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Three rules for improving listening

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Forum Name: Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies
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URL: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=35562
Printed Date: 07 May 2021 at 9:14am

Posted By: Ari
Subject: Three rules for improving listening
Date Posted: 23 March 2013 at 8:59pm

Ari's Three Simple Rules for Improving your Listening Comprehension
Having spent some time learning languages, I've picked up a few things. I'd like to share three simple principles that I've found do wonders for your listening comprehension. They're not revolutionary or very original, but I think it's good to spell these things out, so here we go.

Rule 1: Listen to Material you'd Understand in Written Form
Don't waste your time listening to stuff that contains a bunch of words you don't know. Listening is crap for expanding your vocab. That's what reading is for, where you can go through the text slowly, look things up in a dictionary and memorize them. Listening should be about matching the sounds you hear to the words and structures you already know (at breakneck speed). This is the skill you should focus on, and trying to improve your vocab at the same time will drastically reduce your efficiency. Use the right tool for the right job. This doesn't mean you need to understand every single word and expression perfectly, but if it were a text, you would be able to read it and understand what it says, even if you'd have to read slowly.

Rule 2: Push the Envelope
Don't listen to easy things. This might seem to contradict the last rule, but that rule is about vocab and this is about speed and clarity. In the beginning, a sleepy newsreader played at half speed seems really fast and that's challenging, and that's good. But as your skill improves you need to progress to more difficult material. Resist the temptation of staying in your comfort zone and congratulate yourself because you understand perfectly this one speaker reading from a script in this one podcast. If it's easy, it's not gonna teach you much. If conversation is easy, start listening to podcasts. If the podcasts are easy, try TV shows, then debates, then cop shows full of slurry speech and curses, or a medieval show with archaic grammatical constructions, or something. And then, I dunno, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C9x2uGWMBI - these guys ? Of course, don't take too long strides—listening to something you don't understand at all is as useless as listening to something you understand without effort. Keep it challenging. Dial it in so that you feel that if you just focus and really listen to every syllable, you can understand most of it, though your brain is stressed out trying to keep up with the flow. Which brings us to the third and final rule.

Rule three: Focus!
Our brains are great at distracting themselves. Meditators sometimes calls this the "monkey mind"; when you try to focus on one thing your mind will soon begin to wander and think about other things and you won't even notice it. This is why language learners can gain a lot from practicing meditation. But you don't need to meditate to work on your focus. When listening, really make an effort to listen to all that is said and take it in, and don't let your mind wander. When the brain has to listen to some semi-comprehensible syllables the temptation to wander is even greater. You're also likely to fall into the trap of getting caught on a certain word and trying to remember what it means and when you remember it, you've already missed 20 seconds of listening. Or you'll just start thinking of what to have for dinner tonight. As soon as you notice your mind wandering, gently bring it back to focus on what you're hearing again. As you keep practicing this, you'll get better and better at focusing your attention, which will help your listening immensly.

So there you go. Hope that's useful to somebody. Happy listening!

Replies:

I voted for this message and want to add that working on phonetics improve our listening
skills.
Марк on 23 March 2013

Ari wrote:

Rule 1: Listen to Material you'd Understand in Written Form
Don't waste your time listening to stuff that contains a bunch of words you don't know. Listening is crap for expanding your vocab. That's what reading is for, where you can go through the text slowly, look things up in a dictionary and memorize them. Listening should be about matching the sounds you hear to the words and structures you already know (at breakneck speed).

This implies being able to read better than you listen. There's no need for that, it's unnatural.
Extensive listening can be as good as extensive reading, especially if you're an aural learner.
I'd simply say "listen to i+1 material". many things can account for the +1, it's just important that they didn't all occur at the same time (unknown vocab, grammar, weird accent, mumbling, poor structure, fast pace).

This also depends on the language to some extent. As I've said many times, for me there are two categories of cognates - those I *could* understand and those I do understand. The first time I see or hear a cognate, I'll explicitly think of the related word/translate it in my head/even have to decipher it in some cases. Once I've come across the same cognate a few times, I understand it automatically. With related languages, there's a huge amount of words that you need to truly understand, and for that listening it's better because it doesn't let you stop.
Serpent on 23 March 2013

Serpent wrote:

This implies being able to read better than you listen. There's no need for that, it's unnatural.

You say that like it's a bad thing. Taking a plane across the Atlantic is also unnatural, but it's a heck of a lot more effective than the natural alternative (swimming). Whether or not something is "natural" is hardly relevant.

Quote:

Extensive listening can be as good as extensive reading, especially if you're an aural learner.

Cainntear once wrote on these forums that "There's about as much evidence for learning styles as there is for the crucifixion of Jesus". Studies that do find evidence for them http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/ learning-styles-debunked-there-is-no-evidence-supporting-aud itory-and-visual-learning-psychologists-say.html - suffer from bad research methodology .

Quote:

I'd simply say "listen to i+1 material". many things can account for the +1, it's just important that they didn't all occur at the same time (unknown vocab, grammar, weird accent, mumbling, poor structure, fast pace).

Well, if you prefer it that way, by all means. I'm just sharing what has worked for me. But it seems logical to me that hearing a completely new word in the middle of a sentence and then continue listening is not a very efficient way to learn that word. Encountering it in a text means you can look it up and really take notice of it, which will imprint it better on your brain.

Quote:

This also depends on the language to some extent. As I've said many times, for me there are two categories of cognates - those I *could* understand and those I do understand. The first time I see or hear a cognate, I'll explicitly think of the related word/translate it in my head/even have to decipher it in some cases. Once I've come across the same cognate a few times, I understand it automatically.

Sure, but the same goes for reading, so that means that you'd be able to understand the material if it were written down as a text. Which means my rule says it's good material for listening. We don't disagree here.
Ari on 24 March 2013

I would add a fourth rule: Listen a lot! Really a lot!

For some people, relistening several time works. I need extensive listening, just as I
read extensively. But both have one thing in common: tons of time spent listening.
---
Well, hard to say something is unnatural. It varies. Yes, everyone learns to speak and
listen before reading in their native language. But for the foreign one, it is very
often the opposite, especially when it comes to people who read a lot even in their
native language. Where I find merit in the first advice is this: Many listening
comprehension troubles are just disguised vocab troubles. I found this very true not
only for myself.

The second one, don't listen to easy things is a good one but there is an upper limit,
I'd say. Some people just jump into too hard listening stuff (classical example is the
radio) and the only result after such an honest attempt is discouregement. But you are
more than correct that many people struggle with making the leap from their comfort
zone into something more challenging. I used to be one of them.

Rule three addition: Choose things you enjoy or are interested in. It will be much
easier to keep your focus.

Cavesa on 24 March 2013

Ari wrote:

Cainntear once wrote on these forums that "There's about as much evidence for learning styles as there is for the crucifixion of Jesus".

Or for his fluency in most of the languages he's learning.

I do believe in both of these things btw, both learning styles and Jesus. (no need to assume everyone is atheist here.) I agree that learning styles can be overrated and even if you're very visual, you still need a lot of listening to be able to actually speak and listen. But it can't be denied that people differ in their sensory perception, things like memory and imagination. The most extreme example is that a blind person would probably benefit much more from listening than from reading Braille.

Anyway, do you always look everything up? I specifically mentioned extensive reading. If your recording is clear enough there's no need for this to be different from this kind of reading. Not to mention that you can pause a recording to look up a word, or at least write it down for looking up later. You'll also hear the correct pronunciation and you may be more likely to repeat the word when you are confident you're saying it correctly.

Quote:

Once I've come across the same cognate a few times, I understand it automatically.

But with reading you determine the pace. with listening, you can only choose a different recording and perhaps even edit it, but the time slot for every individual word is still small. It's possible to read a word 100 times (in context, of course) and still stop to think of it every time; it's very unlikely with listening.

@Cavesa, great post!!! and sure, for some people it's better to learn by reading. But in this thread Ari is generalizing just as much as LaughingChimp normally does. I just think that being able to read better than you listen should be considered a limit and not a goal. I'm sure most people agree that even if you love reading it's better not to neglect listening in the beginning.
Serpent on 24 March 2013

Марк wrote:

I voted for this message and want to add that working on phonetics improve our listening skills.

Hmm, I wonder if the http://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/languages/french-phonolog y.html - FSI French Phonology Course would be helpful for listening. Has anyone tried it?
luke on 24 March 2013

Serpent wrote:

Or for his fluency in most of the languages he's learning.

I do believe in both of these things btw, both learning styles and Jesus. (no need to assume everyone is atheist here.)

Didn't mean to cause offense by bringing up Cainntear or Jesus. It was just a plithy quote. Sorry. The point is things like "aural learner" are thrown around sometimes as though they were real, established concepts, but it seems to me that they have fuzzy definitions and their scientific basis is tenuous at best.

Quote:

Anyway, do you always look everything up? I specifically mentioned extensive reading.

Extensive reading (by which I assume you mean reading without looking things up) is also crap for improving your vocabulary. It's great for improving reading speed, for solidifying your grasp of vocab you already know and for learning common ways of expressing things and so on, but while it may improve your vocabulary it's not a very efficient way of doing it. Again, right tool for the right job. So yes, if I want to improve my vocabulary, I'm going to look things up.

Quote:

Not to mention that you can pause a recording to look up a word, or at least write it down for looking up later.

It's hard to look up a word if you don't know how it's spelled. It's pretty easy to get the pronunciation from a dictionary (and lots of electronic dictionaries have recordings, too), but it's hard to get the spelling from a recording. Heck, if you use a tool like Readlang, translation is just a click away. I'm not saying it's impossible to learn any other way, I'm saying this way has in my experience been more effective than other ways I've tried.

Quote:

I still don't understand how you're disagreeing with me here. I'm saying listening to material where you don't know a lot of the words but you can figure them out because they're cognates is a great idea. Isn't that what you're saying, too?
Ari on 24 March 2013

What would you recommend for the harder stuff where there may not be transcripts? For example, I'm watching sitcoms and I'm noticing that it's not necessarily the vocab itself I have problems with, but rather how a native speaker cuts the words short/rate of speech. Like how English speakers say "wanna" and "gonna". Is this something only a native speaker can understand? Do you think that by watching TV/movies one can really understand all of the intimacies of a language?

And how would I go about listening for new words if I've never seen it before? Is this something one can learn solely through context?
sillygoose1 on 24 March 2013

Ari wrote:

Extensive reading (by which I assume you mean reading without looking things up) is also crap for improving your vocabulary.
...
It's hard to look up a word if you don't know how it's spelled. It's pretty easy to get the pronunciation from a dictionary (and lots of electronic dictionaries have recordings, too), but it's hard to get the spelling from a recording.

Once again, it depends. In a related language you can probably learn more by extensive reading, and it also becomes much more useful if you read something where you know the content (HP, LOTR, The Little Prince etc)
In a language like Spanish, Finnish or German looking up a word you've heard is fairly trivial, and that's a good skill to have. (My gut feeling is that Swedish is like that too, btw, at least compared to Danish or French)

Ari wrote:

Quote:

I'm also saying that for the "unknown knowns" (as opposed to Prof Arguelles' "known unknowns" :D) listening is better than reading, and that you can learn them efficiently without looking up. Hence, neither listening nor extensive reading are necessarily crap for the vocabulary.
Serpent on 24 March 2013

sillygoose1 wrote:

First of all, get 100% comfortable with the words that are said the way you expect them to be. Your understanding of them should be fairly effortless.
I think pausing may be a good strategy in this case. The problem is not just that you didn't understand a word - the problem is that you need to concentrate on the next one and soon the next sentence. Pause and without necessarily translating or repeating try to understand what the person just said. Take a breath. Continue listening.

