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Products for improving listening skills? | ||
Tags: Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Gallash Tetraglot Newbie United States Joined 4835 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC1, Spanish, French | Message 17 of 21 03 September 2011 at 1:05am | IP Logged | ||
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[QUOTE=LittleKey] 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.
QUOTE] Here in New York it is not an easy task. We spend long hours in traffic. But there is no French radio stations to practice French. Dito Italian and German. There are many Spanish ones. But 80% of time they run songs or commercials. Other time is filled with calls and replies. But people call with cell phone from some noisy locations and quality of sound is too poor for a foreigner to understand. Otherwise radio recordings with transcripts is a clever idea. But how to obtain them in practical terms? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4912 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 18 of 21 05 September 2011 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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A tool for listening comprehension exists in traditional classrooms: dictation. You can mimic this by listening to very short bursts of your target language, and trying to transcribe what you hear. Then check this against the original transcript, and try again if you got more than an acceptable level of errors (according to your own judgement). Progress from shorter texts to longer texts as you improve.
There is a website with a graded series of audio files for dictation practice, with text files to check. If I remember correctly, there are about 4-5 dictations for each of 30 lessons. So the first few are short and simple, the last few are about a printed page in length each. I also know several Hindi learners who do this with music. They listen, transcribe, check, and transcribe again. It really does help develop the skill of picking out sounds and putting them together into words and sentences. For other languages, Assimil should work well for ear training. Personally, I always listen to Assimil chapters without the textbook 3-4 times first, in order to develop my ear for French. I'm only on chapter 5, so it's early days, but it seems to be working well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5301 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 19 of 21 05 September 2011 at 9:46pm | IP Logged | ||
si tacuisses ... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| RMM Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5230 days ago 91 posts - 215 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Italian, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Swedish, Japanese | Message 20 of 21 11 September 2011 at 12:30am | IP Logged | ||
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Since the original poster asked for personal stories, I thought that I would write a little about my own experiences. Let me start with a little background info. I took one year of German in high school and three years in college. I did very well in the classes, and at the time I got grammar and (easy-to-intermediate) reading down pretty solidly. However, in all that time I never did hear the language spoken very much, and when I did, it usually was not native speakers who were talking. This left me with fairly poor listening comprehension skills. Even worse, after college I did almost nothing for several years with the languages that I had spent so long studying in school, so naturally my skills declined even more.
Fast-forward to last year when I found this message board and first read about the L-R (Listening-Reading) method. I gave it a go with a very easy children’s book translated into German (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), and thought that it worked well. But then I was distracted and largely dropped my languages studies yet again. Then a few months ago I started a much more dedicated language study regimen (though, still not nearly as dedicated as that of many of the people on this board from what I’ve seen). At any rate, I L-R’ed three books in German, as well as some more in other languages, in about two months time in a moderately laid back fashion. I listened to German language audio books while following along with L1 (English) and then L2 (German) language texts--the opposite order from what was suggested in the original thread about the method, but the order which I find definitely works better for me (and not just with languages I’ve already studied either). This gave me many hours of concentrated, comprehensible German audio listening practice. After this I could already tell that my listening comprehension was noticeably better than it had ever been before, even at the height of my German studies. After this I spent a week going crazy watching German films with subtitles (I saw around 2-4 movies per day). I forced myself to pay attention to the actual dialogue, rather than becoming totally absorbed in subtitles like I used to when I only knew a little German. I realized that this strategy was in fact working when I was watching the movie, John Rabe, and didn’t even realize when the dialogue switched to English and the subtitles disappeared. They had already been speaking in English for several minutes before I noticed (I rewound the film to check how long it had been since they had last been talking in German). After this, I moved on to watching German news and TV programs online, and I found out that for the first time in my life I’m now able to watch foreign language programming without subtitles and understand the vast majority of what’s being said (though I, of course, still miss a fair number of individual words because my vocabulary is not quite up to the level that it should be yet). At this point, I can pick up a lot just from context, though, so I really do improve a lot as I watch more and more German shows and movies, now without subtitles. (By the way, my favorite German TV programming at this point is the Terra X series, many episodes of which can be found at: http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/hauptnavigation/startseite#/h auptnavigation/startseite. The series consists of little 45-minute documentaries on interesting historical topics, such as pirates, Muslims and WWI, Egyptian archeology, Shoguns and Samurai, etc. I esp. like the Imperium programs in the series, which are hosted by one of my favorite German-speaking (Swiss) classic film actors, Maximilian Schell). So, this is how I largely overcame my biggest deficiency in German in three months time, even while I was studying other languages and doing other things too (which would not be possible with the AJATT method for example). 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| birthdaysuit Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4820 days ago 48 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Swedish | Message 21 of 21 21 September 2011 at 3:39am | IP Logged | ||
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I think people tend to overcomplicate language learning much of the time. All these
references to "training one's ear" just makes the whole process sound so unnatural. Sometimes it really is best to go back to basics, i.e, listen and learn the way you did with your mother tongue. My experience: I started out very early on watching The Golden Girls (my favourite show) in Spanish with Spanish subtitles. This was when I only knew a handful of verbs and words in Spanish. As I was familiar with the characters and, to some extent, the storylines, it made the listening easier as it was in context. Then after 3 seasons of that I moved on to watching Desperate Housewives completely in Spanish without the subtitles. Again, I was familiar with the characters but this time not so much the storylines (I'd only watched the first season in English). I found that watching the action unfold with the dialogue (in context) worked wonders for my listening comprehension. I really can't stress this whole in context thing enough. If you can see what is happening and understand from the video, you will automatically expect a certain response from the characters, so when they finally speak you already have a rough idea of what they will say. I couldn't tell you why this works (for me) but it just does. Another thing that I should mention that really helps is to avoid trying to listen to each individual word. I found a video on youtube on this topic. Apparently, when you listen to material in your native language you don't listen to every word, your brain skips past many of the everyday words and processes the most important ones (or something like that). I think this can be likened in some way to the "F" test. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it's the test to see how many people will count the "F's" in a sentence when the word "IF" is used in it. Something like 2% of people will see those IF F's. But this is just my 2 cents. I can only go by what works for me. I simply believe that with something like listening practice we need only go back to the grass roots approach and actually listen to improve. I do believe, however, that having subtitles in the beginning really does help. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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