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Accelerated Listening Comprehension? | ||
Tags: Comprehension/understanding | Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| drp9341 Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 4910 days ago 115 posts - 217 votes  Speaks: Italian, English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French Studies: Japanese | Message 1 of 4 29 March 2016 at 9:23am | IP Logged |
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My greatest challenge has always been with all of my languages my listening comprehension.
My Portuguese is pretty decent, but I cannot catch every word someone is saying, and a lot of time I rely on context. What I did was I started watching "Youtubers" and listening to their quickly spoken, "funny" monologues. At first I didn't understand all that much, but I spent about an hour and a half slowing down, repeating, taking notes, and paying attention to prosody with a 6 minute video. I knew 95% the words, I understood the grammar, and if it was written down I could breeze through it. But I could barely understand the meaning of 70% of the utterances that were said. I worked with that one 6 minute video for about an hour and a half, really applying myself and focusing on learning the content of that video well enough that I could understand every single word when played back at full speed relatively effortlessly. Then I moved on to a second video by the same Youtube and did the same thing. After about 3 hours of very focused applied studying and analysis of these videos. I watched a third video by that same Youtube and was able to go from understanding 70% of what he was saying to understanding everything he was communicating, (although not fully understanding on a grammatical/linguistic level the function of every word in that sentence, and not being able to recognize/understand a couple of 3-4 words utterances etc.) I went as far as to take multiple sentences, slow the audio down to half speed, and transcribe in the IPA the exact sounds that were said. I focused on three things: Word stress, sentence stress, and how words meshed together in fluent speech. Also, I paid attention the how a certain word when stressed in the sentence, can be pronounced much differently when unstressed in a sentence. I treated it as if I was learning the rhythm to a new song. My listening comprehension improved drastically in these three and half-ish hours, more than it would have improved in over the course of watching 10 hours of telenovelas. I shadowed the select few phrases at half speed in order to get my mouth used to the unfortunate reality that what is written is not a perfect representation of what is said, and that an accompanying text can cause you imagine that certain phonemes are present when they're really not. I learned the words without any text present in order to avoid the text prejudicing what I was hearing. I kept a clear mind and allowed myself to hear the sounds of the language without thinking about what the word sounds like in my own head, or what it looks like on paper. Let me know what you think! I've done this before for Spanish and it significantly improved my listening comprehension in just a 3-4 hour span. Although, this may not be a suitable method for people who don't enjoy doing analytical, "boring" work. As most people would find this quite unbearably boring. If you have any advice, or anything to add, please let me know! I am always looking for ways to improve my weakest skill in all my languages, listening comprehension! Thanks! -Danny 7 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Speakeasy Senior Member Canada Joined 4050 days ago 507 posts - 1098 votes Studies: German | Message 2 of 4 29 March 2016 at 9:50am | IP Logged |
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Hello, Danny:
This is truly an interesting post and deserves greater discussion. However, while the HTLAL forum continues to serve as a highly-valued archive of several years of very interesting discussions, for the most part, the "active members" have moved on to the new REPLACEMENT forum A LANGUAGE LEARNER'S FORUM I suggest that you register on the new forum and post your comments there, as well. Edited by Speakeasy on 29 March 2016 at 9:54am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4763 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 4 08 April 2016 at 6:43am | IP Logged |
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What Speakeasy said about htlal.
And, I've played around a bunch with speeding up the audio on audiobooks over the past few months, and I've found it surprisingly effective. Of course it's not the same as listening to input from someone speaking rapidly and emotionally, but I have a theory that I miss things when listening to a telenovela is that I miss the bursts of speech. Even if the "average" speech in a movie or TV show is at about 83 words per minutes, sudden emotional bursts are at 250 words per minute, or so it appears. If you can get to the point that you can understand a novel being read at 250 wpm, it makes TV/movies easier by far. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4442 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 4 of 4 08 April 2016 at 1:30pm | IP Logged |
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When it comes to watching videos, subtitles is invaluable. There are videos with and videos without. In the beginning, it is tempting to find videos with subtitles. After the first few times, try repeating the video without subtitles if possible or just listen to the same dialogue without watching the screen. In a country like Canada we recognize both English & French as official languages. If you watch TV programs in either of the 2 languages you can press the [CC] button on your remote to get captions for the hearing impaired.
A language like Cantonese once considered a "dialect of Chinese" share a lot of common words & phrases with standard Mandarin Chinese but not all. A lot of times you watch a TV program / video in Cantonese, the text is in standard Chinese and the text would show the correct meaning but doesn't match the dialogue. A movie that is in English I sometimes find watching it with subtitles easier to pick up words & phrases when a person talks quietly or very fast. Watching videos on YouTube you can go to Settings and adjust your Speed. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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