You may also want to experiment with http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=35025&PN=1&TPN=1 - deliberately suboptimal or http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=9553&PN=7 - accelerated audio, using slightly easier recordings and possibly even transcripts.

For your specific languages, there are also materials for learning (about) the slang/highly informal language and the dialects.
Serpent on 24 March 2013

Ari wrote:

Extensive reading (by which I assume you mean reading without looking things up) is
also crap for improving your vocabulary. It's great for improving reading speed, for
solidifying your grasp of vocab you already know and for learning common ways of
expressing things and so on, but while it may improve your vocabulary it's not a very
efficient way of doing it. Again, right tool for the right job. So yes, if I want to
improve my vocabulary, I'm going to look things up.

I agree with most of what you've written Ari, but you do tend to exaggerate for
rhetorical effect, when describing something as "crap" just because it might be
less efficient than something else. We could argue for ages which is more efficient:
taking the time to look everything up, and thus reading less but knowing the words
more, or not looking up all the words, and learning words through the context, while
reading more.

Personally, trying to understand every word used to slow me down so much that I
couldn't finish a page of anything. Recently, I've discovered the value of just
pushing through without looking up much, and I find both my comprehension and
vocabulary increasing, whereas before I used to quit in frustration. Of course, this
comes down to learning preferences... not scientifically established, just a matter of
experience.

My current pattern is to use books with CD's at a little above my comprehension level.
I listen to the CD several times first. Initially, I probably understand about 50% of
what I hear; I may know more of the words, but they get lost in the flow of speech.
But I get the gist of the story, and then with repeated listening I understand more and
more of the story. Then I take the book and begin to read. I avoid looking things up
on the first reading, but I check google translate on my phone from time to time when I
just can't make sense of a sentence. By the 2nd or 3rd reading I find I understand
most of the book (meaning there's only 1 or 2 words on a page I don't get).

I guess my point is that, "learning styles" aside, people have different ways that are
effective for their learning. As far as I am concerned, it mostly amounts to what we
are able to keep up with. Trying to look up every word only stopped me from reading,
so it was not effective for me. Accepting a level of uncertainty might stop others
from continuing, so it would be more efficient for them to look up every word. My
point is not about the science (or lack thereof) of learning styles, it is about
keeping going. Basically, if you keep up with input which interests you enough to
persevere with it, you will learn more effectively than if you follow a method which
just doesn't appeal to you.

To get back to the original post: I quite agree with Ari about listening to something
that you would understand in written form. But on my first listen, since it is going a
lot faster than I would when reading it, I still miss most of what I'm hearing. What
is important is that it is audio that I will be capable of understanding, it just takes
a couple of listens to get it all to sink in.

Finally, learning styles might be easily blown off with a pithy quote and a link to an
article. But if I enjoy learning more in a visual way, then I will persevere more in
that method. And I hope we can all agree finding a way of learning that keeps us
learning is more useful than finding a more "efficient" method which we won't keep up.
Jeffers on 25 March 2013

As for rule #3, it may just be my ADD brain but I find that finding interesting content on just the right level automatically keeps me focused. When I don't have that kind of content, walking around while listening usually does the trick, and so does doing mindless chores.
Bao on 25 March 2013

Audio books + text = ?
French_please on 25 March 2013

Sometimes great, sometimes an illusion.
Serpent on 25 March 2013

Ari wrote:

Don't waste your time listening to stuff that contains a bunch of words you don't know. Listening is crap for expanding your vocab.

I don't agree with this. I prefer to hear unknown words before I read them. If I read them first, I won't be sure how they're pronounced exactly . Also, if I listen to material I already know, this won't help me when faced with real world scenarios. Personally, I feel a lot of language learners don't spend enough time listening extensively, and especially to unknown material.

DaraghM on 25 March 2013

DaraghM wrote:

Ari wrote:

Don't waste your time listening to stuff that contains a bunch of words you don't know. Listening is crap for expanding your vocab.

I also was stunned about this statement. I've learned loads and loads of words in Thai and other languages through extensive listening, and I usually really enjoy the process.
Bakunin on 25 March 2013

DaraghM wrote:

I feel a lot of language learners don't spend enough time listening extensively, and especially to unknown material.

This.
Serpent on 25 March 2013

I understand that listening to material that is at, or somewhat above, your level is very good for language learners. I also understand that it is good to have a transcript of what you are listening to.

That said, it can be quite difficult to find materials that fit both of these criteria - especially if you, like me, are not willing to pay a buttload of money for them. Especially for beginners, the only listening material I can think of that meets a beginning/lower intermediate level student, with transcripts, are the (Language)Pod101 podcasts. Books with audio tend to be for more upper intermediate/advanced students.

So it seems that the only way beginners and lower intermediate students can benefit from listening to native audio, in my opinion, aside from the aforementioned podcasts, is to listen to material that is way above their level, but not to listen for vocab, grammar, etc. Just listen to the sounds, get to know the way the language sounds, how people add intonation to their sentences, pick out the words that you do know, use Iversen's "listen like a bloodhound" method, etc.

I've been doing this with Portuguese (in addition to the PortuguesePod101 podcasts), and while it does zilch as far as teaching me new vocabulary, grammar, etc., it does reinforce the vocabulary that I do know. Yesterday I heard "parecem" in a Portuguese news podcast, and because I had recently learned it, a light bulb popped in my head, and I could remember the meaning as well as hear the native pronunciation of the word. That strengthens "parecem" in my head.
kujichagulia on 26 March 2013

Jeffers wrote:

I agree with most of what you've written Ari, but you do tend to exaggerate for rhetorical effect, when describing something as "crap" just because it might be less efficient than something else.

You're right, I do do that and I'm sorry about it. I'll try to express myself a bit more cautiously. The truth is of course that these are things that I've found to be true in my learning, and YMMV, as always. Other learners might have methods that work better for them, for a variety of reasons. But since I know that I would have benefitted by being told this stuff earlier, I'm assuming others can, too, so I wanted to share.
Ari on 26 March 2013

Bakunin wrote:

I also was stunned about this statement. I've learned loads and loads of words in Thai and other languages through extensive listening, and I usually really enjoy the process.

I honestly don't understand how this works, and I've never found it to be true for myself. Listening will strengthen words I already know, but for teaching me new ones, it's super slow and inefficient, for me. Do you stop and think about the new word, even look it up, or do they all just ooze into your brain automatically? That sounds like I'm being sarcastic, but I'm genuinely curious. How does it work?
Ari on 26 March 2013

kujichagulia wrote:

So it seems that the only way beginners and lower intermediate students can benefit from listening to native audio, in my opinion, aside from the aforementioned podcasts, is to listen to material that is way above their level, but not to listen for vocab, grammar, etc. Just listen to the sounds, get to know the way the language sounds, how people add intonation to their sentences, pick out the words that you do know, use Iversen's "listen like a bloodhound" method, etc.

Personally, I don't think that's a very productive use of your time. Spend that time improving your vocab and grammar instead, and delay the listening practice until you have a solid base.
Ari on 26 March 2013

Ari wrote:

Personally, I don't think that's a very productive use of your time. Spend that time improving your vocab and grammar instead, and delay the listening practice until you have a solid base.

So what you are suggesting is for a beginner student to put off listening to native materials until he/she has reached, say, A2 or B1?

I'm curious because it seems that you have had tremendous success with the listening aspect of language learning, and listening is my weakest aspect for both Japanese (B1) and Portuguese (perhaps A1, but maybe not there yet). I've incorporated elements of your ChinesePod method into my everyday study routine, and it has helped my listening out a lot. But I use that method with the dialogs from JapanesePod101 (Upper Beginner and Lower Intermediate) and PortuguesePod101 (Absolute Beginner and Beginner), as well as the dialogs from my Japanese and Portuguese textbooks. That listening material is suited for my level in each of those languages, so I think that is why it works. But material for natives sounds more interesting to me.

What I would like to find out is how successful learners of languages have incorporated things like podcasts aimed at native speakers into their study regimen.
kujichagulia on 26 March 2013

kujichagulia wrote:

So what you are suggesting is for a beginner student to put off listening to native materials until he/she has reached, say, A2 or B1?

What I'm suggesting is to avoid listening to material where you don't know (or are able to guess, in the case of transparent languages) most of the vocabulary. There are a couple of things you can do to get around it at beginner levels. One if to find native audio with a transcript. There you can look at the transcript and look up words you don't understand to increase the known/unknown vocab ratio. Another is to find native material at a low level, like children's shows. But yeah, I think there's little point in listening to largely incomprehensible audio. The "getting a feel for the sounds of the language" and "spotting for words you do know" arguments are, in my opinion, weak. You might get some benefit, but you can use the time better. The truth is that spending time with the language with the intention of learning it will eventually bring results, if you put in enough hours, but there are faster and slower paths to take.
Ari on 26 March 2013

I find listening starts to help when I've had a whole truckload of vocab and grammar
practice behind my belt. I've only recently started watching documentaries, listening to
Russian series and so on because it's only NOW that I can draw enjoyment from them
without having to bother finding out every word.

At the beginning it was pointless.
tarvos on 26 March 2013

kujichagulia wrote:

kinda offtopic but have you tried GLOSS? it's mostly for intermediate learners but some of the materials are not too difficult.

also, especially if you have no immediate need to use the language, there's nothing wrong with learning some specific vocabulary to be fluent in a particular field. heck, even the EU-produced Polish and Ukrainian courses for Euro-2012 teach you A2 stuff for tourists+football vocabulary that a typical A2 learner doesn't need.

the Brazilian Portuguese GLOSS lessons about football (soccer, obv) are oriented at Americans who have no clue. if you know who Pelé is and some other easy facts, those lessons shouldn't be too hard. btw did you know that all reading lessons have audio? click Source to see the whole text and listen to it.
Serpent on 26 March 2013

Ari wrote:

Bakunin wrote:

I also was stunned about this statement. I've learned loads and loads of words in Thai and other languages through extensive listening, and I usually really enjoy the process.

I'm not sure if your question is serious, but I try to answer it nevertheless.

Extensive reading and extensive listening are basically the same, just one is based on written and the other on spoken language. If I understand most of what's written/said, then I can figure out the meaning of new words from context, without having to look anything up. When the word comes again (and again and again), it gets more and more familiar until I know it. The same is true for words I encounter in interactions with other people, of course.

When I read or listen extensively, I rarely stop and think about a new word, and I never look it up. Usually, I just make a quick guess, let it go and move on (as we practice in meditation). It will come again. It will grow at its own pace until I know it. That's the magic of extensive reading/listening.

If you tell me that you can't listen and learn new things, then I believe you and also feel a bit sorry for you. It means that you always have to sit down and see language in written form. Sounds quite limiting to me. You certainly were able to listen and learn earlier in your life - when you learned the basics of your mother tongue -, but somehow you must have lost this skill. Any ideas as to why?

As to what is more efficient, I don't now. A fair comparison would be between extensive listening and extensive reading, I'd say. I've read that reading speed often exceeds the speed of spoken language, that would give extensive reading an advantage. I don't really care, though, I enjoy both activities.
Bakunin on 26 March 2013

Serpent wrote:

kinda offtopic but have you tried GLOSS? it's mostly for intermediate learners but some of the materials are not too difficult.

I've, uh, glossed over GLOSS, but I haven't fully incorporated it into my routine yet. (I really should!)

I forgot about GLOSS; that is also a nice source of free listening material with transcripts that you can adapt to your level.

Anyway, I think I'm siding with Ari on this one (as well as Serpent and tarvos). They have a ton of languages under the "Speaks" column, and I just have my native English so far.
kujichagulia on 26 March 2013

sillygoose1 wrote:

What would you recommend for the harder stuff where there may not
be transcripts? For example, I'm watching sitcoms and I'm noticing that it's not
necessarily the vocab itself I have problems with, but rather how a native speaker cuts
the words short/rate of speech. Like how English speakers say "wanna" and "gonna". Is
this something only a native speaker can understand? Do you think that by watching
TV/movies one can really understand all of the intimacies of a language?

