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Listening Practice | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| G2Ident89 Newbie United States Joined 5337 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 1 of 12 15 April 2010 at 8:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm currently teaching myself Spanish and seem to be making some good progress in the areas of reading and writing but I'm a little worried that my listening comprhension skills are somewhat lacking. For Spanish, I've been using a great website called Lo Mas TV which includes word-for-word transcriptions and subtitles in both English and Spanish, but I was wondering if there are any really great, innovative techniques to use in addition to this that people have found to be quite useful in improving their understanding of the spoken form of a language(not just Spanish).
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| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5828 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 2 of 12 15 April 2010 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Some people find memorizing song lyrics and singing along with them to be helpful for listening & speaking skills.
Other than that, there isn't really any particular method of "listening training" that I know of rather than just listening. The only thing is to be sure that, when you listen, it's not all passive listening- that is, that when you listen to the language, you strain to hear the places between words and pick out the words you already know and so on. This will train your ear to not only hear the language, but begin to understand it. And the more listening you do, the better you will get at this. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5669 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 12 15 April 2010 at 9:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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There have been many posts on here about how to improve your listening ability. The most obvious is listening to a heck of a lot of material (many hours a day if you can - forever). This will flood your brain with input, and the giant pattern-matching machine in your brain will (fingers crossed) slowly begin to make sense of it all.
In addition to such "extensive listening" there are lots of other techniques that crop up here. For example listening very closely to just the sounds (to notice word endings) without worrying too much about meaning - this helps get over the problem of the foreign language sounding like a stream of endless babble. Another example is shadowing, where you repeat what you hear as close as possible to the time it is being said (this keeps you very focused, and helps you connect speaking with listening). Finally, the "listening reading" method - which helps you understand the spoken word even when your vocabulary is limited. If it is of any help, I made some youtube videos on a few of these techniques. They are a bit slanted towards people learning Czech, but much of what is there should be language-independent: A video on the problem of it all sounding like babble A video on just hearing the sounds A video on shadowing A video on the listening-reading method Edited by Splog on 15 April 2010 at 9:54pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Zeitgeist21 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5645 days ago 156 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 4 of 12 18 April 2010 at 1:59am | IP Logged | ||
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While many of these techniques are great (I can't vouch for all of them as I haven't used all of them extensively) I would highly recommend seeking out some Spanish dvds and websites that let you watch tv (livestation is a tv streaming programme that sucks for German as I can't find any good channels but I've heard people say good things so maybe it is good for Spanish =) ).
Watching tv and films is a passive thing, an easy thing and therefore something much easier to keep up regularly than the work, and regularly listening is all you NEED to develop high listening comprehension. It's debatable as to which is the best way to fluency and which techniques will take you there the fastest, but if you can get into the habit of watching tv (not so hard ;) ) then I can guarantee that you will eventually reach your goal =) As we speak it is 2am where I am and I'm guiltily still awake watching My Name is Earl in German :D EDIT: Just to show that it actually works, I understand more than 95% of what they say and extended exposure was the only thing I did to improve my listening comprehension =) Just chillin' ;) Edited by WillH on 18 April 2010 at 3:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dolly Senior Member United States Joined 5790 days ago 191 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin | Message 5 of 12 18 April 2010 at 2:20am | IP Logged | ||
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It's difficult for beginners to understand spoken French because it has a lot of contractions--it's like a bullet train on quantum tracks. Fluent French Audio helped me a lot: interviews in rapid, informal French with word-for-word transcripts. And I listened to audiobooks, of course. My first French texts were lyrics from the rock group Dolly, from which I took this username. Edited by dolly on 18 April 2010 at 2:20am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5352 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 6 of 12 18 April 2010 at 2:58am | IP Logged | ||
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I have always felt that my listening comprehension was weaker than my reading ability, but recently I came to believe that I may have just been hard on myself. I generally have come up against two different problems, which can be solved in different ways.
