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How to become a better listener? | ||
Tags: Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| kieran Newbie United Kingdom Joined 94 days ago 12 posts - 1 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 7 08 November 2009 at 12:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hey guys, I'm new to this language business. And I'm currently learning Spanish. When I'm reading, writing, learning, I find it very easy to pick things up like new words and sentences etc. However listening is just a nightmare, when someone starts rattling off verbally, I just crumble, how do you become a better listener when learning a language?
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| Cainntear Tetraglot Pro Member Scotland Joined 609 days ago 1894 posts - 280 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Gaelic (Scottish) Studies: Italian, German, Dutch, Japanese, Polish, Gaelic (Irish), Welsh Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 7 08 November 2009 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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Learn to speak, and I mean learn to speak in a flowing manner, not just spit out words. As you learn to produce language clearly, so you'll be able to link what someone else says to what you would mean if you said it yourself.
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| Rikyu-san Diglot Pro Member Denmark Joined 126 days ago 138 posts - 68 votes Speaks: Danish*, English Studies: German, French, Mandarin, Japanese, Sanskrit Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 7 08 November 2009 at 3:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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Here is a technique you can try out. It has to do with rhythm, and moving in sync with the rhythm of the audio you are hearing or people you are communicating with.
I have seen a film where it was shown that babies are doing this spontaneously so it might be a property of language learning that we are wired to do from birth - without being told by our parents that we should do this. Since I saw the film I have seen things in babies in real life that seems to confirm it. And I have used this myself to good effect. Here is the deal: I you listen to people speaking, they speak in rhythmic patterns. If you compare this with listening to music, you can tap the rhythm. In fact, listen to a piece of music and tap the rhythm with a finger. It feels good to follow the rhythm if you can. But not only does music follow a rhythm, natural speech does too. Try it out for size. Call a friend or speak to someone around you next time you have the chance, and simply notice the rhythm by which they speak. Even when they pause to reflect, when they pick up speaking again, they will most likely begin again in sync with the rhythm. This is because they are following their own rhythm already and we sync naturally to our own rhythms - and those of the people we are communicating with. People with good rapport will communicate in sync, naturally matching each others rhythms. It is like "the dance of life" - and that was, as far as I remember, the title of the movie. One interesting feature I have noticed is our tendency to speak in triplets - that is, three notes on one beat, or three notes over 2 or 4 beats. Some rhythms can be harder to discover unless you can hear them as triplets. If this is too hard, just tune into the general rhythm, whether it is fast, slow or something in between. I would like to add that in my experience, when I am out of sync with other people's rhythm, it is harder to communicate. If I am slower or faster, communication is not as smooth as it is when our rhythms match. I use this technique professionally as a very, very subtle rapport building technique. People respond to my inner metronome even when they can't hear it because my own body-mind begins to follow the rhythm. I lead myself into a rhythm that matches theirs and out of this rapport is more easily built. When you listen to native speakers, in your target language, atune yourself to the rhythm by which they are speaking. Tap the rhythm discreetly with you fingers or just mark the rhythm with gentle movement with your hands, feet, or whatever is possible. It can be done very elegantly so no one notices what you are doing. What will happen is that you will atune yourself to their rhythm, and your body-mind will begin to move in sync with their rhythm, and that makes it much easier to follow the conversation. This may require some bit of practice, and here are a few useful tips. * make it a habit of noticing the rhythm people communicate with, including yourself. Is it fast, slow, medium tempo? Can you follow the tempo? * if necessary, tap the rhythm with your fingers, do it discreetly if necessary. * everybody is doing this so there are opportunities to practice everywhere. Practice with the taxi driver, the waitress at the deli, your account manager, your colleagues. * just a music is not always played on the beat, but still has a distinct rhythm, natural speech follows a recognizable tempo even if the words are not all falling on the beat. It would become quite mechanical if they did, just as music would. Music and speech has a rhythm - the point is to learn to discover and follow the rhythm. * next, try to pick up the rhythm in audio in your target language. Tap it, follow it, relax and get into the groove. By following the rhythm effortlessly, your body-mind will sync with the speech you are trying to follow. I listened to a Chinese FSI tape last week and it was quite challenging for me. I felt as if I was "on the outside" and they were communicating "on the inside". I was in a way mismatching them and it created so much "noise" that I could not follow the conversation. I remembered this technique, listened to it again, and tapped the rhythm with my fingers. I began to feel more at ease with what I was hearing and after a couple of minutes begain to feel included, "inside", and part of the conversation, as if we had great rapport and I was simple listening in. What was said made much more sense immediately and now I could follow along. (This also helps explain why Professor Arguelles' shadowing technique is designed the way it is (with the strong pacing back and forth) - at least this is my hypothesis). Edited by Rikyu-san on 08 November 2009 at 3:28pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 doviende Pro Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 584 days ago 290 posts - 257 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Swedish, Esperanto Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 7 08 November 2009 at 6:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've definitely felt this gap between written and audible communication. I had lots of trouble with this in Chinese, where I found that there was a lot of stuff that I could understand in written form, but not while listening.