And how would I go about listening for new words if I've never seen it before? Is this
something one can learn solely through context?

What worked for me with Welsh was finding a number of singer-songwriters whose music I
enjoyed even when I didn't understand it. I bought the CDs rather than MP3s, in order
to get whatever lyrics inserts I could. In listening to the CDs over and over in the
car, and occasionally referring to the lyrics inserts and to the small dictionary I
keep in the car's door pocket, I got used to hearing the equivalents of 'wanna' and
'gonna' and 'no big deal' and etc. The more pieces you understand, the more the bits
that you don't understand pop into sharp focus so that you can then track down the
aberrant word or idiom. I'm still finding lyrics suddenly unscrambling themselves as
I've learned more and more over the last several years.
Tahl on 26 March 2013

I know it's anathema to the hippest language learnin theories, but I think I can truthfully say, I have not learned a single word solely from listening and guessing from context, despite the fact that listening s my main language activity. Zip. (I don't consider myself as having much natural talent for language learning, so it's nice to hear that someone like Ari has the same experience) What works for me though, is once you get to a standard where you can watch TV and understand 90%, then you can look up unknown words you hear, whilst still following what's going on with one ear/eye. It doesn't seem to be so easy with audiobooks or podcasts, where I always feel obliged to pause the audio, or not bother looking things up at all)
schoenewaelder on 26 March 2013

I think Ari's contention would probably be true, for me at least, if it was confined to
strictly audio material without transcripts and translations. But when it comes to
audio-visual material, absolutely not, especially if you're talking about shows like
soap operas or cartoons that have fairly predictable story-lines, a great deal of
repetition of themes, exaggerated body language and facial expressions, and where the
characters' words are often directly related to
their present physical activity.

I started watching telenovelas without subtitles of any kind as soon as I began
learning Spanish. I don't think it took hardly any time before I had figured out that
"¡Lárgate!" meant "Get the h*ll out of here!" even though I hadn't learnt the
imperative mood, pronominal verbs, or the verb largar. Similarly, I knew that
"¡Suéltame!" meant "Let go of me!" long before I'd learned imperatives, direct object
pronouns, the verb soltar, or the concept of stem-changing verbs. Since "lárgate" was
always accompanied by the speaker gesturing towards the door or in the process of
forcibly ejecting someone from somewhere, and "suéltame" by someone struggling to
extricate themselves from another's grasp, it wasn't a bit difficult to figure out.

Those are isolated and somewhat extreme examples, but I can attest that I quickly and
effectively learned a very substantial amount of vocabulary from telenovelas before I
had encountered it elsewhere or had learned the grammatical framework behind its usage,
and what's more, I had fun in the process. I certainly also "studied" and I was taking
formal classes, but much of what I learned by that route simply explained and
consolidated things I had already assimilated from telenovelas.

EDIT: I did NOT, however, find watching news programs or documentaries (often
recommended around here) to be helpful (or tolerable) until I was at the intermediate
level. A fair amount of their content is pretty lacking in visual cues; a talking head
with, perhaps, a picture or scene behind them in some way related to what they're
talking about is not enough.

Gala on 26 March 2013

I think that listening does allow you to acquire new vocab once you've "decoded the
language" and are able to follow sentences normally, so that one word you do not know
will not lead to a blurring of the sentence meaning and you can ask "what is that word"
without feeling that you are missing out. At this point, it becomes useful. But that
requires you to be able to follow 95% of a conversation without trouble. I learned
several words this way during French class, mostly because I understand everything the
teacher says except an odd word. In this sense, you will also have the capability to
infer spelling (if it's a language that's reasonably easy to spell from audio).

But until that point the best way is audio with transcript, visual aid (to give
context) and foreign language subtitles (or same language subtitles). I actually prefer
same language, matching subtitles so I can infer each new word exactly. And that
doesn't happen until you're a lot further along. I can only do this in languages I'd
have in my "speaks" column.

(It is imperative you listen and follow along though. Else you will not get any
practice for how to pronounce a language. Just reading for vocab is not enough.
Practice saying them out loud).
tarvos on 26 March 2013

I can confidently say that I find it easier to understand an audiobook in German than
to read the same book, assuming that I'm not looking up any words. Moreover, I can
listen to the audiobook while driving or walking, although occasionally I'll have to
skip back a minute or two if my focus shifts.

The main advantage of an audiobook over a book is that the reader is providing
emotional context through the intonation. I might mix up Verwalter and Vergewaltiger on
the page, but I doubt that would happen in an audiobook.

I don't know how to measure the impact of this study method, assuming I consider it to
be a study method. I definitely learn a few words, but I could probably learn more with
the equivalent of audio flashcards. The problem being, of course, that I would soon
fall asleep and crash into a telephone pole.

I suspect the real value of extensive reading or listening is in solidifying and
enriching understanding of vocabulary that I have learned formally, and priming the
pump for vocabulary that I have yet to learn- thus those wonderful "aha" moments when I
come across a word and I already have some weird, subconscious associations with it.

This is all specific to a language similar to my native language, that I'm reactivating
at a medium level. Changing any of those variables could completely change the outcome.
osoymar on 26 March 2013

Gala wrote:

This is a very good point. Thanks for that. As tavos says, it does require enough understanding to "decode" most of what you're hearing, though. And I want to point out that I explicitly said you don't need to know every single word, but enough to be able to understand what's going on (were it presented in written form).
Ari on 27 March 2013

osoymar wrote:

I can confidently say that I find it easier to understand an audiobook in German than to read the same book, assuming that I'm not looking up any words.

Makes sense to me, though I don't think it's very relevant to this discussion. The advantage I cited for reading as a tool for expanding your vocabulary was precisely the fact that it's a lot easier to look things up.
Ari on 27 March 2013

I may be just imagining it, but I think that if I spend a lot of time listening to stuff that is mostly comprehensible it gives a huge boost to my listening ability and a slight boost to my speaking ability, especially pronunciation. However, if I spend a lot of time listening to stuff that is mostly incomprehensible, it seems to have a negative impact on my ability overall. It's as if my brain automatically tunes out of the language altogether if I get too much information I can't make sense of.
g-bod on 27 March 2013

g-bod wrote:

g-bod, I think you summed up exactly how I feel, and that is the reason why I'm thinking of not listening to incomprehensible audio when I could be listening to comprehensive audio.

Did I mention that this thread is awesomeness on toast?
kujichagulia on 27 March 2013

Ari wrote:

osoymar wrote:

I can confidently say that I find it easier to understand an
audiobook in German than to read the same book, assuming that I'm not looking up any
words.

Makes sense to me, though I don't think it's very relevant to this discussion. The
advantage I cited for reading as a tool for expanding your vocabulary was precisely the
fact that it's a lot easier to look things up.

I'm really comparing extensive reading with extensive listening- looking words up
inherently makes it intensive reading or intensive listening. In that case I definitely
agree that intensive reading is preferable.

Anyway, apologies for the tangent.
osoymar on 27 March 2013

Ari wrote:

Gala wrote:

This is a very good point. Thanks for that. As tavos says, it does require enough
understanding to "decode" most of what you're hearing, though. And I want to point out
that I explicitly said you don't need to know every single word, but enough to be able
to understand what's going on (were it presented in written form).

I may not have explicitly stated it, but I think that it was implicit in what I wrote
that I did NOT have the knowledge of the language to have understood most of what was
going on in telenovelas when I first (and for several months, at least) began watching
them, if I had been reading the scripts. It was the visual cues that enabled me to
actually learn many words and phrases in context before I ever came across them in
written form.
Gala on 27 March 2013

What are you guys' thoughts on languages closely related also? For instance, let's say I have a C1 level in Swedish and I want to learn Norwegian. How much studying do you think would be needed for Norwegian before I should start watching tv and listening to the radio. Couldn't one hypothetically start a bit earlier in the "listening to the unknown" stage, to the contrary of a C1 in German and learning Mandarin, and still get good results?
sillygoose1 on 28 March 2013

You can listen from the very beginning. I've had good results with the Romance and Slavic languages and I suspect I would have had better results with Swedish or Norwegian instead of Danish.
It all depends on where you want to get and how soon. For me, speaking is a low priority until I can visit the country of the language, and I suspect the best technique would actually be to do the same thing as in listening, and the same thing that Prof Arguelles did to learn Portuguese and one of the Scandinavian languages (?). Talk a lot, even if in the beginning it will be too much of the familiar language and too little of the new one. Unfortunately I felt bad about doing this thing with Polish - had I been ready to do this, I would've had tons more practice.

Basically, while for the active skills you do need at least to read (or to do an audio-based course), for the passive ones you can just learn from exposure. Enough exposure will move the words to your active vocabulary.

My personal preference is not to learn to say anything unless I can actually understand the reply. Maybe it's just that I feel uncomfortable if I don't understand enough.
Serpent on 28 March 2013

sillygoose1 wrote:

What are you guys' thoughts on languages closely related also? For instance, let's say I have a C1 level in Swedish and I want to learn Norwegian.

I still hold to my Rule #1. If you have C1 Swedish you'd be able to read a Norwegian text without too much difficulty, so you could listen away to native stuff pretty much from day 1.
Ari on 28 March 2013

I listened to native materials from very early on, but I found it really frustrating at first because I was kind of randomly tuning into the radio; a better way would have been to focus on watching YouTube videos at the start, since they're short, self-contained, have plenty of visual cues, and can still be entertaining even if you don't get everything. I also kept (still keep, actually) a list of videos so that I can periodically go back to ones that I didn't understand so well on the first pass.

Of course, it's also easier to maintain focus on something that's really short.
tastyonions on 28 March 2013

I've been thinking about the discussion some more, in particular about the statement "I have not learned a single word solely from listening and guessing from context" by schoenewaelder as well as Ari's statement "Listening will strengthen words I already know, but for teaching me new ones, it's super slow and inefficient, for me". This may be true for those two, but I'd like to add some evidence for my conviction that it's entirely possible to learn languages through listening and interaction.

1) In many developing countries with multi-ethnic societies, multilingualism is the norm, and the vast majority of those people are not literate in those of their languages which are not promoted by central governments. As an example, I have friends in Thailand who speak Khmer at home, Lao in the market and when interacting with people from the region, and Thai in school and when interacting with people from other parts of the country. They have never seen a single word written in Lao but are nevertheless proficient in that language.

2) More generally: For the vast majority of multilingual people in human history, reading hasn't been an option at all.

3) Swiss-German is a spoken language with almost no literature or other written texts. There are some textbooks but they don't get you very far. There are many proficient speakers of Swiss-German who have immigrated to the country as adults, and they all have learned most, if not all, of the language through listening and interacting with native speakers.

4) Linguist doing field work with undocumented languages often seem to learn the languages they are researching.

I don't want to question schoenwaelder's and Ari's experience, but based on the examples given I would conclude that for the majority of people listening is as valid in the learning process as is reading. While it is possible that reading is a more efficient use of your time (evidence, anyone?), for most people it can't be true that listening is "super slow and inefficient" and should only serve to consolidate knowledge acquired through reading.

I'm not arguing against reading, not at all. By all means: read, and read a lot! But for a large part of us (if not the vast majority), extensive listening and interacting with people can be a valuable and enjoyable source of new vocabulary.
Bakunin on 29 March 2013

There's a big difference between listening to informative content, and listening to people while you're interacting with them. Or: I do not zone out when another person is going out of their way to make their language comprehensible to me.
Bao on 29 March 2013

Bao wrote:

There's a big difference between listening to informative content, and listening to people while you're
interacting with them. Or: I do not zone out when another person is going out of their way to make their language
comprehensible to me.