The first problem is the speed at which the language is spoken. Today I was listening to some children's news in Dutch, and was able to understand a good portion of the audio, despite the fact that I have only a very limited knowledge of Dutch vocabulary. The audio was a bit slower, and the vocabulary used was also a lot easier than an adult broadcast, so it made it very easy for me to understand. To overcome the problem of the speed at which the speakers talk, you can try to find slower audio samples to listen to, and sometimes songs also work nicely, depending on the style. I am of the opinion that this helps when one is a beginner, and needs more time to hear the words and comprehend. The second problem is not understanding the audio because one does not understand the vocabulary. This is the problem I most frequently run into, and the only thing I can say is talk with speakers of the target language, listen to music, watch movies, and do vocabulary exercises to memorize more vocabulary. I recently watched "Lola rennt" and "Der Krieger und die Kaiserin" for a psychoanalytical article I am going to write for a class, and I understood a lot more of the audio than I had understood, three years ago when I first bought these DVDs. The vocabulary which I did not understand I often could determine from context clues. The more I watch these movies, the more I understand, and I have noticed the same for some of the music I listen to. Just watch the movies, and concentrate while watching, and things will begin to click and comprehension will begin to become better. Sometimes I feel that it helps to start watching the movie with subtitles in your native tongue, and then wean your way off of that. Below would be the manner which I would use: 1) Watch the movie with subtitles in the native tongue 2) Watch the movie with subtitles in the target language 3) Watch the movie with closed captioning, to pick up any bothersome words or spots that you just cannot seem to get Of course, this regiment depends on the languages available on the DVDs, but that is what I would try to do when possible. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5828 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 7 of 12 18 April 2010 at 6:59pm | IP Logged | ||
It doesn't have to be! I watch anime with English subtitles and do active listening. I can read English very quickly so I just flick my eyes towards the subtitles, enough to grasp basically what they mean, and then strain myself to pick out every word I can in the audio. I find the subtitles actually help because I kind of know what I *should* be hearing, like if the word "eat" is in the English subtitles I know I should hear the Japanese verb taberu (or sometimes kamu, "to chew"). I also sometimes encounter scenes where I don't care what's going on so I ignore the subtitles to see how much I can get without them. The amount I can follow without the subs has gone waaayyy up since I started using this method. I can't follow the very very long exposition-filled sentences that have most of the plot information in them because they're just too complicated for my current level, but I'm working on that. As far as vocabulary goes, I consider it a separate thing from listening practice. There are many different methods to study vocabulary, I would suggest that if the OP is interested in them that xe should search for the many vocab-related threads already on the site. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Zeitgeist21 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5645 days ago 156 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 8 of 12 18 April 2010 at 11:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Though to be fair the search function is being slightly restricted at the moment, and when people first come here everything seems new and you'd never guess everyone has had thought and talked about the same things already so cut the OP a bit of slack :P
Yeah you're right, listening doesn't have to be passive I just meant that passive listening is easy, helps alot and is a very easy and useful habit to have, especially for lazy people like me =D And you can do it on top of everything else and became way more fun for me when I stopped straining to understand everything. I was still curious, but just a bit more chilled; I used to strain to get everything and constantly use subtitles and rewind and stuff but then I kept getting stressed out. Then I stopped and chilled and still made loads of progress =) I would describe my level of comprehension as being fluent, although my speaking is still slightly dodgy; I can do it but it sounds horrible ^^ But I achieved most of that comprehension progress, both the vocab and getting used to hearing it through chilling and found that much easier to keep up over long periods of time, and no German doesn't feel harder to understand than English just different and I feel a bit like a child who doesn't know the big words :P Once I've improved my accent it will be time to start reading I think =) Of course working actively may be much more effective, though I would recommend doing it in combination with chilling in case you struggle to keep up the active work; and it's what you keep up (or don't) that makes you (or brakes you), however to get to fluency you'll need to stick with this language learning thing for awhile however you decide to go about it. So make sure some of it's easy so that whatever happens, however stressy your life gets you can still keep up something useful =) I wonder if I've ever ended a paragraph on this site without using a smiley xD 1 person has voted this message useful |
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