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Learning to listen? | ||
Tags: Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Tyrion101 Senior Member United States Joined 3764 days ago 153 posts - 174 votes  Speaks: French | Message 1 of 15 26 March 2014 at 5:05am | IP Logged | ||
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My current language I am learning is French. French is apparently difficult to listen to. I have mixed results in listening to the radio. For some reason it is easier for me to listen to Quebec French, than it is to listen to French from France. Even still at this point, it is still almost impossible for me to tell what is going on unless they happen to be talking hockey. Then I know some of the things that are being discussed. Should I not be attempting to listen to the radio? Should I find something easier to listen to? What would you all suggest? My goal is more reading/listening than actual speaking, though that would be a plus.
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 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 15 26 March 2014 at 11:07am | IP Logged | ||
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To make progress listening, you need two things:
1. The ability to figure out some of what's being said. 2. Lots of listening. Given that you're going to be spending a lot of time doing this, your life will be much more pleasant if you also have: 3. Things which are fun to listen to. Let's talk about (1). In general, if you're listening to French, there will be some stuff that you can understand almost automatically, other stuff that you can understand if you pay close attention, and some stuff that you have no chance of understanding without lots of outside help. When you listen to the radio, or watch television, the general idea is move stuff from the second category to the first: you focus closely enough so that you can figure some new stuff out, and then—by sheer repetition—you cement that slightly challenging material into something you can understand automatically. You've already discovered a big part of the solution: You already know a lot about hockey, and so when you listen to hockey radio, you can figure out a lot of stuff through context. This is what listening feels like when it's working. :-) But I've found that news radio is otherwise a bit of a mixed blessing. There's a lot of it, and it's free, and the announcers usually speak a lot more clearly than movie actors. But on the downside, the subject changes every two minutes and there are no pictures to help puzzle things out. Basically, I think news radio is most useful if you love news, and if you also read French language newspapers a lot, because that will give you lots of context, and then you'll be able to figure it out the way you do hockey news. Another popular strategy around here is Listening/Reading, which requires the French and English versions of a book, plus the French audio book. Basically, you use the English book to figure out the French book, you use the French book to figure out the French audio, and you go for a lot of volume rather than perfect comprehension. But my personal preference is to watch things with pictures, because I can use the pictures to figure out some of what's being said. Nature documentaries, for example, have incredibly slow and clear audio, and the announcer says thinks like, "The tiger waits for her prey." The Quebec version of BBC Planète Terre, for example, is spectacular and often very easy to understand. But my secret listening weapon was actually dubbed TV series, preferably multi-season DVD box sets. They're great: A TV series has a consistent plot, so I could get used to the vocab. It has mostly the same actors, so I could get used to the voices. It has pictures. And because it's a box set, I've got seasons and seasons of listening material. Plus it's easy to pay close attention to TV. But of course, not all series are equally difficult: I started with Engrenages, and got destroyed, because Engrenages is one of the most difficult shows on French TV. I eventually lucked out with Buffy contre les vampires and these excellent transcripts. After that I watched Angel, and Ulysse 31 (a French kid's cartoon from the 80s) and L'Avatar, le dernier maître de l'air and then one day, my skills had broadened enough that I could channel surf French TV and at least follow 75% of the shows. Right now I'm working on Le trône de fer (challenging but an excellent dub, and judging from your user name, you might be a fan), and Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is complicated enough that I needed to watch the entire series, read a bunch of Wikipedia articles, and then rewatch it, and I'm finally getting pretty solid comprehension. But TV isn't the only way to improve your listening comprehension. Just focus on finding material where—if you pay close attention—you can figure out a fair bit from context. Then use repetition to lock that in. And unless you possess unusually high levels of motivation, focus and will-power, and unless you can maintain them for a couple hundred hours, then do yourself a favor and find stuff that you really enjoy listening to. And don't stop reading: The faster you can comfortably read French, the better chance you have of following the same material spoken rapidly. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4516 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 3 of 15 26 March 2014 at 2:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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The radio is certainly a bit tough at first. One thing that could help is concentrating on shows that focus on a single topic, which you can find lots of on France Inter and France Culture. If that doesn't work for you, you could try YouTube videos, which were my first meaningful exposure to native spoken French without subtitles and helped me a lot. If you like documentaries, which are usually easier than either radio or regular movies, just search "documentaire" on YouTube and you will probably find at least a few interesting things. If you like silly and kind of juvenile comedy, there are a lot of young French people who make short YouTube commentary- or sketch-style videos about various subjects. I can give you a list of channels if that interests you.