That, plus if you don't understand a word, you can just ask.
jhaberstro on 30 March 2013

These 3 rules sum up what in my experience has been the only way to see gains in
listening. Very cool to see explained clearly.

I've also never once learned a new word by listening, without a text, and guessing the
meaning. In Mandarin, it has taken me a long time to even learn to hear syllables, let
alone guess meanings.

Old post, but OP is great advice and I just want to give props.
BobbyE on 06 December 2013

The OP is actually controversial to some extent, but the whole thread is a great discussion.

Ari wrote:

I think there's little point in listening to largely incomprehensible audio. The "getting a feel for the sounds of the language" and "spotting for words you do know" arguments are, in my opinion, weak. You might get some benefit, but you can use the time better.

I'm more inclined to agree with http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=26634 - leosmith on this. The main reason for the disparity between one's level of reading and listening is that a good coursebook CAN teach you to understand newspapers and easy novels, but a coursebook with audio is not enough for the same level of listening.

Formal materials focus on the intensive activities too much, which can be okay with reading but are definitely not enough for listening. If you learn to read slowly, you can then learn to read faster. If you listen to short segments and with a lot of pausing, proper native materials require a much longer leap.

If you put off native audio until you can understand "enough", it will never happen. And if you don't listen to natural speech, you'll have a crappy pronunciation.
Serpent on 06 December 2013

In the beginning if you have videos where you can get subtitles / captions in the target language it would be very
helpful. If you can find videos on DVDs or online you can go over a few times the first time you can rely on
subtitles because your listening skills is not very high. You can come back the next day and go over the same
video without reading subtitles.

It takes time to get the correct sounds of words & phrases in your head instead of thinking about them in English
or in your native language. Personally I've made the decision to listen to news reports, watching TV programs in
both Chinese & English throughout the day to increase my exposure in Chinese. Going to class would only give
you about 2h a day. The past month I've watched 3 movies in Chinese but only 1 in English.

In any given day you need to increase your exposure in the language to the point it becomes natural for you to
think in that language. Watching TV shows you can absorb many words & phrases like a sponge without being
bored. I watched half-dozen episodes of 中国达人, the Chinese equivalent of "America's Got Talent" & "Britain's Got
Talent". I'd probably quite the first week attending a class and repeating words & phrases out of a book.
shk00design on 06 December 2013

Serpent wrote:

I'm more inclined to agree with http://how-to-learn-any-
language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=26634 - leosmith on this. The main reason
for the disparity between one's level of reading and listening is that a good
coursebook CAN teach you to understand newspapers and easy novels, but a coursebook
with audio is not enough for the same level of listening.

Formal materials focus on the intensive activities too much, which can be okay with
reading but are definitely not enough for listening. If you learn to read slowly, you
can then learn to read faster. If you listen to short segments and with a lot of
pausing, proper native materials require a much longer leap.

If you put off native audio until you can understand "enough", it will never happen.
And if you don't listen to natural speech, you'll have a crappy pronunciation.

I don't know much about coursework, because I only use native material nowadays. I
think it's crucial to go to native stuff asap.

Understanding speech consists of: 1) hearing the sound of the words, 2) hearing the
meaning of those words. For me, the goal of listening is to connect the two: sound and
meaning. I want to train immediate comprehension of speech.

If I listen to content and I don't have any way to know what the meaning of those
sounds are, then I am not training myself to connect sound and meaning, instead I am
only training myself to hear the sounds better (which is not a bad thing). The reason
I think listening to comprehensible material* is better for me, is because both skills
are being worked on instead of just the one.

I've tried listening to random things I haven't read beforehand, I feel like I never
got a lot out of it. I think, for me, it functions more a like a test than a learning
strategy. Movies are similar, I catch things but the amount of learning that I can get
from movies doesn't compare with what I get from reading/listening.

*When I say comprehensible material, I mean challenging native material that I couldn't
comprehend before using it, but then learned the words and can now comprehend. For
example, I will read a chapter of a novel with maybe 80 new words in it, I will learn
the new words as I read (thanks to annotation), and then for a day or two I will listen
to the audio of that chapter until my comprehension of it has gone up to the point that
I don't think I can gain anymore from it. Then I move onto to listening to something
else challenging which I've recently read. It's a reinforcing cycle of learning new
words by eye, then learning those words by ear.

BobbyE on 07 December 2013

I'm with schoenewaelder and Ari on the question of learning words from written sources rather than spoken sources. If I lived abroad in a country where I heard a foreign language all day long and never opened a book, then I might have to learn to learn words from things I heard, but as long as I study at home with access to both kinds of sources I definitely find it easier to learn the words from written sources, where I can be certain of their spelling so that I can look them up and get precise definitions and include them into my wordlists. A spoken word is away and gone before I have as much as thought about how to spell it, and then I forget it. If it returns again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again so forth then I may eventually remember it, and maybe I can even guess how it is spelled so that I can look it up, but I could have arrived at that point already at the beginning of the sequence if I had seen the same word in a text.

However I do need to know how to hear the words in my mind while reading long before I can read native speak, so listening to the sheer sound of the language is necessary from the beginning, but preferably of short passages where I also know what the speakers actually try to say - and without a teacher that is best done by having a written version (with a translation) plus some audio. You could characterize this as LR (listening-reading) at the micro level, and it would probably be beneficial to continue with longer sequences, but it's not easy to find suitable materials.

After that there is a long period where I learn to read and acquire a sizeable vocabulary from written sources plus some silent thinking and THEN I'm ready to start listen for the meaning without subtitles, not before. Everything I might understand earlier would have to be extremely simple, and extremely simple stuff tend to be boring and irrelevant.

In this moment I'm listening to a TV-program in Dutch and English about Temple http://www.uitzendinggemist.nl/afleveringen/1375897 - Grandin , who have evolved into a very eloquent woman in spite of being autistic (but as she says: "if you cured mild autism you'd get rid of all people that could fix your computer"). Dutch is not exactly my best foreign language, but I can read it fluently and have a reasonable vocabulary, and every time I listen to spoken Dutch I get better at using the things I already know from my studies of written Dutch. But after several hours of listening to Dutch today I can't point to one single word I have picked up from those hours of listening.
Iversen on 07 December 2013

I tend to think of letting your listening lag behind your reading as of a carelessness similar to the "fossilized" pronunciation errors. Sure, it's possible to catch up, just like it's possible to fix your errors (and if you don't understand a word that you know in writing, you probably pronounce it incorrectly/unnaturally in your head while reading)... but it's much easier to learn it correctly from the beginning. To pronounce things correctly and to understand orally the words you know in writing.

In my experience, if you do BOTH reading and listening, this also helps activate your passive skills. Many people recommend listening for activating, but this assumes that you've been reading a lot and your listening lags behind (which, I insist, is not an inevitable problem). But really, the synergetic effect from being able to listen as early as you start reading - the synergetic effect is incredible. Before you try, don't tell me it's impossible and that activation is a must.

Of course it depends on your priorities. But learning to speak is so much easier when you are already good at listening.
Serpent on 07 December 2013

Iversen wrote:

But after several hours of listening to Dutch today I can't point to one single word I have picked up from those hours of listening.

I've found that one of the weird things about "extensive" listening (and reading) is that I learn a large amount of vocabulary without realizing I'm learning it. When I actually learn vocabulary deliberately, I almost always use Anki, and I have something like 2,000 Anki cards in my French deck. This would be just enough to struggle along in day-to-day life. But I can often read adult books with better than 99.5% comprehension (less than 1 unrecognizable word per 200, sometimes as low as 1 per ~750), and when I looked at a sample French C1 exam, I knew every single word in the reading test. So clearly the vast majority of my vocabulary was learned incidentally along the way, and only perhaps 20% was learned deliberately.

And two years ago, back when I was around A2, I spent several years listening to my wife speak French to our children, and I somehow managed to learn almost every single word she used with the kids without every seeing any of them in written form.

But if I need to learn words by listening, my order of preference would be (1) listening to adults interact with children, (2) interacting with adults myself, (3) watching TV series, and finally (4) radio, podcasts, etc. Basically, interaction and visual feedback make spoken language far more comprehensible than some radio announcer rattling on at high speed.

So while agree that it's great to train listening comprehension by working with materials that I could read with no problem, I don't think it's essential if there's another way to infer meanings of words from context.
emk on 07 December 2013

Emk's anki cards doesn't contain all his French vocabulary, and my wordlists don't do that either. But I do most of my intensive vocabulary learning before I reach a level where I can read or listen comfortably - or in other words: before the written or the spoken language becomes comprehensible to me. And without the basis I get from my initial intensive studies they would never become comprehensible.

For me the normal order is that I learn to read long before I learn to understand new languages, but in fact I learnt to understand spoken Norwegian, Swedish and Low German by watching TV rather than reading - and yet all my comprehension skills didn't teach me to speak them. And one thing more: these were languages which were so close to Danish and German so that they almost were comprehensible from the beginning, otherwise I couldn't have learnt to understand them just from watching TV.

If I had family members who constantly said simple things to me in another language, or I lived in a country where I needed to have simple conversations on a daily basis I might learn to pick up languages from their spoken versions only. But for me sitting in my comfy chair here in Denmark there is nothing that pushes me to have dicussions in Greek or Portuguese, and my travels last days, not months on end. And I don't have TV in those languages or the majority of the other languages I try to learn.

On the other hand I have a cornucopia of written materials, and as a special bonus these sources also give me the advantage of being stable enough for intensive study (including dictionary lookups, use of wordlists and grammar books). And the succeding head start of written comprehension is exacerbated once I have learnt enough to read for pleasure without having heard nearly enough to understand the spoken language. From that point my reading skill soars, while my listening skill may be somewhat more limited.

Of course I could have searched frantically for Youtube videos or radiostations or Skype partners, but for me it has been quite natural to let the written sources drive the process ahead and let the spoken sources follow along. And this will of course also mean that I can't have simple conversations as early as those who learn from social situations, but once I do start speaking I also have the lexical apparatus to tackle topics like history and science which interest me - and not just my name and provenience. PS: I almost wrote "the weather" here, but then I remembered that the hardest part of Colloquial Dutch without doubt was the weather report on page 199.

I'm not panically scared of fossilized errors. Systematic pronunciation errors are actually easier to correct than thousands upon thousands of isolated inaccuracies, for instance in the stress of Russian or Greek words or weird pronunciations in English. Whether you actually get rid of them is in my opinion mostly a question of attitude, precise information and feedback. Alas, it is difficult to get those things without consulting a qualified teacher (unless you are a born parrot), and I don't claim to have a perfect pronunciation in any of my languages. It is however worth noticing that this also is true for those languages I originally learnt by listening to TV programs.
Iversen on 08 December 2013

I think the Original Poster (Ari) was somewhat hampered by the limitations of the forum software, namely the limit on number of characters in the subject title, by calling it "Three rules for improving listening", when, as his early paragraphs make clear, what he was originally talking about was "listening comprehension", and they weren't
"rules" as such, but "principles".

(I think I would have preferred "guidelines", since even "principles" might sound a little prescriptive).

But if we take the 2nd part of the subject title more literally, namely "improving listening", then no one much has really addressed this, although I think Iversen came
closest, here, and also elsewhere, where
he has suggested to beginners listening to native audio material to learn to listen out
for the beginnings and endings of words, and other specific listening advice.

Because there is a difference I think, between improving your listening comprehension
and learning how to listen well.

Improving your listening comprehension may indeed include things like using written material to expand your vocabulary before you start listening, but that in itself will
not necessarily make you a better listener. That takes time and practice, and I'm not
sure there are really any rules for this, but it isn't necessarily easy, or necessarily
"just happens".

