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Understanding fast spoken language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| brian91 Senior Member Ireland Joined 5226 days ago 335 posts - 437 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 9 of 53 04 July 2010 at 7:24pm | IP Logged | ||
Euronews is great for that. I can also recommend this service from Deutsche Welle: world.de/dw/0,,8030,00.html">http://www.dw-world.de/dw/0,,80 30,00.html. Does anyone know of equivalent services for French and Spanish? I plan on watching Amélie with French subtitles tonight, as I have huge difficulties with spoken French (like listening to Europe 1). :/ Edited by brian91 on 04 July 2010 at 7:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Declan1991 Tetraglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6221 days ago 233 posts - 359 votes Speaks: English*, German, Irish, French | Message 10 of 53 04 July 2010 at 8:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5230 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 11 of 53 04 July 2010 at 10:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'n my experience, the best way to start overcoming this problem is to listen to native's
natural speed speech while reading the transcript. The best database I know for this is lingq (has a lot of content for 10 languages) and if you are just doing listening and reading it is totally free. Next thing I did, after about a month of reading while listening to natural speech, was to start watching TV serials in Spanish, but I tried to choose ones that had quite few episodes. The reason for this is that it may take you few episodes to get used to the way actors speak, but once you do, you start understanding literally everything - jokes, swearing... :) 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5564 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 12 of 53 05 July 2010 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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This is my biggest problem too.
I process what I'm hearing, "OK, that word means that and that word means this..." but this goes far slower than I'm heairng and then there's pressure and...yeah. I just can't do it. Watching stuff with subtitles doesn't work too well for me. I find myself just reading the subtitles and ignoring the speach as with watching a film in a language I don't know with English subtitles. Edited by Tyr on 05 July 2010 at 6:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| staf250 Pentaglot Senior Member Belgium emmerick.be Joined 5479 days ago 352 posts - 414 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, Italian, English, German Studies: Arabic (Written) | Message 13 of 53 05 July 2010 at 7:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5134 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 14 of 53 05 July 2010 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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For me, I primarily use(d) movies with subtitles, music, coupled with the occassional audio book or hour of Deutsche Welle, if I happened to be awake at that time (in my area, Deutsche Welle comes on the TV at 3 (sometimes 2) in the morning, and I much prefer to watch TV on a TV than with a computer). That said, when people speak slow German to me, it sounds really annoying, as I am more used to fullspeed.
From my personal experience, I find documentaries to be much easier to understand than news broadcasts, and also find movies to (for the most part) be easier to understand than the news. I am always surprised when forum users suggest how easy it is to watch news broadcasts, as the vocabulary can be much more complex, imo, than a TV special about the origins of Christmas or something. Music is good, I usually listen to Rock music. At first, I sometimes struggle to understand, but eventually I get really good. At that point, if I still don't feel that I am grasping the whole concept of the song, I will look up the lyrics and either translate them, or find someone else's translation, and see if the missing words hold the key. More often than not, they don't, and the song is just not meant to make sense. With this technique, I not only improve my listening but also build some new vocabulary here and there as well, without much hassel. edit: Another thing is to not "think about it" too hard when listening. When I first learned German, my first (well second if you count Latin) foreign language, I could understand, but as soon as I realized that I was understanding a foreign tongue, I would freak out and not understand anything, as if my brain was telling me that it was impossible to comprehend, since I was speaking and listening in a foreign language. By now these moments are few and far between, but at the beginning it was a large (mental) problem. Edited by tracker465 on 05 July 2010 at 7:18pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| dolly Senior Member United States Joined 5572 days ago 191 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin | Message 15 of 53 05 July 2010 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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| Declan1991 Tetraglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6221 days ago 233 posts - 359 votes Speaks: English*, German, Irish, French | Message 16 of 53 05 July 2010 at 7:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Funny. I find thrillers and police dramas and that sort of thing easier to understand, because it's easier to pick up vocabulary from what you see as well as what you hear. New broadcasts require an awful lot of concentration for me because they often contain statistics, numbers and more complicated language that I have to think about.
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