Listening vs Comprehension (and the case against TV) [interesting article]

General discussion about learning languages
User avatar
rdearman
Site Admin
Posts: 7231
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 4:18 pm
Location: United Kingdom
Languages: English (N)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1836
x 23123
Contact:

Re: Listening vs Comprehension (and the case against TV) [interesting article]

Postby rdearman » Sat Apr 22, 2017 10:07 am

smallwhite wrote:But intensive listening in my case is not 50h but just 10-20h so I choose intensive, and then spend the difference (300-10) doing anything I want to - watching the same series, or another one in another language, or just anything. Understanding something 290 hours later than I could have is torture in itself!

Could you elaborate on your technique for intensive listening. A "For Dummies" guide would be greatly appreciated. :D
2 x
: 0 / 150 Read 150 books in 2024

My YouTube Channel
The Autodidactic Podcast
My Author's Newsletter

I post on this forum with mobile devices, so excuse short msgs and typos.

User avatar
smallwhite
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2386
Joined: Mon Jul 06, 2015 6:55 am
Location: Hong Kong
Languages: Native: Cantonese;
Good: English, French, Spanish, Italian;
Mediocre: Mandarin, German, Swedish, Dutch.
.
x 4876

Re: Listening vs Comprehension (and the case against TV) [interesting article]

Postby smallwhite » Sat Apr 22, 2017 10:11 am

rdearman wrote:
smallwhite wrote:But intensive listening in my case is not 50h but just 10-20h so I choose intensive, and then spend the difference (300-10) doing anything I want to - watching the same series, or another one in another language, or just anything. Understanding something 290 hours later than I could have is torture in itself!

Could you elaborate on your technique for intensive listening. A "For Dummies" guide would be greatly appreciated. :D

Just listening with transcript. Not too different from Ari's Chinesepod Method. And not "hard work" at all to me. I do 5- to 10-minute sessions. I remember blaurebell mentioning listening to a podcast about Bauhaus. So I would listen to it while reading the transcript.
1 x
Dialang or it didn't happen.

User avatar
blaurebell
Blue Belt
Posts: 840
Joined: Thu Jul 28, 2016 1:24 pm
Location: Spain
Languages: German (N), English (C2), Spanish (B2-C1), French (B2+ passive), Italian (A2), Russian (Beginner)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3235
x 2240

Re: Listening vs Comprehension (and the case against TV) [interesting article]

Postby blaurebell » Sat Apr 22, 2017 11:46 am

smallwhite wrote:Thanks, but I mean real experience rather than guesses.


Well, anyone who'd pay for an expensive B2 exam and then try to pass it on 10-20h listening no matter whether intensive or extensive is excessively optimistic in my eyes, so I can't help you with "real experiences" like that :D In fact, I doubt that anyone will be able to answer your question if you discard guesses, since most people wouldn't consider burning money on experiments like that. And mock exams tend to be different from the real ones - sometimes actually more difficult.

Yes, my guesses are just guesses, but I gave you some numbers on real world applications and those say a lot more about listening comprehension than what's required in exams, at least in my opinion. What does it really say to be able to dissect some 5min "radio interview" about some high brow topic, which is obviously just some text read by voice actors who make an effort to enunciate reasonably well? Real people don't enunciate well and rarely speak in full sentences. They also leave out essential information or there is a car passing in just the wrong moment. Maybe 10-20h of intensive listening can prepare you for a B2 exam where intensive listening to pristine recordings is all that's required. It's hardly enough for the real world though where things are much more messy and complicated. I think taking some complicated movie as a measure says probably more about listening comprehension than a B2 mock exam.