There is a bit of a bias (IMHO) on HTLAL towards the written word, and perhaps that is not so surprising, but nevertheless, concentrating on the written word will not
necessarily make one a better listener.

Watching films and TV is often encouraged here, and while it may well have many
benefits, I'm not sure it's actually all
that conducive to good listening.

First of all, if there are subtitles, whether native or target language, time spent reading those means you aren't paying as much attention to the sound as you might be.
(And in the worst case, may not even be listening properly at all).

Secondly, although films and TV watching are often promoted because you are given visual clues to the meaning of the words, and if what you are watching is not dubbed,
you can also get clues as to pronunciation by lip-reading the actors, all this visual
stimulus is potentially distracting you from active listening.

I find that if I really really want to listen and hear everything (when it comes to
recorded material), the best way to do
this is to close my eyes and concentrate on the sound alone. If it's a film or TV then
I miss the visual clues, yes, but I also miss the visual distractions. If it's an
audiobook, radio broadcast, or podcast, then there is no visual information to miss. Of
course one can't always be in a position to shut one's eyes, but when one is,
then, at least for me, that's when I listen best.

Something else that hasn't been talked about in this thread as much as it might have
been is listening to other people speaking in person. One of the dangers of
conversation (Even in one's own native language) is that instead of listening to the
other person, we are mentally preparing what to say when it's our own turn to speak.
The danger of this is even more acute when we are having to worry about less familiar
structures, vocabulary and grammatical niceties like gender, number and case.

Rules? I don't know, but I think the thing to keep in mind, if you want to improve your
listening skills is a simple statement of the obvious: remember to actually
listen.
montmorency on 08 December 2013

Iversen wrote:

For me the normal order is that I learn to read long before I learn to understand new languages, but in fact I learnt to understand spoken Norwegian, Swedish and Low German by watching TV rather than reading - and yet all my comprehension skills didn't teach me to speak them.

As I said, you need both. On its own, a lot of listening is only slightly better than a lot of reading for helping one to learn to speak. But do both and you'll be surprised.

My trips also last for days, and I've seen maybe 5% of what you've seen. That's exactly why I don't want to spend a lot of time working on my "active skills". Instead I read, listen and interact with natives on twitter, writing as much or little as I can. It was very different prior to LR and football, though...

Monty, great post! I also find that http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=9553&PN=1 - accelerated audio is great for improving your listening *skills* rather than comprehension level.
Serpent on 08 December 2013

You say Iverson is careless for letting reading get a head of listening, but I think that
is totally wrong. Choosing an approach that you enjoy and that will keep you going is
not careless, I think instead it is carefree. Being carefree and enjoying the language
is actually a really good thing to have, and it is way better for learning than being
over-concerned about if your method is right.
BobbyE on 08 December 2013

As I said, it depends on your priorities, and I certainly wasn't criticizing Iversen as his approach clearly works for him. I'll just never get tired of repeating that it's not an inevitable situation (when your listening lags behind), and it's not very desirable if you can avoid it.
Serpent on 08 December 2013

Serpent wrote:

As I said, it depends on your priorities, and I certainly wasn't
criticizing Iversen as his approach clearly works for him. I'll just never get tired of
repeating that it's not an inevitable situation (when your listening lags behind), and
it's not very desirable if you can avoid it.

I don't know, it depends on your goals.

For me listening is important, but much more in 1-on-1 situations than in any other
situation, because I barely ever listen to the radio for example.
tarvos on 08 December 2013

Serpent wrote:

If you put off native audio until you can understand "enough", it will never happen.

Well said, Serpent! I think some of us as experienced language learners tend to forget what it is like for someone who hasn't learned their first second language yet. It can be very difficult to put yourself in their shoes. Also, first time learners usually don't clearly state their goals. Do they want to speak, listen or just read, or do they want to get better at all facets of the language? My assumption is usually the latter. This response is not intended for experienced learners, or people whose priority is not listening comprehension.

Typical Advice Center question on HTLAL: "I'd like to learn 'X', how do I start? (my assumption- learner wants to learn all facets of the language.)

Me: "Use a course (or two) but also start listening as soon as you can and start reading as soon as possible (obviously- comprehensible input- meaning audio with text, preferably bilingual). Make this a part of your learning from the start at the same time as you use your course. Pick an audio, with a transcript, ideally a bilingual transcript or a subject you are familiar with. Pick a text and work with it (ideally a bilingual text) and try to decipher it a sentence at a time, then a paragraph at a time. It might take weeks to get through it. At the same time, continue with your course. In other words: don't just depend on a course and anki alone, use multiple resources at the same time. Doing so, means that your course becomes a way to solve problems with what you are seeing, hearing and speaking, and eventually less about teaching you "X" from scratch.

Others, one post later: "Get Assimil". Seconded in next post.

New poster: "Also use "Teach Yourself X".

New Poster: "Anki is great for learning vocabulary!"

Learner: "OK, I'll use Assimil, TY and Anki". Implied: "I won't be going outside this box."

Problem solved- Me: eye roll.

Me: "Good, but you should also include listening to native audio, reading native text and speaking before you are 'ready'. This can be done by..." (doing this is not mutually exclusive with using a course and Anki)

Serpent: You should try Lyrics Training and Gloss as well. They're both great ways to practice and work on both listening comprehension and reading.

Learner: Nothing, now convinced that courses and anki are the solution. More than one person has recommended them (neglecting to mention the fact that they themselves actually did more than just use the course and anki- because they don't consider reading, watching TV or listening to be "study").

Result: Learner believes an hour a day with courses and Anki alone will lead them to the promised land. In a box is better than out of the box. Inside the box is easier. "The course and anki reps will teach me. Listening to native speech is hard. There's no one to hold my hand. I'll have to find audio myself. I'll have to take notes and work on the audio, maybe even have to listen to the same audio multiple times more. Worse yet, I might have to talk to people! What would I say? How would I understand what they say? I get discouraged and quit."

Learner after using mostly courses: "Why can't I understand TV, or movies, native conversation or podcasts?" -Me: eye roll, again. I give up.

If you want to get better at listening, practice listening. Give it at least the same amount of effort (if not more) that you give to your course and anki. If you fail the first time, don't give up. Keep at it until you get better. Even if that means listening over and over again to the same stretch of audio. Like all exercise, the more you practice listening, actively, the better you will be, but it takes time.

iguanamon on 08 December 2013

Haha this is so accurate! Reminds me on the dialogues of Plato ;)
Serpent on 08 December 2013

I think that's mostly wanting the silver bullet to solve everything. We don't drink
magic potions in order to speak Spanish. We just speak whatever we think is Spanish and
then what comes out is something quite like, but not entirely Spanish. The degree to
which this is true varies.

To learn a language isn't to open a book and read its grammar. Listening is a part of
language learning (and I find it the hardest and the most boring one to train). To
learn a language you need all of its facets in some distribution. In what distribution
you use them exactly depends on your goals - and for me spoken and written interaction
are a great part of the distribution. This means I need pretty good overall skills.
Listening tends to be the lagger but I a) accept it as part of my methodology and b) I
find that it is something you eventually overcome with lots of practice. I usually have
a sort of "aha" moment somewhere where languages more or less click into place after
sustained effort. It usually entrains a lot of effort, focusing, and continuous
exposure to the sounds of the language.

I also find that training your pronunciation is endlessly important in order to
understand the other person.

tarvos on 08 December 2013

As we say here, waiting and chasing are the worst things in the world. I also hated listening before I discovered there were better resources than news and textbook audio. Believe it or not, it's much more enjoyable when you're not chasing and trying to bite your own tail.

And it helps your speaking greatly. When I was learning Finnish, I learned to read/write/think first, then I listened to the Da Vinci Code audiobook on 17 CD's, always following the written text. Then I shadowed Assimil. This whole "activation"/"transferring" took about a year - okay, that was also my final year at school, but still I was much more motivated for Finnish than for anything else.

I expected to follow a similar route with other languages, but thanks to football and LR I didn't find it necessary. It was just so much better to do LR early and do it with L1 written text. Less effort, more joy.
Serpent on 08 December 2013

Serpent wrote:

It usually takes me a few months to activate. So no, I'm not that bothered, actually.
Actually, the languages where it took longest to activate were French and Russian - and
for French it became a lot better after two months of immersion (mostly because I had
the basic grammar down but needed to see it in context). A year is a pretty long time
for me to take to activate a language, and that usually only happens if I am very non-
diligent about using it or if it is the first new language of a certain new family
where I also encounter lots of unknown vocab at the same time.

I.e. Russian and Korean (and French at the time). I find that vocabulary is much more
important, as well as a sense of the flow, melody and pronunciation of that language.
It really helps when listening to understand how you have to make the language flow. I
barely ever had trouble learning to understand Swedish or German for example.
Pronunciation is a must, else you cannot guess how a certain word is pronounced.

Quote:

I expected to follow a similar route with other languages, but thanks to
football and LR I didn't find it necessary. It was just so much better to do LR early
and do it with L1 written text. Less effort, more joy.

I'm not saying don't use LR. I use LR as well. But for picking up vocab I tend to just
read, especially if the pronunciation of certain words is easy to guess from the
orthography (f. ex. I don't care if it's written in Romanian... it's easy to guess).

What you're saying is use sources that appeal to you - I do the same thing, I can't
tell you how many football interviews I've watched in Spanish lately :D But I find LR
costs too much time so I tend to just relax with a book... quicker, easier, and I still
retain shittonnes of vocabulary.

I also do way more speaking and interaction than you do, and for me that's a source of
listening as well. I find that much less stressful than a radio (and I also enjoy
talking to people more). Although I do occasionally listen to, say, the Romanian radio
and then I understand like 80%.

tarvos on 08 December 2013

tarvos wrote:

I also find that training your pronunciation is endlessly important in order to understand the other person.

It's important for being understood, but it's totally possible to understand media without ever practising speaking. And when you finally open your mouth, you won't be learning the pronunciation from scratch. And you'll be able to hear where you sound off.

(Hmm makes me wonder what it's like for Scandinavians to learn to pronounce the neighbours' languages)
Serpent on 08 December 2013

Serpent wrote:

tarvos wrote:

I also find that training your pronunciation is
endlessly important in order to understand the other person.

I never train pronunciation while simultaneously speaking to somebody else, always to
myself. Or, I might, given the chance, have it corrected by a patient native, but the
beginnings of pronunciation I always do by myself. It tends to shock my iTalki teachers
when I tell them "by the way, this is like the second time I speak Romanian, ever" and
then they give you that stare of "but you didn't just say that". It isn't necessary to
practice from day 1, but at some point, you do need to take the training wheels off. I
do this somewhat earlier than you do because of a) my goals b) my personality and c)
because of the psychological factor - many newbies put it off because they are scared
of making mistakes, but since I've already made 1 gazillion of them one more doesn't
rankle my brain that much.

That is why I tend to push people into having more contact with, more exposure to, and
more influence by the target language. Not because they should have a set goal of "you
must converse", but because this will force them to be confident in themselves and take
the training wheels off a little earlier. Besides that, context with experience in
which you would really use the language also makes it easier to understand the
language. You of all people should know this because there are I don't know how many
phenomena in football which are very specialised terminology but really easy to guess
from context when a commentator says them ("hors-jeu", "Abseits", "buitenspel").

Native audio is important and you can use one of 20000 sources for it, I tend to mix
them in another proportion because mine include more interaction because I'm
comfortable saying bullshit and making shit up on the spot while I'm speaking in order
to get my point across. Yes, I'll attract a funny look or two, but I'm an idiot
anyways.

tarvos on 08 December 2013

What exactly do you refer to as training wheels? I wouldn't say I have any in my learning, well, maybe translations.
Serpent on 08 December 2013

Serpent wrote:

What exactly do you refer to as training wheels? I wouldn't say I have
any in my learning, well, maybe translations.

