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Listening and full comprehension | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5304 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes  Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari | Message 1 of 9 05 June 2014 at 2:34pm | IP Logged |
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At the point where I'm at in Pashto listening, I can listen to short conversations and sentences and get the gist
of things and often get full comprehension I everything being said. However when I listen to a long, fast audio such as a news report, I start hearing only the individual words and verb conjugations and it moves into the next sentence faster than I can translate the previous sentence. Are there any techniques you guys would suggest to improve my comprehension in such circumstances? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5072 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 2 of 9 05 June 2014 at 4:58pm | IP Logged |
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What did you do for Spanish? "Listen more" is the short answer. Make daily listening a habit. A lot of international broadcasters (BBC, DW, VOA, etc.) have Pashto services and podcasts available for download. I don't know if any of them have a transcript. Ideally, it would be best to find a newscast with an exact transcript to serve as a bridge for your listening. This helps to focus on the words and sentences.
There are many ways to use a newscast/audio with transcript. Listen first, then read, then listen and read simultaneously, then listen again- for example. The keys are, to make listening daily a habit, don't give up because "it's too hard" and listen a lot. Don't expect miracles overnight. It takes time to build up a "critical mass" of listening. At some point, start weaning yourself off of the transcript. Eventually you won't need it at all. After a few months of daily listening to Portuguese, I got really good at it. A TV series would help but I know absolutely nothing about what kind of media is available for Pashto. Good luck. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5304 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari | Message 3 of 9 05 June 2014 at 5:21pm | IP Logged |
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Spanish was easier because the verb conjugations were easy and the sentence structure was
not much different than English. Pashto has fairly difficult conjugations; Present tense conjugates off subject, past tense conjugates off object and the conjugations are so similar that it's sometimes hard to catch in fast speech. Verbs also come at the end of the sentence. I listen daily in class, but I have to listen 3-4 times to most things to pick up everything, and when I actually do the DLPT that won't be an option. It's also quite hard to find transcripted Pashto audios so I end up struggling through 25 minute news broadcasts where I understand about 30%. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5072 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 4 of 9 05 June 2014 at 6:32pm | IP Logged |
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I wish I could help you find the perfect link, I can't. I did find a youtube channel with news audio and transcripts (read from newspaper and obviously dated) Pashto News Selection. The audio sounds slow to me.
If you can read Pashto, you can follow along. The cursor moves to each word as spoken. Also, have a look at VOA Pashto and the BBC or Deutsche Welle's Pashto service. I can't read the language, but many articles may have audio along with them. Sorry I can't be of more help. Edited by iguanamon on 05 June 2014 at 6:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6407 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 9 05 June 2014 at 9:51pm | IP Logged |
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Try GLOSS. Note that the reading lessons also come with recordings - click Source at the top and you'll see the full text, recording and translation.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| luhmann Senior Member Brazil Joined 5143 days ago 156 posts - 271 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: Mandarin, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Persian, Arabic (classical) | Message 6 of 9 11 June 2014 at 2:14am | IP Logged |
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Seems you are too green for news, stay away from that. Try drama instead, such as.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pashto+drama After watching a few hundred episodes the language will feel very natural. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5342 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 9 11 June 2014 at 3:06am | IP Logged |
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Yeah, this is usually a volume problem, I suspect. For French, I tackled it by doing two things:
1. Reading thousands of pages of books, comics, newspapers, etc., so I had a pretty good idea about what French speakers might say. 2. Buying DVD box sets with multiple seasons of interesting television series. I started out understanding about 40% of Buffy, and gradually worked my way up to 90+% comprehension of quite a few series, and near-complete comprehension of some of my favorites. Television is a great way to tackle listening (for those languages with either produce it natively or dub it), because it's interesting, it has repetitive story lines, and the pictures provide context. Of course, Pashto won't have the same kinds of listening resources as a larger language. But the basic principles will probably still work: One way to get much better at listening is to get massive, more-or-less comprehensible exposure to the language in an agreeable form, cheating as much as necessary. I suspect this works because (1) if you set things up cleverly and you pay close attention, you can usually puzzle out quite a bit, and (2) if you exposure yourself to enough volume, anything which you can "puzzle out" will eventually become second nature. Of course, there might be more efficient methods. But this one works for me, at least. :-) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Sterogyl Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4177 days ago 152 posts - 263 votes Studies: German*, French, EnglishC2 Studies: Japanese, Norwegian | Message 8 of 9 12 June 2014 at 8:30am | IP Logged |
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I did it almost exactly like emk and I succeeded, too. First reading a lot and listening to CDs from language text books, then listening to my favorite films dubbed in French (I extracted the sound and listened to the films again and again on my mp3 player - best idea I've ever had), then listening to other things like news or documentaries or audio books (hardest). Don't make yourself crazy if you don't understand, that's normal and it will take some time. You can't force it. Everything will fall into place eventually.
But: The harder the language, the longer it takes. I did the same with Japanese and still don't understand more than 40 % of what I hear (I started Japanese a long, long time ago). I usually don't even get the gist. It really depends on the language. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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