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So I need help with listening... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5345 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes  Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari | Message 1 of 6 25 February 2014 at 2:47am | IP Logged |
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I'm currently learning Pashto at DLI and I'm struggling with listening. My last score on my listening test was 86, which might sound alright, but is below a 3.0 on the obnoxious scale we use here at DLI (anything below 96 is no longer an A.) We do maybe an hour or two of listening total every day in our 6-7 hours of classtime, and I have a little free time afterwards I could devote to that. I also have my weekends free. I want to know what you guys would suggest I do to quickly improve my listening.
Another thing I'm curious about are diminishing returns. From your experience, how much time can you devote to each activity (listening, reading, vocab) before you start to get diminishing returns or before it's not worth it to keep focusing on that activity. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5383 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 6 25 February 2014 at 3:48pm | IP Logged |
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I've never found a quick way to improve listening comprehension, unfortunately. I strongly suspect that building listening comprehension is a lot like building muscle: it requires a substantial, sustained effort.
My biggest improvements came from several things: 1. Watching several seasons of a TV series dubbed into French, and then repeating the process with a few other series. This is a typical "extensive" activity, and it can be done after all other forms of studying are done for the day. It works fairly well because TV series tend to use a limited number of voices and a predictable vocabulary, which gives you a temporary comprehension boost. And by working through several series, you gradually broaden this boost to cover more speakers and more subjects. 2. Using subs2srs to make flashcards from movies, and deleting 90% of the cards within the first few reviews. This was a remarkably effective "intensive" activity—I had automatic, nearly 100% comprehension of even the most difficult movie dialog that I studied within the first month of reviews. It's actually a little uncanny. 3. Repeatedly listening to short passages, and trying to make my own transcripts, then later checking them against real transcripts. This is much harder than subs2srs, and the payoff actually seems to be slightly less (at least for me), so I don't do it much. But it has the advantage of not requiring the target language to have a TV industry. Iversen has some excellent advice on improving listening, but I can't find the link right now. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6448 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 3 of 6 25 February 2014 at 7:49pm | IP Logged |
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LR is the fastest way, especially if you have the time. (Oh the irony. But basically LR is imo the most efficient way of spending a lot of time on listening - I myself also watch a lot of football/soccer)
Some important threads: Incorporating native materials Diminishing returns Iversen's guide to learning languages: listening "three rules by Ari" - note that many disagree with the original post to some extent, but it's been the starting point for a great discussion Also, would you say you need to improve your listening or to get better scores on listening? or both? And do you get GLOSS lessons as assignments? Work with them and try to deal with less familiar content. Maybe you just need to get used to the specific types of assignments and to guess/get the gist/cope with ambiguity in content that you're not expected to understand fully. After all, this is what real life language use is often like. Edited by Serpent on 25 February 2014 at 8:10pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5617 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 4 of 6 25 February 2014 at 8:47pm | IP Logged |
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One question: Do you have a firm grip on the target language phonology?
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| osoymar Tetraglot Pro Member United States Joined 4587 days ago 190 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English*, German, Portuguese, Japanese Studies: Spanish, French Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 6 26 February 2014 at 1:58am | IP Logged |
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One more question- what kind of listening practice do you get during the classes?
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| PeteP Newbie United States Joined 4888 days ago 27 posts - 48 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Romanian | Message 6 of 6 26 February 2014 at 7:59pm | IP Logged |
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Go to
http://www.rferl.org/section/afgha nistan/149.html LOTS of Pashto and Dari to listen to. I LOVE their Moldovan site for listening to Romanian. I don't know Pashto but this site looks like a GREAT resource. The Moldovan site has LOTS of audio and a LOT of the audio comes with transcripts! 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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