Translations in the beginning are training wheels. Coursebooks with standardized
pronunciation are another (I know you don't use them as much, but I am talking about
newbies in general, not you). Romanizations or other transcriptions for languages with
foreign alphabets (my god do I HATE Revized Romanization for Korean... McCune-
Reischauer is a lot better, but hangul is best).

Basically anything which forces you to sit at home inside a box and not go outside of
it and try using it in the real world. And yes, you'll stumble a few times, but that is
something you need to learn to accept as a learner (general you).

I use native content for most languages basically daily. You'll also sound a lot more
natural that way. This includes books, shows, football matches, but also interactions
through sms and internet, talking to people, formal speeches, shops, academing writing,
etc...

Even if I speak somewhat off in most languages (most people here will judge that my
Russian is somewhat off in most respects), what makes people continue is that I sound
natural, like me, when speaking Russian. Because I sound like a human being using the
language with other human beings which is what languages are in effect. A book is just
a written vehicle, and Twitter's the internet vehicle. How much you use is dependent on
personality anyways, but that is eventually what it is for, and not for sitting at home
with the textbook. Even you use shittonnes of native content and material.

tarvos on 08 December 2013

Serpent, in my learning listening from day 1 has been important. And it definitely
supports my ability to speak. When I don't listen much, my speaking is less automatic.
When I listen a lot, my speaking feels more natural. I think listening is very good for
developing an instinct for the language. I do think it's possible to get pronunciation
to a point that you can read accurately, and then learn mostly by reading. The reason I
wouldn't do that though is because I get a lot of benefit from understanding from ear and
also the support that listening gives my speaking. On the other hand, I think reading is
a way faster method for building vocab, but is even better if you review that vocab
separately with audio. In my own study, the two are activities are inseparable.
BobbyE on 09 December 2013

I agree, reading is important too. What do you do to review the vocab with audio, btw?
Serpent on 09 December 2013

I just listen to whatever I read and go back to listen to it later. Like I'll read a
chapter of a novel at night, then again in the morning, then that whole day listen to
that chapter, maybe two days until I understand most of it and it gets boring. Then I'll
go back a week later and re-listen to it a few times, and then maybe again a week or two
later until I feel I'm really not getting anything out of it or I'm completely
uninterested. Luckily I have a pretty awesome book series I'm a fan of, the type that I
feel an emotional connection with the characters, and also a very well performed
rendition of that novel on audio where the actor plays the different voices. I still
love going back and re-listening just for the nostalgia of the story.

How do you go about it?
BobbyE on 10 December 2013

iguanamon wrote:

Serpent wrote:

If you put off native audio until you can understand "enough", it will never happen.

And then s_allard is like: you need to take classes!
:)
Serpent on 16 December 2013

Rather than let imposters and charlatans speak for me, I'll throw my own hat into the ring. Most of the advice
given so far is very good. What I would add is the importance of analytical listening. By that I mean not so much
listening to understand what is said but more how it is said.

When I'm listening seriously I like to analyze what I hear in terms of the grammatical and lexical components. For
example, in Spanish I pay particularly close attention to the verb morphology. I make sure I can identify the form
and why it is being used. I make sure I can identify fillers, crutch words and conversation markers. Idiomatic
expressions are a partiicular problem.

I look at discourse strategies, at how the speakers interact with each other, How they ask and answer questions.
How to interrupt, interject, argue, agree, etc. Basically, I listen as if I were dissecting the sounds into the
component parts.

This, I believe, is the key to being able to reproduce similar phrases, which , it seems to me, is our goal.
s_allard on 17 December 2013

Ari wrote:

[...

Rule 1: Listen to Material you'd Understand in Written Form
Don't waste your time listening to stuff that contains a bunch of words you don't know. Listening is crap for
expanding your vocab. That's what reading is for, where you can go through the text slowly, look things up in a
dictionary and memorize them. Listening should be about matching the sounds you hear to the words and
structures you already know (at breakneck speed). This is the skill you should focus on, and trying to improve
your vocab at the same time will drastically reduce your efficiency. Use the right tool for the right job. This
doesn't mean you need to understand every single word and expression perfectly, but if it were a text, you would
be able to read it and understand what it says, even if you'd have to read slowly.

[...!

I don't understand this principle or rule. I can see the idea of listening to an audiobook with the text in front of
me. But what if I'm watching a soap opera or a Youtube video without a transcript? When I run into all kinds of
new words, I pause the video and look them up in a dictionary. It seems to me that listening is great for
expanding one's vocabulary.

As for understanding the written text, there is a problem with spontaneous native speech in the media: when
written it is often incomprehensible because spoken language is very different from written language. Reading
the transcript of a natural conversation gives only an imperfect comprehension because elements like prosody
are missing and all kinds of seemingly extraneous elements are present.

For this very reason most television shows and movies are actually poor representations of real spoken speech.
Real people do not speak like actors.
s_allard on 17 December 2013

Serpent wrote:

tarvos wrote:

I also find that training your pronunciation is endlessly important in order to understand the other person.

It's important for being understood, but it's totally possible to understand media without ever practising speaking. And when you finally open your mouth, you won't be learning the pronunciation from scratch. And you'll be able to hear where you sound off.

(Hmm makes me wonder what it's like for Scandinavians to learn to pronounce the neighbours' languages)

any insight? anyone?

BobbyE wrote:

I just listen to whatever I read and go back to listen to it later. Like I'll read a chapter of a novel at night, then again in the morning, then that whole day listen to that chapter, maybe two days until I understand most of it and it gets boring. Then I'll go back a week later and re-listen to it a few times, and then maybe again a week or two later until I feel I'm really not getting anything out of it or I'm completely uninterested. Luckily I have a pretty awesome book series I'm a fan of, the type that I feel an emotional connection with the characters, and also a very well performed rendition of that novel on audio where the actor plays the different voices. I still love going back and re-listening just for the nostalgia of the story.

How do you go about it?

I see, I was picturing writing out the words you learn and listening to them at forvo etc...
TBH, in my experience it's not important to use the same text. If you do both listening and reading separately, you will improve. The main exception for me is GLOSS, where you read a text intensively (and perhaps skim extensively at first), do some fun exercises and optionally can listen to the whole text. I normally listen when I understand it in detail, much like Ari suggested in the original post. But it's not my main way of working with audio and I think that it shouldn't be.
Serpent on 17 December 2013

Serpent wrote:

(Hmm makes me wonder what it's like for Scandinavians to learn to pronounce the neighbours' languages)

any insight? anyone?

Let's see if I understand your question..

Swedish and Norwegian are pretty close phonetically. There are supradentals, pitch accents, uvular R (in some areas) etc. Moreover, Swedes generally understand Norwegian quite well to start with (and vice versa), and therefore usually don't learn how to pronounce the other language, nor do they have to. But hey, that's why we understand each other. Swedes (usually) don't understand Danish as easily, probably because they don't know how to say the words themselves.

So, in a way, this confirms what Tarvos suggests.
jeff_lindqvist on 17 December 2013

Would you say that it's enough to have a theoretical understanding of the pronunciation? Also do you agree that if you listen a lot, you'll pick up the more subtle differences, even if you weren't aware of them, and if you try to speak after a lot of listening, you'll hear where you sound off?

Now that I think of it, my Spanish listening improved from playing around with http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/ - a flash-based phonetics site.
Serpent on 17 December 2013

Serpent wrote:

Only if you actually know what to listen for, and how you make that sound. I didn't
distinguish between uvular and alveolar r until I consciously could produce an alveolar
r in speech. You need to be able to produce the different sounds in another way (it
doesn't have to be 100% accurate but "close enough"). More listening helps with
decoding, yes, but you can't escape practicing the pronunciation.

But you don't need a native speaker per se to do that, of course. I just do it in front
of a mirror or my pc or whatever, and then when I want to speak I get it corrected.
Mostly teachers correct instances of my phonemes when I don't know how to pronounce a
word. They don't say "you don't pronounce the phoneme like that." Accents usually occur
in my case but they tend to be suprasegmental, or limited to one or two phonemes which
I can distinguish and do pronounce differently (but still incorrectly - my ich-laut
isn't correct for example, it's slightly off).

tarvos on 17 December 2013

I distinguished between them long before I could actually pronounce the uvular, though :) In fact, I was never taught to pronounce it. However, once I heard it enough times in a language where I liked it (German rather than French :P) I suddenly realized how it's pronounced. And prior to the super challenge I did VERY little listening in German.

Also, some sounds (common examples: m p s o a j) are different subtly enough that an ordinary textbook will just tell you to pronounce them like in your native language. I never read about the Italian "u" being anyhow special for example.

Basically I still think you don't need to open your mouth until you actually want to speak :P look at the LR method for example. or maybe Khatzumoto, who was the one to convince me that children aren't better at this stuff than adults, they just do significantly more listening. (and yes, children often get explicit corrections, and some get speech therapy too)
Serpent on 17 December 2013

Quote:

Basically I still think you don't need to open your mouth until you actually want
to speak :P

Of course you don't. It's about speaking better ;)
tarvos on 17 December 2013

But why do you think one would speak worse after a silent period? Yes it's practice, but speaking in a class where everyone has a horrible pronunciation is also practice, yet it's not particularly beneficial and can be harmful too.
Serpent on 17 December 2013

There's no doubt that a lot of listening gives you some skills - if nothing else, it's pretty much required that you have actually heard the real language in order to be able to reproduce it. But it's nothing like having practiced saying words out loud yourself. Silly analogy, I know, but I haven't met anyone who learned to sing without opening their mouth.

While speaking in a class can be harmful/detrimental as long as you're in a class with people who don't (know how to) follow the teacher's instructions, it's still practice. And I don't believe in fossilized pronunciation.

It's not a question of listening vs. speaking. Either activity is better than none, and both are better than one.
jeff_lindqvist on 17 December 2013

The main question is "when" though. I think it's pointless to learn to speak "in advance" if you don't need and don't want yet. I basically believe that speaking can be delayed without any harm (and even with possible advantages) but listening shouldn't be.
Serpent on 18 December 2013

Serpent wrote:

But why do you think one would speak worse after a silent period? Yes
it's practice, but speaking in a class where everyone has a horrible pronunciation is
also practice, yet it's not particularly beneficial and can be harmful too.

I wouldn't use a class to speak. I don't actually speak that much either, but when I
do, it's with natives or tutors.

I don't think you would speak worse, I simply think you would sound wobbly because
you've never practiced. Speaking takes time to develop. It isn't the first skill I
develop either (these are listening and reading). You start when you start.

My point is more that you have to train PRONUNCIATION (which doesn't necessarily mean
you speak, but that you do open your mouth to get the phonemes right beforehand).

You have to do both. I advocate lots of listening too.

tarvos on 18 December 2013

iguanamon wrote:

Typical Advice Center question on HTLAL: "I'd like to learn 'X', how
do I start? (my assumption- learner wants to learn all facets of the language.)

Me: "Use a course (or two) but also start listening as soon as you can and start reading
as soon as possible (obviously- comprehensible input- meaning audio with text, preferably
bilingual). Make this a part of your learning from the start at the same time as you use
your course. Pick an audio, with a transcript, ideally a bilingual transcript or a
subject you are familiar with. Pick a text and work with it (ideally a bilingual text)
and try to decipher it a sentence at a time, then a paragraph at a time. It might take
weeks to get through it. At the same time, continue with your course. In other words:
don't just depend on a course and anki alone, use multiple resources at the same time.
Doing so, means that your course becomes a way to solve problems with what you are
seeing, hearing and speaking, and eventually less about teaching you "X" from scratch.

