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Unfamiliar audio: Your approach? | ||
Tags: Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5704 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 1 of 13 22 February 2014 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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...as a beginner (ish).
You have an audio source that you're interested in understanding and using for language learning somehow. But: - You don't have a transcription - No translation either - You're not the type of person who would ask a native speaker to go to the trouble of writing down the words or translating the whole thing for you ;-) - You can't make out all the sounds on the first try - Even if you could, you would understand somewhere between nothing and less than half of the words in a sentence What would you do to get something useful out of an audio like this? Just curious about other people's techniques :-) I tend to use unfamiliar audio a lot, but it's not like I have an optimal technique down yet... So it would be interesting to hear what you would do with it. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 22 February 2014 at 9:56pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4164 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 2 of 13 22 February 2014 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I usually don't use transcripts, but even if I did, the audio tends to go too quickly for the transcript to really be helpful as far as learning vocabulary. For trying to make out all of the sounds, I haven't done anything else except just hitting repeat a few times and hoping I figure it out from there (I usually do after awhile). I try and choose shorter audio, audio about subjects I already know, or podcasts with visuals--something where I'm more likely to figure out context. I try and notice if there are certain words that tend to be repeated during the audio--these words I will usually make a note of and look them up later.
If the audio is really short (under 5 minutes), I will sometimes do a dictation of it and look it up later. I'm actually not bad at recognizing sounds and writing down with the correct spelling. But this takes a lot of time, so I don't do it very often. I'm still working on a better/more efficient method for this! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5561 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 3 of 13 22 February 2014 at 10:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I transcribe some of it, and then try to figure out if the words I think I heard exist, and if they make sense in that context. Usually I pause after a couple of syllables to write down what I think I hear, but I still have to leave some blanks on the first pass, rewind, go through it again, add and change stuff. Depending on the language and the piece in question I can work out most of it, enough to get the gist, or not enough to get the gist. In that case I let it be for the time being. Otherwise, just transcribing some of it makes understanding the rest easier.
3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4502 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 4 of 13 22 February 2014 at 10:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
Skip it and leave it for later. The fact I want to use it does not mean I have to use it now and if I don't understand more than 10% of the words then it is nigh-on useless for me at this point in time. I'm going to find something more appropriate that I can enjoy and return to it when I can actually use it. I don't have the patience to sit down and transcribe or dictate something (which only works when you know the language well enough and can distinguish all the syllables and at that point your understanding is beyond 10-20%) and work on it intensively when there are 1000 easier sources out there that I can use that won't frustrate the hell out of me. Unless I'm studying Greenlandic. But in that case I know what I'm up against. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5704 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 5 of 13 22 February 2014 at 11:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
Fair enough :-) That's obviously a valid concern - and I would want to stay away from frustrating things too. But most of the time when I use unfamiliar audio I mostly use it for passive / semi-active listening in large amounts. This video kind of explains what happens (4:38-5:46 in the video). Basically my brain will naturally pick up on words and phrases I already know and zone in on those, and getting this effect from natural sources helps me review it a lot more effectively than if the word came up in Anki for example. As I keep listening I'll find new things I hadn't been able to make out before, so I tend to pick up on more and more words, partly because practising like this improves my ability to string sounds and syllables together into recognisable elements. And I like the feeling of gradually going from understanding next to nothing to understanding everything. It's a big motivation boost - and for that reason I tend to keep one or two videos that I almost never listen to, just to get that boost every few months. But I don't mind keeping random babbling running in the background even if I don't understand it - because I like how it feels when I've studied something in a course, or looked it up, and then eventually notice it in something I've been listening to for a while. Piece by piece it tends to come together, but every little piece is actually helpful in its own right, and it seems to help from day 1. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 22 February 2014 at 11:57pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4502 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 6 of 13 23 February 2014 at 12:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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In that case I just listen and go "oh, I know that word and what it means". But it's
annoying because without a transcript you can't expect vocab items to come up except for things like "and, because, so, therefore, to be..." but I don't really use it for vocab review either. I don't really take all the learning methodology as seriously as most people here though - I just use the language. I think less and I use more. Language is used intuitively for me and I try to practice that - I never ever think what case I should be using, except when I do it wrong and then I try and automatise the proper response. So I cheat and take the easy way out - once you've cheated often enough then difficult videos will come soon enough. But I don't really make study objects out of videos I don't really understand whatsoever, because I don't really understand them whatsoever. However, when writing, I do care. Then I do pay attention. Because then orthography and spelling start playing a role (when speaking it's pronunciation more often). But I am not much of an aural learner at all. I prefer the written word. Although pronunciation I do train (the first thing I do in fact is pronunciation training, always - so that when I start speaking I have an intelligible accent, albeit a crappy one. And I try and include subtleties in this, like the three-way plosive distinction of Korean, soft/hard consonants in Russian, diphthongs in Romanian, and so on). 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 DavidStyles Octoglot Pro Member United Kingdom Joined 3736 days ago 82 posts - 179 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, French, Portuguese, Norwegian Studies: Mandarin, Russian, Swedish, Danish, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian) Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 13 23 February 2014 at 12:31am | IP Logged | |||||
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Relevant is that some languages are a lot easy to transcribe (without knowing meaning) than others. I don't speak Tagalog but could probably transcribe it easily to look it up. I understand written Danish just fine, but couldn't easily transcribe it. And my French is near perfect, but if I were to transcribe what I'm hearing, it'd be making heavy use of my knowledge of French, not just what I'm hearing, due to French's ridiculous rules regards what gets pronounced and what doesn't, and the commonplace nature of homophones in French.
So, all this to say... what language did you have in mind? Unless making a phonetic transcription, of course, but that's also easy to do badly, especially if the speaker's (or speakers') speech is not especially clear. That said, I am the kind of person who might ask a friend to transcribe something for me if I pressingly wanted it (in fact, I have done exactly that before now). 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5704 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 8 of 13 23 February 2014 at 12:32am | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah the words that come up tend to be a bit random - I guess that's why people recommend using a wide variety of different sources - but it helps reinforce all the words that I've come across before. Important things tend to come up somewhere eventually, and I guess we can artificially boost their frequency by using Anki... I just happen to not like Anki very much so I barely use it (the whole thing bores me). I actually prefer extensive listening to things I don't understand. Using the language intuitively definitely sounds like the best idea, I just find it hard to do anything with a language if I haven't internalised it (the words and structures) beforehand, and native audio helps with that for me. I wish I could say I "think less and use more" :-) Good for you, seriously.
It was more of a general question since I'm just looking for input about what other people do, regardless of what language they're studying :-) People on this forum have so many good ideas, often things I never would've been able to come up with myself, that I can incorporate into my own studies. I'm studying Japanese at the moment and it's definitely different from doing the same thing with Italian audio... Liz Edited by Lizzern on 23 February 2014 at 12:37am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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