So one more datapoint along those lines: I could understand the movie La Vénus à la fourrure almost completely, 97-98%, after 250h of extensive listening - mostly dubbed series and France culture - and that's a movie that changes registers every couple of minutes with high brow literary language and low brow slang and insults. One probably wouldn't run into a real world situation out on the street as difficult as this - hardly anyone switches registers from one minute to the next - and it's unlikely that something like this would come up in a B2 exam. And I would personally think that one can pass a C2 exam in Spain, watch 1000h of TV and still not understand most slang in the Argentinian movie Nueve Reinas. My husband is Argentinian and only understands half of the slang himself! We don't have to go to such extremes though - take any Ricardo Darín movie where he speaks as if he has a shoe in his mouth and you have a better measurement for your skills than a B2 mock exam. And understanding such a movie still doesn't mean that you will understand that old man on the street who randomly starts talking to you about bus time tables without mentioning that he's talking about buses at all. My husband fails at that even as a native speaker ;) And the ultimate test is of course 3 drunk friends in a pub trying to talk about 2 different topics at once!
4 x
: 20 / 100 Дэвид Эддингс - В поисках камня
: 14325 / 35000 LWT Known

: 17 / 55 FSI Spanish Basic
: 100 / 116 GdUdE B
: 8 / 72 Duolingo reverse Spanish -> German

User avatar
neofight78
Blue Belt
Posts: 539
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2015 8:02 pm
Location: Novosibirsk, Russia
Languages: English (N), Russian (B2+), Spanish (A0)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=833
x 1232

Re: Listening vs Comprehension (and the case against TV) [interesting article]

Postby neofight78 » Sat Apr 22, 2017 12:14 pm

It may be different for languages other than Russian, but from my experience what you've described there is a B1 exam and not B2. For a B2 exams you'll get real world audio clips complete with low quality recordings, background noise and scenes from films. B1 is where you'd get dialogs read by actors and crystal clear audio.
3 x

User avatar
smallwhite
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2386
Joined: Mon Jul 06, 2015 6:55 am
Location: Hong Kong
Languages: Native: Cantonese;
Good: English, French, Spanish, Italian;
Mediocre: Mandarin, German, Swedish, Dutch.
.
x 4876

Re: Listening vs Comprehension (and the case against TV) [interesting article]

Postby smallwhite » Sat Apr 22, 2017 12:15 pm

blaurebell wrote:Maybe 10-20h of intensive listening can prepare you for a B2 exam where intensive listening to pristine recordings is all that's required. It's hardly enough for the real world though where... Real people don't enunciate well...

Indeed different skills need different drills. My goal is B2 and maybe to get good grades in a B2 exam so that's what I study for, what I drill in, and what I have data for. If my goal was to watch TV or to understand obscure slang, I would have studied differently and used different material. I did not mean that a B2 mock exam is the ultimate listening test. It's just what I happen to have data for and wondered if anyone else had comparable data. OK, so you don't. But you have other interesting data. In fact, Cavesa told me about her data (hours) before, and that was what tempted me to watch the 8 hours of TV in Swedish, which I'm glad I did.

This is the mock test I took for German and Italian: http://eclexam.eu/sample-tests/
and this one for Swedish: https://spraktest.folkuniversitetet.se/
if anyone wants to try.
Last edited by smallwhite on Thu May 04, 2017 6:36 am, edited 2 times in total.
4 x
Dialang or it didn't happen.

User avatar
blaurebell
Blue Belt
Posts: 840
Joined: Thu Jul 28, 2016 1:24 pm
Location: Spain
Languages: German (N), English (C2), Spanish (B2-C1), French (B2+ passive), Italian (A2), Russian (Beginner)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3235
x 2240

Re: Listening vs Comprehension (and the case against TV) [interesting article]

Postby blaurebell » Sat Apr 22, 2017 3:57 pm

neofight78 wrote:It may be different for languages other than Russian, but from my experience what you've described there is a B1 exam and not B2. For a B2 exams you'll get real world audio clips complete with low quality recordings, background noise and scenes from films. B1 is where you'd get dialogs read by actors and crystal clear audio.