By the way, if you are interested at all in science, that could also be a good bet for starting to understand spoken French. English and French have a ton of scientific words in common, the only difference many times being the pronunciation. Edited by tastyonions on 26 March 2014 at 2:20pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5079 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 4 of 15 26 March 2014 at 3:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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emk,
Where do you find these box sets? 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 5 of 15 26 March 2014 at 9:30pm | IP Logged | ||
Cool fact: Your amazon.com username and password should work normally on Amazon's international sites, and your credit card and shipping address should already be set up correctly. For French, I find a lot of series using SensCritique, which is a gold mine. I've also had good luck searching YouTube for "generiques des séries de mon enfance" (opening credits of series of my childhood). And I replaced our cable with VoilaTV, which allows me to find cool stuff by channel surfing. I find that part of the secret is to spend less time looking for "culturally authentic French series", and more time looking for "stuff that's massively popular in France." For example, I found L'Avatar, le dernier maître de l'air on a list of popular French cartoons, and it was on sale on Amazon.fr, so I grabbed it. It turned out that Avatar has an amazingly good French dub, and it's one of the best animated series ever made. Of course, this works best with a language like French, where's there's a huge market and a tradition of excellent dubbing. Generally speaking, if a US series is really popular in France, it's safe to assume that the dubbing is quite good. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5079 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 6 of 15 26 March 2014 at 9:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks.
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| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4679 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 7 of 15 26 March 2014 at 11:11pm | IP Logged | ||
@Tyrion101: While the other suggestions will all be helpful, I'd say don't give up on radio (or podcasts based on radio programmes), even if you can only manage shortish bursts. What I would say is to have some periods, which can be short, but fairly regular, of really concentrated listening, with no visual distractions whatsoever, e.g. eyes closed or use a sleeping mask (but try not to go to sleep). While movies etc are great in some respects, I find that when there is visual as well as aural input, the visual will almost always dominate, so if you do really want to learn to listen, then pure listening is what you practice doing, at least some of the time. This isn't quite Iversen's "listening like a bloodhound following a scent", but I suppose it's on similar lines. Edited by montmorency on 26 March 2014 at 11:12pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5113 days ago 2238 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 8 of 15 27 March 2014 at 12:45am | IP Logged | ||
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The advice you've been given is excellent. Listening is a skill that can be trained. If you have a transcript and can read it beforehand or after, maybe even two or three times. Then, following montmorency's advice, get yourself prepared to listen, minimize distraction and really concentrate on what you are hearing.
