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How long until listening fluency? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Tyrion101 Senior Member United States Joined 3707 days ago 153 posts - 174 votes  Speaks: French | Message 1 of 8 08 April 2014 at 8:54am | IP Logged | ||
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I've only been learning for 3 months and while I've gotten to the point where I can hear most of what is said,
however quite often even though I recognize the words they go by to fast for me to translate in my head, however I am getting very good at reading in French. These are my two main goals with my language study. Fluency in listening and reading. Speaking is a distant third. Does this just simply take time that even though I may know what's being said I just have to expose myself more to the language? My habit has been this: spend some time learning the words grammar and such, then spend a few minutes (it varies with the time I have) listening, especially for things I just learned. Do I need to alter my approach? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6497 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 8 08 April 2014 at 9:48am | IP Logged | ||
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Maybe you should focus less on translating in your head. Either the meaning of a word pops up in your mind in no time at all or it doesn't, and if it doesn't you'll lose the 'flow' in your listening if you desperately try to figure the meaning out.
Some day you will know so many words that the general meaning appears, and until then understanding the general meaning and following the speech will be merciless competitors. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5326 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 8 08 April 2014 at 12:52pm | IP Logged | ||
As Iversen suggested, translating in your head won't help you understand full-speed, native audio. You need to get sufficiently familiar with the words, expressions and grammar that you can understand them directly in French, without stopping to translate. Fortunately, exposure will help you a lot. If you hear something enough times, and manage to understand it, your brain will try to build new connections, and you should be able to understand it quickly and easily in the future. Reading also helps: If you can read French quickly and with good understanding, at the same speed people tend to speak, this will also help your listening skills. Again, lots of exposure will help. Personally, I tried a bunch of things to improve my listening. At least for me, the big breakthrough was discovering a TV series where I could follow about 40% of the dialog. (For me, this was Buffy contre les vampires, and I used these transcripts of the French dialog to help with the first half-dozen episodes.) By the time I had watched three seasons back-to-back, I understood 80% to 90% of the dialog without any problem. This seems to work because TV series will provide you with several dozen hours of audio with fairly consistent vocabulary and voices, plus some images to help you figure things out from context. Note: It might be better to avoid complicated series with subtle, intricate plots, at least in the beginning. You can always watch Engrenages and Le trône de fer later. And yeah, I know I give this advice a lot, but as you can see in Napoleon's log, this general strategy seems to work for a surprising number of people. Of course, there are lots of other ways to improve your listening comprehension. And of course, this advice only applies once you reach a point where you can watch an episode of a TV series and follow the overall plot and at least a large minority of the dialog. If you're not yet at that point, see iguanamon's links. EDIT: Oops, where did his post go? Edited by emk on 08 April 2014 at 12:56pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5056 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 4 of 8 08 April 2014 at 1:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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You can't go wrong with emk's advice. I was going to give you my standard advice until I saw your earlier thread, Learning to listen, where I already did that along with others. It's about building critical mass, being consistent and persistent. No one can give you a specific time frame to reach listening proficiency because that's very dependent upon the individual, your level of vocabulary and grammar knowledge and your ability to internalize it.
The thing with listening is, it is hard to do at the beginning. Don't expect it to be easy. The more you listen, consistently and persistently to comprehensible input (explained in your previous thread), the better you will be. How long that takes depends upon you and whether you build listening to comprehensible input into your routine on a daily basis, or not. EDIT: Sorry, emk. I deleted my post because I didn't realize that the OP was the same one who started the previous thread- Learning to listen and, basically, I didn't want to be redundant since he already had that information. For others, a great link is to leosmith's post Listening from the beginning. It has 67 votes for a reason! To the OP: I thought your "Learning to listen" thread from a couple of weeks ago had several good posts within it about how to listen and comprehensible input. Is there something specific from that thread that you don't understand or would like to have clarified? Edited by iguanamon on 08 April 2014 at 8:40pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6391 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 5 of 8 08 April 2014 at 1:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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edit: oops.
I've recommended GLOSS already in the thread iguanamon linked to. It's basically a collection of lessons on various interesting topics. You can click Source at the top and get the full text, audio and translation. That's available for reading lessons too but obviously you'll benefit more from the listening ones. The rec for music/lyricstraining also still stands :) (so in US English you use dialog and program outside the computer context too? cool) Edited by Serpent on 08 April 2014 at 1:32pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| day1 Groupie Latvia Joined 3686 days ago 93 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English | Message 6 of 8 08 April 2014 at 1:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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My "strategy" is to choose a foreign audio version of a book I know extremely* well. Then I just listen to that audio before sleep (that is when I can concentrate on listening well). For me it works well even with languages I have not studied - tried it in Spanish and Swedish, and after a month or so listening to the same book all over again I could more or less follow the story. I prefer doing it this way, because eyes closed is the way to keep my mind from wandering off.
- - - - - 1 insomnia + 1 audiobook in English + 1 month or more of being too lazy to take a different audio CD = a book I know extremely well 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4238 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 7 of 8 08 April 2014 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Personally I do listen to discussions in Chinese over the radio. I can pick up around 80% of the
conversation in 6 months with some words & phrases in between that I haven't learned. Radio commentaries & discussions are good for listening because the main theme gets repeated over and over in different ways. Recently I was listening to a commentary about Microsoft Windows XP being a best- selling product for Microsoft and the company will discontinue support for XP in Chinese. The translation for Microsoft sounded like "Mi Yuan" or "Mi Ruan". Listening to a specific label by itself it's hard to figure out what they're discussing but when you hear the rest of the sentence the subject becomes clear. A lot of Chinese programs have captions in standard Mandarin for people who can read but don't necessarily speak the Mandarin dialect. Chinese programs from Singapore often have both English subtitles & Chinese captions. There are all sorts of Chinese drama series anywhere from 20 - 100 episodes. Once you start to follow the story you don't need to translate as much because you hear the same words & phrases repeated. When it comes to French, I can find many movies (including Hollywood blockbusters) in DVDs that have "Version Française". You can watch the English version first to get the story in your head. And then you switch to the French version with the captions on. Once you know the story, there is less need for you to have to translate back and forth. Reading captions over a movie / TV program can be tedious but less boring than reading a book because you are watching something exciting at the same time. Translating back and forth definitely slows you down. You just have to read all sorts of magazines with pictures that interest you and you can watch all sorts of videos online with captions. Finding subjects of interest to follow will speed up the learning process. Give yourself it 3-6 months you will see improvement. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5224 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 8 of 8 08 April 2014 at 8:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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For French I would also recommend the site FluentFrenchNow that
has videos with transcripts with translations from France and Quebec plus great technical commentary. It may be a bit over your head though. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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