcribe what you are listening to.
As LittleKey said, following audio with transcripts can be very useful and I've found that it certainly helps me a lot. Mainly I read through the transcript and learn any words or phrases I don't know and then listen to the audio a few times. One thing you might want to try is the 2nd stage of L-R. I don't know if you are familiar with the method but in the 2nd stage you read a novel in your target language while listening to the audiobook in the same language and doing this with around 20 hours worth of new material quite intensively will make native speech far easier to make out. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JimC Senior Member United Kingdom tinyurl.com/aberdeen Joined 5550 days ago 199 posts - 317 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 21 23 August 2011 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have to agree that probably native materials are what you need. My Spanish comprehnsion has improved greatly through the podcasts from Notes in Spanish
They have three differnt levels which should be able to introduce you at an appropriate point. If you insist on ear training, their is actually a course called Spanish Ear Training I haven't tried this course, but it is from the people who do Synergy Spanish and I rate that course highly. Jim 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5133 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 5 of 21 23 August 2011 at 3:01pm | IP Logged | ||
The reason you can do that with music is precisely because you've taken the time to train not just with your ears, but by mapping those sounds to something else external, whether it's written note intervals on a sheet of music or the distance between keys on a keyboard or frets on a fretted instrument, etc. Once you've learned those mappings, you shouldn't have any trouble diving into broadcast audio or watching TV. Eventually, you go from being able to decipher a single part to a complete score. But it takes time, just as any other training does. Learn the "mappings" (be they written, visual or gestural) and the rest will come with time and practice. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| misslanguages Diglot Senior Member France fluent-language.blog Joined 4849 days ago 190 posts - 217 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: German | Message 6 of 21 23 August 2011 at 3:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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It figures.
You don't need lousy products to "study" listening comprehension. I LOLed at your post big time. Do you have a TV? Do you have access to the internet? Can you download podcasts? That's all you need. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6442 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 7 of 21 23 August 2011 at 6:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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You're actually discussing two almost unrelated skills.
One is listening comprehension. The people who say "listen to a lot of stuff" are correct about this one. Tools include a transcript of what you are listening to. The other is instantly knowing what you are hearing, whether or not you know the language: not what it means, but what it sounds like. For this, you'll want a firm grounding in articulatory phonetics. This is much more directly comparable to musical ear training. I recommend Catford's "A Practical Introduction to Phonetics". On a more language-specific basis, you may also want to look up examples of minimal pairs (words that mean different things which differ in only one way from each other, such as 'bit' and 'pit' in English). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| misslanguages Diglot Senior Member France fluent-language.blog Joined 4849 days ago 190 posts - 217 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: German | Message 8 of 21 23 August 2011 at 6:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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You're right, but studying phonetics is optional, unless you're learning English. Since he's British, I guess he can forgo that part, no matter how enjoyable learning little nifty symbols is.
Seriously, I love phonetics, and it can be very useful. That being said, it's pretty much useless when you study Romance languages or "regular" Germanic languages. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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