WARNING; SOMEWHAT LONG POST FOLLOWS!: First, read this post: Listening from the beginning by leosmith. It's one of the most voted useful posts on the forum for a reason. I began to listen intently first to music that I enjoyed. The lyrics are freely available. I even memorized a few songs. I also found radio news with a transcript. To preface this advice, many people are dead set against using the news as a learning aid because the language is formal and clearly spoken. I would agree, if that was all I used. To me the advantages are having a transcript and knowing what the stories are in English- plus, I like to stay informed on what's going on in the world. The US media have a poor reputation in this regard- international news is more of an afterthought. With a transcript you can read the item first and then listen, or, listen first and then check yourself against the transcript and then listen again, etc. There are many variations. My personal favorite in the beginning is to listen first and then check the transcript. Getting active can be done by say, watching an episode of "Les Simpsons" and then writing a review in the TL- taking extensive notes along the way. I did this with 78 episodes of a Brazilian Soap and went over them with my private tutor. She suggested it. I will be eternally grateful. It was the most useful 4 months I spent in learning Portuguese even though I had no transcript at all. I did have online chapter summaries which helped to confirm what I had described. Unknown words came up a lot in the beginning and that's what I concentrated on first, of course pictures help a lot. I'd note down the time stamp and the words before and after. I'd then go over them with my tutor. As I continued to watch and listen, unknown words became fewer and fewer. Now before someone starts saying, "I'm a broke college student and can't afford a tutor", that's where the transcript comes in. (As an aside, a private tutor is a lot cheaper, for westerners, than most people may think.) I opted to work without one because I had twice weekly tutor sessions to rely on. With a transcript, (there's an HTLAL thread on French series/films with accurate subtitles), that's your backstop and check. You can also search for episode summaries, forums and subtitle files- including English if you're watching a dubbed series or film. Radio France International (RFI) is a great broadcaster. I listen to the 30 minute news from RFI nearly every day in Brazilian Portuguese (no transcript, I don't need one. It's not just straight up factual news items. They have reports from all over, interviews, culture, music, the environment etc. If something is "boring", hey, I can put up with anything for a few minutes. The point is, I'm learning all kinds of things from everything and to me that's not boring! It all depends on your perspective, and perspective is something you are able to alter. RFI has a langue française page with "Le journal en français facile" at the top. It's a 10 minute newscast. You can download the mp3, read and print the transcript, or use the various listen and read options I've talked about. (Caveat: When I'm talking about listening and reading here I am not talking about the traditional LR method with using your native language.) Also, going beyond purely French sources, I used NHK World Radio from Japan with Brazilian Portuguese. NHK's Bulletin en français is a 14 minute newscast with native speakers. It's also available in English, as is the news from RFI. Listening in English first, then in French, can help you a lot even if you don't do the whole 10-14 minutes. Some people also say that there isn't enough repetition in the news to be useful. Well, not all the news is "new". Many stories, unfortunately, last for a while. The Ukraine story is ongoing. The search for the missing Malaysian jetliner is ongoing. NSA spying is ongoing (Hi guys! It's me again!). You get the point. The news won't help you in colloquial conversation, true, but it can help train your listening skills and maybe even give you something to talk about in French with someone. As a guy who likes to stay informed, I pretty much know the news in English before I hear it in the TL. The BBC is my homepage when I start up the laptop in the morning. I read (some, not all, by any means) of The Guardian, The NYT, El País, El Nuevo Herald, Folha de São Paulo, Público from Portugal, A Verdade from Moçambique, VOA Kreyòl, Kol Israel Ladino, and of course, Twitter keeps it all organized for me. Maintaining and learning languages takes some time and effort beyond courses. An hour and a half throughout the day, my daily one hour walk, and my car time, is sufficient for that. Ladino and Kreyòl listening take up about 15 minutes a day total. With Twitter (and android apps) I can pick and choose what I want. Giving up a lot of English isn't a huge "sacrifice" for me. Obviously, there's a price to pay for this. That price for me means that I long ago gave up listening to English on my car radio (unless I have a passenger). I don't watch nearly as much English language TV as I used to and my reading mostly takes place in other languages as well. Ultimately, it's about how much do you want it? Do you want French enough to really make an effort to listen to as much of it as you can during the day? (Caveat: don't do any of this unless you want to!) Would you watch the same 20 minute episode of the Simpsons (or something else you may like) 3 or 4 times in a week until you feel you have understood it? Would you take notes in French, write a review in French and maybe post it on lang8 or talk about it in an exchange with a native speaker? Would you listen to something "boring" for 10 minutes if you knew that doing so regularly for a couple of months would dramatically improve your vocabulary and listening abilities? I would. I did. Now, I reap the benefits and can listen to anything I like. Speaking of which, it's time to go and watch Caso Cerrado on Telemundo. Lastly, before I go, I came across this site a few years ago which has short videos with transcripts and they can be downloaded as well: Authentic Informal Free French Listening Resources. The videos range from birthday cakes to French department stores. As a bonus, on the home page, along with comparative romance vocab and phrases, they also have Swedish available, go figure. Hope I may have been of some help. You'll have to find what works best for you. It's not going to be easy at first. I won't lie, but it will get easier the more you do it. Good luck! Edited by iguanamon on 27 March 2014 at 5:02am 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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