One thing you need to adjust to is letting go of the words that you don't understand. If you try super hard to understand every word that you hear, then you'll get stuck in one place while the rest of the conversation continues without you. To solve this, you need to practice listening intensely to the sounds without getting "stuck". You have to cultivate a mind-set where it's ok for you to leave those words behind. One way to practice is to find any sort of native-speaker audio (I particularly like news radio for this). Put it on, and just listen. I suggested news radio because it will have plenty of words that you don't know, so you can get more comfortable with not knowing them (yet). Listen to the sounds, listen to how the language flows, and see if you can pick out a few words like the names of famous people and places. Doing lots of listening of any sort will build your familiarity with the spoken language. I also like to have lots of audio on as "background noise" when I'm doing other things. Some people don't like this as much, but I think that it really adds to the immersion environment. You don't have to actively listen to it or understand it, just have it playing while you're washing the dishes, walking to the bus stop, or even sitting at work (if it's acceptable to have headphones on at work). This is just another way to get comfortable with the sounds and rhythms of the language. The other benefit of using news radio for this, is that news radio is usually spoken very fast and very clearly. They almost never mumble the words. It's very precise. Because it's so fast, you can accustom yourself to the rhythm of an extremely fast speaker, and then when you go back to your regular slow-paced beginner material you'll be amazed at how slow it sounds, and how easy it is to pick out lots of the words. Another great way to practice listening is to watch lots of TV. As a beginner, I suggest watching something that you're already familiar with (which may be an English show that's dubbed in Spanish). For example, I watched the entire series of "Star Trek: Deep Space 9" dubbed in German, and I learned a lot. The reason you want something familiar is because you will already know what the characters are like and what sorts of things happen in the plot. This will help you understand what's going on even when there are many new words. Also, just watching what the characters are doing in the scene will help you figure out what the words mean too. In Star Trek, I knew that usually when the captain gets to the bridge in an emergency scene, he shouts "Report!". When I started watching it in German, a "red alert" scene came up, the captain came out, and he shouted "Bericht!" and I immediately understood it. :) I'm sure that there are many other ways to improve your listening, but almost all of them involve spending hours and hours just listening to something. You get good at listening by listening. Yes, you will suck at the start, but that's ok. Everyone sucks at the start. You just need to put lots and lots of time into it, and you will get good. Don't worry about your current level, just try to get a little bit better each time. Step by step, you'll improve, and after many hours you'll realize that you understand quite a lot :) 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sennin Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 632 days ago 1126 posts - 65 votes 5 sounds | Message 5 of 7 08 November 2009 at 6:48pm | IP Logged | ||
Obviously, the best way to become a better listener is by listening a lot. When radio and TV become too easy for you it is time to focus on non-standard language. Based on my personal experience, amateur podcasts can be a very good source of authentic informal speech. Apart from that the best thing to do is to communicate with native speakers as much as possible.
I think this is relevant only when dealing with non-standard, dialectal speech. I usually aim for 100% comprehension but it's not always possible and people get insulted if they can understand you but you seem to have trouble understanding them. In such cases it's best to do some guesswork rather than asking all the time and leaving the wrong impression that you don't understand a word. Edited by Sennin on 08 November 2009 at 6:54pm | |||
| doviende Pro Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 584 days ago 290 posts - 257 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Swedish, Esperanto Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 7 08 November 2009 at 10:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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I disagree strongly. It takes a long time to learn a lot of vocabulary, so in many cases you're going to be spending a long time in that "intermediate" stage where you only understand maybe 75% - 90% of the words that people are saying to you. Usually you have to be at quite an advanced stage before you understand every single word that you hear in conversation.
Yes, I'm eventually aiming for an advanced level in my German, but I don't expect to attain that for many months and therefore I don't worry about getting every single word that someone says to me. Since I'm somewhat of a perfectionist, my habit in the past has been to try to think really hard about all those words that were said, but this just ruins the flow of the whole conversation and I get lost. Therefore, I have found it very beneficial to try hard for perfection only when I'm trying to pull vocab words out of a recording. When I'm talking to a real person I just try to let the conversation flow over me and grab whatever I can at the time. For someone like kieran who is a beginner at Spanish, there's no chance of already having a 20000 word vocabulary, so clearly not every word will be understood. Therefore, I recommend that one can get higher comprehension by learning to ignore some of the words. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 158 days ago 57 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish | Message 7 of 7 09 November 2009 at 1:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Don't try to understand. Just listen to and follow the sounds. Play short sections on
loop. Edited by schoenewaelder on 09 November 2009 at 1:58pm |
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