Others, one post later: "Get Assimil". Seconded in next post.

New poster: "Also use "Teach Yourself X".

New Poster: "Anki is great for learning vocabulary!"

Learner: "OK, I'll use Assimil, TY and Anki". Implied: "I won't be going outside this
box."

Problem solved- Me: eye roll.

Me: "Good, but you should also include listening to native audio, reading native text and
speaking before you are 'ready'. This can be done by..." (doing this is not mutually
exclusive with using a course and Anki)

Serpent: You should try Lyrics Training and Gloss as well. They're both great ways to
practice and work on both listening comprehension and reading.

Learner: Nothing, now convinced that courses and anki are the solution. More than one
person has recommended them (neglecting to mention the fact that they themselves actually
did more than just use the course and anki- because they don't consider reading,
watching TV or listening to be "study").

Result: Learner believes an hour a day with courses and Anki alone will lead them
to the promised land. In a box is better than out of the box. Inside the box is easier.
"The course and anki reps will teach me. Listening to native speech is hard. There's no
one to hold my hand. I'll have to find audio myself. I'll have to take notes and work on
the audio, maybe even have to listen to the same audio multiple times more. Worse yet, I
might have to talk to people! What would I say? How would I understand what they
say? I get discouraged and quit."

Learner after using mostly courses: "Why can't I understand TV, or movies, native
conversation or podcasts?" -Me: eye roll, again. I give up.

If you want to get better at listening, practice listening. Give it at least the same
amount of effort (if not more) that you give to your course and anki. If you fail the
first time, don't give up. Keep at it until you get better. Even if that means listening
over and over again to the same stretch of audio. Like all exercise, the more you
practice listening, actively, the better you will be, but it takes time.

I was surprised and amused by such a self-serving post by someone who's advice I quite
respect. Let me summarize the post the way I read it:
Learner asks advice.
Iguanamon give the right answer.
Everyone else muddies up the water.
Learner follows everyone else's advice.
Moral: Leave the advice to Iguanamon.

The reason the learner settles on course A + course B is that the advice as described
above is completely incomprehensible to a language newbie. They want simple advice, and
they don't expect to spend 3 hours a day for the next 3 years.The advice Iguanamon gives
in his imaginary post is great (as usual), but most people coming for advice are asking
because they need something simple. The problem isn't that the average learner stays
"inside the box", the problem is that the average learner gives up after a while for a
huge variety of reasons. There is nothing wrong with a course alone + Anki.

There are several successful learners on these message boards who have gotten their start
that way. Those on these forums who have started with Assimil properly, done the one
lesson every day until they have finished, and then turned to native material, are
probably more successful than I, who have been slowly working through Assimil (and other
courses), but mostly working with native material (listening, watching, reading). My
strategy is more long-term. I feel like by the time I actually finish Assimil (after
maybe 3 years of work) I will have a better foundation in the language because of all of
the native material I have been using. But if a beginner wants simple advice, let them
stick to a course. If they have the discipline to finish that course, then they will be
in a good position to tackle native material. If they quit, they will just be like 90%
of people who try to learn something new.

Now to wait to be drop-kicked into the "textbook only" camp....
Jeffers on 18 December 2013

I get almost all of my starts using a coursebook (not necessarily always with Anki).

But I combine it with writing and speaking.

It's and/and.
tarvos on 18 December 2013

What is the difference between the language in "a program" (like Assimil for example) and "native material"? Nothing except the program is specifically designed by experts to help the learner learn material relevant to beginners and to learn as fast and efficiently as possible. There is no magic in "native material." It is not a different language.

If someone is a beginner who wants to spend an hour a day learning a language they will be much better served spending the first year working exclusively with courses than working in a lot of native materials. Maybe they will have a false sense of ability after the year, but that is not the fault of the course. They will certainly be more advanced in the language than if they had spent most of the time using native material.

If someone is advanced or has a ton of time on their hands it would likely make sense to use more than just courses. Courses stop at roughly a B1 level and it certainly is true that if people keep using only courses at that level they will not progress.

The key is to use appropriate level material (regardless of whether or not it is a "course" or "native material") that will advance the student as efficiently as possible. With courses you get instructive material as well as a language expert doing all the work to determine what is "appropriate level material."

James29 on 18 December 2013

Jeffers wrote:

...I was surprised and amused by such a self-serving post by someone who's advice I quite respect. Let me summarize the post the way I read it:
Learner asks advice.
Iguanamon give the right answer.
Everyone else muddies up the water.
Learner follows everyone else's advice.
Moral: Leave the advice to Iguanamon. ...
The reason the learner settles on course A + course B is that the advice as described
above is completely incomprehensible to a language newbie. They want simple advice, and
they don't expect to spend 3 hours a day for the next 3 years.The advice Iguanamon gives in his imaginary post is great (as usual), but most people coming for advice are asking because they need something simple.

I guess I get frustrated by seeing the type of post where I expect that a prospective learner actually wants to learn (by "learn" I mean all aspects) the language and not just play around with it. I do not have THE answer. I have an alternative that I'd like people to consider. Most people asking for advice never state what they hope to accomplish with their language, what they want to do with it or how much time they have to devote to learning it.

You're right, Jeffers, my post does come off as arrogant, but I wrote it in the context of a hypothetical learner who finds listening difficult after using "something simple" and complains about having trouble with listening. If listening is integrated as soon as possible into a routine, it will help the learner become better at listening. Obviously, that doesn't help the hypothetical poster who hasn't incorporated it from the beginning stages, but it may help someone who is at the early stage to question their reliance on being inside the box. Adding listening doesn't have to be that much more added on to the course/anki routine. An extra ten or fifteen minutes spent outside the course with a song at lyrics training or with an audio with a transcript, for example, can do wonders for training listening and help with making connections on one's own.

Soon, we will be in a New Year and there will be a bunch of new people coming to HTLAL for advice who have made a New Year's resolution to "learn" (however "learn" is defined) a language. I generally try to write a personalized response in order to try to help people. Assimil & Anki (or other course), you'll have to admit, are the default recommendations on the forum. There are plenty of folks who will give that advice, but few who will provide alternatives. You can almost time an advice post to how long it will be before someone says- "just get Assimil".

I will be eternally grateful for what I learned from Barry Farber's book about the multi-track approach and I want to share it. It helped me to speak two languages at a high level and get pretty far in a third. I just want to help people to do what I have done and be successful learners of another language- of which I reap the benefits every day. I think we all want to help. That's why we're here. I try to provide an alternative point of view that has worked for me, but it's getting tiring tilting at windmills.

I apologize, for the "self-serving" tone of my post. I wanted to show people, especially beginners, that there are consequences to staying inside the course/anki box. I probably could have said what I wanted to say more effectively and persuasively outside of the format I used of an imaginary dialog, which does come off as arrogant and self-serving. I just get frustrated sometimes. I'll try to avoid that in future.

iguanamon on 18 December 2013

Jeffers wrote:

The reason the learner settles on course A + course B is that the advice as described
above is completely incomprehensible to a language newbie. They want simple advice, and
they don't expect to spend 3 hours a day for the next 3 years.The advice Iguanamon gives
in his imaginary post is great (as usual), but most people coming for advice are asking
because they need something simple. The problem isn't that the average learner stays
"inside the box", the problem is that the average learner gives up after a while for a
huge variety of reasons. There is nothing wrong with a course alone + Anki.

There are several successful learners on these message boards who have gotten their start
that way.

One of nice things about Assimil, as James29 points out, is that it gives you many of the pleasures you'd get from fooling around with native text, without the potentially brutal difficulty. If you read three pages of my log http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=31338&PN=0&TPN=102#473628 - starting here , you can watch me pound my head against a hieroglyphic translation of Peter Rabbit. My conclusion: Even with a couple of hours of dictionary work, I'm lucky to be able to decipher 60% of a page, despite already being at Assimil lesson 30. Without those 30 Assimil lessons and my Anki deck of the 200 most common hieroglyphs, I'd be totally lost.

There are ways to work around around this. If you know the writing system, and if you have parallel texts (but not word-for-word translations), then you can make mostly opaque MCD cards and use volume to puzzle out patterns slowly. But even then, working from Assimil's graded, word-for-word translations still gives me a significant boost, http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=31338&PN=0&TPN=104#474776 - as you can see here .

But if you read those three pages of my log, you'll also see that I start down two or three false trails that would probably be fatal to a novice learner. But thanks to my prior experience with French and with my 3,000+ card Anki deck, I can notice when I'm wasting time, when I'm getting lost in the weeds, and when I'm trying to cope with text that's way above my level.

The problem is that first-time language learners don't necessarily have the toolbox to pick up a Spanish children's book and use it effectively. And if you give those same learners a copy of The Book of the Dead and a typical graduate-level, grammar-heavy Egyptian course, then they're going to be so totally screwed that it's not even funny.

So that's why I recommend Assimil fairly often. If you do one lesson a day until you finish the course, it's pretty hard not to acquire the basics of a language. I'm a little bit more careful about pushing Anki, because even though I consider it an invaluable tool, there are several easy ways to ruin your life using Anki. (Such as learning more than 20 cards a day, endlessly recirculating your leech cards, or not deleting cards that cause that sinking feeling every time they pop up.) And of course, native materials are wonderful, amazing and essential. But I don't see any harm in putting them off until Assimil lesson 50 in a European language if you want, and even then only dabbling with them in a casual, low-stress fashion. (Of course, it's never to soon to turn on an L2 TV channel and get some new songs on your MP3 player: Lots of listening hours helps. But unless you really like the movies Stargate, The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, good luck working on your Middle Egyptian listening comprehension!)

The problem with giving advice is that novices can't always troubleshoot and they may not notice when they're going horribly astray. So any advice needs work reasonably reliably for most people. And ideally, it should also take into account that only a handful of novices will stick with the kind of brutal techniques that an experienced learner would use to short-circuit the learning process.
emk on 18 December 2013

iguanamon wrote:

I apologize, for the "self-serving" tone of my post. I wanted to show people, especially beginners, that there are consequences to staying inside the course/anki box. I probably could have said what I wanted to say more effectively and persuasively outside of the format I used of an imaginary dialog, which does come off as arrogant and self-serving. I just get frustrated sometimes. I'll try to avoid that in future.

Thank you for your very mature response. I found your post more amusing than offensive, but that's because I know you to be a poster with a lot of good advice and experience to share. I imagine that the frustration you are experiencing is akin to the reasons a lot of the heavy posters of a few years ago are becoming strangers around here.
Jeffers on 18 December 2013

James29 wrote:

The main difference is the content.

In textbooks there may be some relevant and interesting texts at the end, but the dreary stuff keeps on for too long. For instance my antique Latin textbook by Mikkelsen started out with "Sicilia insula" est, and then it kept going on with unconnected sentences until the far end of the book where the readers were treated to a feast of Punic wars and and other genuine, but comprehensible texts. However on the way we weren't subjected to silly games and multiple choice inanities, and all the unconnected sentences were clearly illustrating something in the grammar, so I am still rather fond of this book.

Most other text books try to make the initial part more interesting by introducing fictional characers who interact while saying the kind of sentences you would say during role play in a class room setting. Maybe this is seen as more pedagogical, but on me it tends to cause nausea because I hate roleplay - especially if I find that the characters are stupid and irritating and awkward. I may have to use such books in the beginning of my learning process, but I'll try to get through that phase as fast as possible so that I can start reading about real things like dinosaurs and baroque music and the geography of Southern Africa and .. oh yes, also grammar (because grammar actually is an interesting subject). And luckily I can produce bilingual study materials on the fly using Google translate.

