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Languages you hear (or not!) | ||
Tags: Listening | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Le dacquois Diglot Groupie France Joined 5649 days ago 54 posts - 69 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, German | Message 1 of 6 01 July 2009 at 5:41pm | IP Logged |
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I'm wondering if you can "tune" your ear into certain languages easier than others. Would this depend on your mother tongue?
I'm getting slighly annoyed about my inability to follow Spanish as well as I'd like. My ear seems incapable of "tuning" into it properly. I understand when someone speaks slowly and clearly or when it's written, but not in a real life normal pace situation. I watch Spanish TV and I'm quite let down about how much I don't understand (the most of it.) The weird thing is though that when I manage to get subtitles I begin to hear the words I normally wouldn't. I find this disturbing because I quite clearly know the vocabulary and understand the sentence grammatically, in essence what's being said, but without the subtitles my ears don't pick it up. Why is this? Lack of exposure? I'm not sure. I never seem to hear very ordinary words such as "un", "una", "y" "para", etc. It flies by me. In a sentence where I understand every little thing in theory, in practice I hear a couple of words. So, I can maybe guess roughly what's being discussed, but not what they're actually saying. Make sense? Strangely, my ear has never experienced this level of difficulty in hearing French. Even when just starting out I would hear the vast majority of the words I knew. Anything I didn't understand was generally because I didn't know the vocabulary. Even with idiomatic expressions that I didn't know the meaning of, I heard all the words. I thought watching "good" Spanish speakers on TV would help me. Presenters and weather guys usually have good accents and articulate well. It goes with the job. However, this doesn't seem to be helping me with Spanish. What's the solution here? Is there such a thing as "ear tuning capability" varying from language to language? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5784 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 2 of 6 01 July 2009 at 7:36pm | IP Logged |
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I'd disagree with you on Spanish.
I've never learned the language but I can still quite clearly make out words and thus understand some of them through French/latin knowledge. Italian too is easy to pick things out. French...not so much, its more blurry. But still its not too hard. Japanese is easy too. What I find really hard are Germanics. Swedish is very hard to make out words with. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| will72694 Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5706 days ago 59 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 6 01 July 2009 at 10:58pm | IP Logged |
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I find it much easier to "tune into" Russian than Swedish, even though I'm more grammatically and vocabularily, if
that's a word, confident in Swedish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Katie Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6720 days ago 495 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, Hungarian Studies: French, German | Message 4 of 6 01 July 2009 at 11:06pm | IP Logged |
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Le dacquois - I know exactly what you're talking about! I struggle at times with the same thing in Hungarian.
Unfortunately, I have nothing to offer you by way of advice. Up until this point, I've just tried to keep going, hoping that I'll eventually start to pick up all of the words. I just keep listening (with & without subtitles). So, I'll be happy to hear some feedback from our most knowledgable in this area too! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 6 01 July 2009 at 11:22pm | IP Logged |
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My mottos is: if I can say it, I can understand it. If I find something I can't understand, I learn to say it.
By this I don't just mean "I learn to produce a grammatically correct sentence", but I try to learn to say it as close as possible to the way that native speakers say it. A classic error that many learners make (regardless of mother tongue and target language) is to try to stress all words. An English learner might say: I wanted to understand it instead of just I wanted to understand it. Similarly in Spanish you might want to say: ¡No me lo digas! when a native would say ¡No me lo digas! If your brain expects those little words to be stressed, it won't recognise them when they're not. A bit of echoing on problematic phrases taken from DVDs might help you here. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Le dacquois Diglot Groupie France Joined 5649 days ago 54 posts - 69 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, German | Message 6 of 6 02 July 2009 at 10:19am | IP Logged |
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I think Cainntear is getting at what I was on about.
So, for "¡No me lo digas!" I would likely hear "blah, blah, blah, DIIIIg, blah." and my mind would say "Man, what the hell was that?! That didn't sound like the way I thought it would be said." Maybe after hearing the same sentence a million times I'll understand it based on the rhythm and phrasing, even if I never hear the words. I often find that consonants are "eaten" in Spanish (especially by the charming lady who presents the news on TVE!) hehe. I have problems also with strings of vowel-like sounds. For example, in "nos hemos hallado..." I'm likely to hear "noaymoayao". Especially when I talk with my Argentinian pal, who doesn't seem to pronounce certain consonants. When that happens the vowels naturally roll into one another and it just becomes a mushy mess which my ears have trouble figuring out. It's a bit frustrating! What I don't understand though, is that French has many flowing strings of arcane vowel sounds. "Il y a" often just becomes "ya" but I don't have a problem with it. I suppose my ears just haven't yet tuned into Spanish and I probably lack the practice. Edited by Le dacquois on 02 July 2009 at 10:20am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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