Good to know! I've listened to audio for B2 exams for Spanish and those neither had accents nor any background noise. The stuff was supposedly taken from the radio, but the way they went from one speaker to the next was so unnatural and weird that it can only have been voice actors - and bad ones at that. I don't know, maybe someone mixed up the files and it was really the audio for the B1 exam?
0 x
: 20 / 100 Дэвид Эддингс - В поисках камня
: 14325 / 35000 LWT Known

: 17 / 55 FSI Spanish Basic
: 100 / 116 GdUdE B
: 8 / 72 Duolingo reverse Spanish -> German

Arnaud
Blue Belt
Posts: 984
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 11:57 am
Location: Paris, France
Languages: Native: French
Intermediate: English, Russian, Italian
Tourist : Breton, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish, Latin
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=1524
x 2172

Re: Listening vs Comprehension (and the case against TV) [interesting article]

Postby Arnaud » Sat Apr 22, 2017 4:11 pm

АУДИРОВАНИЕ ТРК2 1, АУДИРОВАНИЕ ТРК2 2 (TRK2=B2, afaik)
I don't know if it's the kind of stuff you have in a real exam...
1 x

User avatar
neofight78
Blue Belt
Posts: 539
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2015 8:02 pm
Location: Novosibirsk, Russia
Languages: English (N), Russian (B2+), Spanish (A0)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=833
x 1232

Re: Listening vs Comprehension (and the case against TV) [interesting article]

Postby neofight78 » Sat Apr 22, 2017 5:15 pm

It's over a year ago now, so hard to be sure. Which means that both my memory has faded and my level has moved on. But yes, I think it's around that kind of level. One other big difference is the questions. There's very little time to read the questions for B2 and your understanding has to be much more precise as well as being able to interpret situations. Understanding the gist won't cut it. At B1 you can probably get away with just listening out for keywords, plus you get to hear it twice instead of once. At B1 you also get all the time in the world to read the questions in advance which is a massive help.
3 x

YtownPolyglot
Orange Belt
Posts: 227
Joined: Thu Apr 14, 2016 9:42 pm
Location: Ohio, USA
Languages: English (N), French (C1), Spanish (B2), German (B2), Italian (B1)
On the wishlist: Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch....
x 311

Re: Listening vs Comprehension (and the case against TV) [interesting article]

Postby YtownPolyglot » Sat Apr 22, 2017 6:28 pm

rdearman wrote:
YtownPolyglot wrote:If you're a true beginner in a language, intensive TV viewing and listening does more for your prosody than anything else.

If you're at A1 or A2, you should start to recognize some common words and cognates. You may pick up a few words and phrases through context. Television may help you some with pronunciation.

If you're at B1 or B2, you should pick up a few words and phrases. This is a level where you should begin to understand more and more of what you are seeing and hearing.

If you're at C1 and C2, you are in a position to develop a more natural sounding version of the language. You'll pick up informal expressions and constructions, and your accent will sound closer to what the natives are producing.

The problem with "thousands of hours" is that there are only 168 hours in any week, and you will want to eat, sleep, etc. Even great input from television is not all you need. You should do things that are substantially more active and get feedback to really learn a language. it reminds me of the old cereal commercials, where they say that the brand advertised was "part of a balanced breakfast," and not the whole thing.


I'm not sure about this scale, and did a quick look around for an explanation of the CEFR with regards to listening only, but couldn't find anything useful.

EDIT:
Found a decent explanation for listening here: http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/sites ... efr-en.pdf


What I'm referring to here is the benefits learners can expect from television, not so much what they should be able to do.
3 x
Native language: English
Other languages: French (C1), Spanish (B3), German (B2), Italian (B1)
Wish list: Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Norwegian....

User avatar
coldrainwater
Blue Belt
Posts: 686
Joined: Sun Jan 01, 2017 4:53 am
Location: Magnolia, TX
Languages: EN(N), ES(rusty), DE(), FR(studies)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7636
x 2381

Re: Listening vs Comprehension (and the case against TV) [interesting article]

Postby coldrainwater » Wed Apr 26, 2017 1:57 am

I'll refrain from commenting on that which I know little about, but to say....when I read threads like this, I feel like I am pilfering little gold nuggets right and left. It is really is superbly valuable to be the dumbest person in the room. I'll contribute what I can when I get around to binge watching several series. As a false beginner, I am pretty sure my 20th century Spanish teachers would have had a tough time justifying and an even tougher time stomaching the notion that they would have been better off taking 3.5 years of silent drills to Fahrenheit 451 and flipping on the TV for 45 minutes each classroom day instead.

In short, thanks for all the valuable info here!
9 x


Return to “General Language Discussion”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: nathancrow77, themethod and 2 guests