The progression which is built into the textbooks isn't as relevant as it might seem at a first glance. I don't remember everything I have read once, so if a textbook assumes that I remember a word from lesson one when we have reached lesson twenty then I have to look it up - and then we are in the same situation as with native materials. The grammatical progression is also of limited value because I normally try to get an overview over the grammar from the beginning by reading a true grammar book - I don't try to piece the elements together from the fragments I'm feed in some preset order. This doesn't mean that the progression principle as such is wrong, but I just feel more at home with a progression through the grammar of a language when I already have got that bird's eye view over the whole field from a book dedicated to the purpose.

Sorry about the digression, but it can partly be justified insofar there also are audio elements in most courseware nowadays.
Iversen on 19 December 2013

Iversen wrote:

The progression which is built into the textbooks isn't as relevant as it might seem at a first glance. I don't remember everything I have read once, so if a textbook assumes that I remember a word from lesson one when we have reached lesson twenty then I have to look it up - and then we are in the same situation as with native materials. The grammatical progression is also of limited value because I normally try to get an overview over the grammar from the beginning by reading a true grammar book - I don't try to piece the elements together from the fragments I'm feed in some preset order. This doesn't mean that the progression principle as such is wrong, but I just feel more at home with a progression through the grammar of a language when I already have got that bird's eye view over the whole field from a book dedicated to the purpose.

Sorry about the digression, but it can partly be justified insofar there also are audio elements in most courseware nowadays.

And it totally applies to Assimil because tons of words from translation exercises only appear once prior to that.

And yeah the progression is another reason why I don't use courses anymore, especially the English-based ones.
Serpent on 19 December 2013

Serpent wrote:

And it totally applies to Assimil because tons of words from translation exercises only appear once prior to that.

I've only consistently used the one Assimil course (the newest ‘Le Breton’), but one thing I've remarked on many times throughout the course is how it seems almost like they have a spaced repetition thing going on. Of course, many words from the translation and fill-in-the-blank exercises have only appeared once before, but that's because their purpose is to get you practising the new words you are currently learning in that very day's lesson.

Maybe ‘Le Breton’ is unconventionally good for Assimil in this respect. As I said, I haven't followed any other Assimil course.
eyðimörk on 19 December 2013

Assimil has a strategy for progression. Maybe it is not perfect, but other experts may have developed other strategies that could be more suitable to different people. Certainly the folks as FSI put a ton of time, effort and money into developing their courses.

The point is that in courses these things have been analyzed and studied by experts and they are doing all the work for the new learner. With a course the new learner does not need to waste countless hours figuring out how to learn (progression, appropriate level, finding translations/audio, etc). How does the progression in "native materials" work for the beginner?

Certainly for people who know or study 22 and 18 languages jumping right into native materials may be easier, but new learners are going to be much better off if they spend their time learning the language with appropriate programs... rather than trying to become an expert on language learning so they can then learn their first language.

James29 on 19 December 2013

eyðimörk wrote:

Serpent wrote:

And it totally applies to Assimil because tons of words from translation exercises only appear once prior to that.

I made the dubious decision to retype all the hieroglyphs, transliterations and literal translations in the first 30 lessons of Assimil's LÉgyptien hiéroglyphique, and then I did SRS reps on it for a year. Along the way, I absolutely noticed the "spaced repetition thing" you mention—a lot of the vocabulary is just one-time filler, but there's a certain core of words that get repeated frequently at first, and then less often as the course goes on.

Another odd thing: After I had started reading French in earnest, I went back and flipped through New French with Ease. Towards the end of the course, the density of useful idioms is remarkable—quite a bit higher than I'd expect in normal French text.

The one glaring weakness is listening. Assimil's audio is slow and clear and well-articulated all the way up until you reach Business French, at which point it finally reaches full speed. I think well-articulated audio plays a role (watch how parents of toddlers speak when they want to make something clear), but Assimil doesn't provide any exposure to high-speed audio. And so I completely agree with everybody who has suggested native audio, transcripts, the radio, and so on.
emk on 19 December 2013

emk wrote:

eyðimörk wrote:

Serpent wrote:

And it totally applies to Assimil because tons of words from translation exercises only appear once prior to that.

One further thing I noticed about Assimil French while doing the active wave: some words which haven't appeared for a long time appear on the same day in the passive lesson first and then in the active lesson. In other words, the author made sure to reuse some words 50 lessons later.

The audio is fairly slow on Assimil French, but the difference between disc 1 and disc 4 is quite a bit. Having listened to news, watched TV and films, etc, I felt that the final 20 lessons or so are pretty near native speed (but clearly articulated, of course).
Jeffers on 19 December 2013

emk wrote:

The one glaring weakness is listening. Assimil's audio is slow and clear and well-articulated all the way up until you reach Business French, at which point it finally reaches full speed. I think well-articulated audio plays a role (watch how parents of toddlers speak when they want to make something clear), but Assimil doesn't provide any exposure to high-speed audio. And so I completely agree with everybody who has suggested native audio, transcripts, the radio, and so on.

The thing is that in reading style is something that matters later, whereas each person's speaking "style" is something you have to deal with as soon as you start listening.
Serpent on 19 December 2013

eyðimörk wrote:

Serpent wrote:

And it totally applies to Assimil because tons of
words from translation exercises only appear once prior to that.

I've only consistently used the one Assimil course (the newest ‘Le Breton’), but one
thing I've remarked on many times throughout the course is how it seems almost like
they have a spaced repetition thing going on. Of course, many words from the
translation and fill-in-the-blank exercises have only appeared once before, but that's
because their purpose is to get you practising the new words you are currently learning
in that very day's lesson.

Maybe ‘Le Breton’ is unconventionally good for Assimil in this respect. As I said, I
haven't followed any other Assimil course.

I think SSiW does something like this as well. There is a lot of repetition going on,
and there is obviously some rhyme and reason to it, because one notices certain
patterns, although it is reasonably subtly done. But if you work through a lesson
faithfully (and 30-40 minutes can feel like a long hour sometimes), the chances are you
will remember most words and structures, and a single further repetition of the lesson
will cement it in place.

Of course you have to be on the alert, and it's not all mindless repetition, because
(for example) mutations will be thrown in without undue explanation, and you are
expected to listen out for them, use them, but not to worry about them (the course
mantra - paed a phoeni - don't worry).

I have yet to do my first Assimil course, but it (Danish) is waiting for me to fit it
in sometime...er, that's sometime in 2014 now, I guess.
montmorency on 19 December 2013

Even Pimsleur uses some sort of spaced repetition.
Serpent on 19 December 2013

Serpent wrote:

Even Pimsleur uses some sort of spaced repetition.

LOL XD
Jeffers on 20 December 2013

I have worked a lot with the Total Physical Response Method and learning a language through story telling message. Both of those methods put an emphasis on listening to words that are understandable, or words that you already know. The goal is not to learn anything you don't know but to assimilate and make part of your right brain vocabulary that you know but is not assimilated. I have seen very positive results from this method. Students tend to remember very well vocabulary that they have been given the meaning to up front. So I think for those who are learning a language without the benefit of a teacher should keep this in mind when picking a program. The Pilsmeur approach does incorporate this to some degree.
gmat2010 on 22 January 2014

Ari wrote:

Ari's Three Simple Rules for Improving your Listening Comprehension
Having spent some time learning languages, I've picked up a few things. I'd like to share three simple
principles that I've found do wonders for your listening comprehension. They're not revolutionary or very
original, but I think it's good to spell these things out, so here we go.

Rule 1: Listen to Material you'd Understand in Written Form
Don't waste your time listening to stuff that contains a bunch of words you don't know. Listening is crap for
expanding your vocab. That's what reading is for, where you can go through the text slowly, look things up in
a dictionary and memorize them. Listening should be about matching the sounds you hear to the words and
structures you already know (at breakneck speed). This is the skill you should focus on, and trying to improve
your vocab at the same time will drastically reduce your efficiency. Use the right tool for the right job. This
doesn't mean you need to understand every single word and expression perfectly, but if it were a text, you
would be able to read it and understand what it says, even if you'd have to read slowly.

Rule 2: Push the Envelope
Don't listen to easy things. This might seem to contradict the last rule, but that rule is about vocab and this is
about speed and clarity. In the beginning, a sleepy newsreader played at half speed seems really fast and
that's challenging, and that's good. But as your skill improves you need to progress to more difficult material.
Resist the temptation of staying in your comfort zone and congratulate yourself because you understand
perfectly this one speaker reading from a script in this one podcast. If it's easy, it's not gonna teach you much.
If conversation is easy, start listening to podcasts. If the podcasts are easy, try TV shows, then debates, then
cop shows full of slurry speech and curses, or a medieval show with archaic grammatical constructions, or
something. And then, I dunno, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C9x2uGWMBI - these guys ? Of
course, don't take too long strides—listening to something you don't understand at all is as useless as
listening to something you understand without effort. Keep it challenging. Dial it in so that you feel that if you
just focus and really listen to every syllable, you can understand most of it, though your brain is stressed out
trying to keep up with the flow. Which brings us to the third and final rule.

Rule three: Focus!
Our brains are great at distracting themselves. Meditators sometimes calls this the "monkey mind"; when you
try to focus on one thing your mind will soon begin to wander and think about other things and you won't even
notice it. This is why language learners can gain a lot from practicing meditation. But you don't need to
meditate to work on your focus. When listening, really make an effort to listen to all that is said and take it in,
and don't let your mind wander. When the brain has to listen to some semi-comprehensible syllables the
temptation to wander is even greater. You're also likely to fall into the trap of getting caught on a certain word
and trying to remember what it means and when you remember it, you've already missed 20 seconds of
listening. Or you'll just start thinking of what to have for dinner tonight. As soon as you notice your mind
wandering, gently bring it back to focus on what you're hearing again. As you keep practicing this, you'll get
better and better at focusing your attention, which will help your listening immensly.

So there you go. Hope that's useful to somebody. Happy listening!

If my mind wanders was all the hours of "listening" a waste of time? Man listening can be so damn boring
when you don't understand the full meaning :( I listen for hours and I have to catch myself constantly to listen
am I wasting my time or it still matters regardless?
pagare on 03 March 2016

@Pagare
I suggest you try posting on www.forum.language-
learners.org as you might get a few more answers.
Of course this site is still in use but due to
various technical issues an alternative forum was
set up and is a lot more active than this one.
Rhian on 09 March 2016

Serpent wrote:

kujichagulia wrote:

kinda offtopic but have you tried GLOSS? it's mostly for intermediate
learners but some of the materials are not too difficult.

also, especially if you have no immediate need to use the language, there's nothing
wrong with learning some specific vocabulary to be fluent in a particular field. heck,
even the EU-produced Polish and Ukrainian courses for Euro-2012 teach you A2 stuff for
tourists+football vocabulary that a typical A2 learner doesn't need.

the Brazilian Portuguese GLOSS lessons about football (soccer, obv) are oriented at
Americans who have no clue. if you know who Pelé is and some other easy facts, those
lessons shouldn't be too hard. btw did you know that all reading lessons have audio?
click Source to see the whole text and listen to it.

Thanks for another learning resource I will check it out.
Rozzie on 03 April 2016

pagare wrote:

If my mind wanders was all the hours of "listening" a waste of time? Man listening can be so damn boring when you don't understand the full meaning :( I listen for hours and I have to catch myself constantly to listen am I wasting my time or it still matters regardless?

Have you made progress? That's the best way to know. But it's not necessarily binary. Don't fall into the trap of worrying about perfect conditions. It's not a choice between 100% efficiency and 0% efficiency. Inefficient listening can still help with things like intonation, pronunciation, Sprachgefühl, perhaps endings etc. Don't dwell on the past :)
Serpent on 06 April 2016