Anecdotal evidence for extensive TV series

[rdearman]

I'm doing a talk in Bratislava about using native materials such as TV, with Anki, and I'd like to pick up some anecdotal evidence regarding TV series watching. I have been following closely a thread about TV comprehension, and I have been doing a lot of binge watching myself. If you do watch TV extensively for language learning, can you please complete the following questionaire? Feel free to comment also, I'm really interested in your experiences.

1. The number of hours watching TV in your TL required to pass an A2 listening test is:
2. The number of hours watching TV in your TL required to pass an B1 listening test is:
3. The number of hours watching TV in your TL required to pass an B2 listening test is:
4. The number of hours watching TV in your TL required to pass an C1 listening test is:

Love to know as well if you used NL sub-titles, TL sub-titles, no sub-titles, or a mixture (if so what mixture). I would also be interested in knowing what additional activities you did which you feel reinforced the benefit you were getting from watching TV.

Also if anyone knows any actual studies done with papers published?

[sillygoose1]

No idea about the hours, but it's how I progress in all of my languages. I've mentioned it on the forum quite a few times, but my summer French TV binge boosted my comprehension a few years ago quite drastically. I watched like 10 seasons of TV series and at least 20 movies without subtitles. Since then my French comprehension is to the point where I can now watch anything I want with ease without subs - even over loud music, static, no context, and so forth. Shows like Braquo, Engrenages, and stand up are no longer a problem for me. Of course I don't always understand every single word, but that happens in English too. I still get these occasional blocks where I can't understand a sentence/it doesn't register in my brain but that's becoming rarer and rarer every month and it's usually English words pronounced with a heavy French accent. I'd say that my French in terms of passive listening is pretty damn close to English, though.

I have to say that along with extensive listening, I did extensive reading to match. I've read more books in French than English.

[rdearman]

No idea about the hours, but it's how I progress in all of my languages. I've mentioned it on the forum quite a few times, but my summer French TV binge boosted my comprehension a few years ago quite drastically. I watched like 10 seasons of TV series and at least 20 movies without subtitles. Since then my French comprehension is to the point where I can now watch anything I want with ease without subs - even over loud music, static, no context, and so forth. Shows like Braquo, Engrenages, and stand up are no longer a problem for me. Of course I don't always understand every single word, but that happens in English too. I still get these occasional blocks where I can't understand a sentence/it doesn't register in my brain but that's becoming rarer and rarer every month and it's usually English words pronounced with a heavy French accent. I'd say that my French in terms of passive listening is pretty damn close to English, though.

I have to say that along with extensive listening, I did extensive reading to match. I've read more books in French than English.

OK, I'm going to estimate your numbers: 10 seasons, 13 episodes each, 45 minute show. = 5850 minutes or 97.5 hours. And sounds like your ability would be C1 ???

The number of hours watching TV in your TL required to pass an C1 listening test is: 130 hours?

Edit forgot 30 hours of film, so adjusted up to 130 hours.

[smallwhite]

You probably know this already, but for completeness' sake, here's a post by Cavesa about TV series, then a question by me, then another post by Cavesa.

(You may want to ask people their level before and after the TV-watching).

[DaveBee]

Also if anyone knows any actual studies done with papers published?

Reineke mentioned a chinese study on another thread.

[Xmmm]

I've done about 150 hours of TV and films in Russian. This is in addition to at least 150 hours of L/R in Russian. I'm somewhere in the A2 to B1 range. I guess to be a C1 listener I would have to put in a minimum of 500 hours of TV and 500 hours of L/R. I should have real numbers for you in 2019.

I've done about 20 hours of TV and films in Italian, with another 20 hours of L/R. I'm a solid A2 listener there already.


So "I listened to 100 hours of TV and then everything popped and became transparent to me" may be a Romance language thing ...

[Arnaud]

I can answer too, but watching extensively Tv series is not my only way of trying to progress.
So, my self-estimated passive level is a good B2 in russian (my productive level is rather B1).
I've watched extensively 38 series: humor:10, detective:9, melodrama/drama:9, teens-geared (for slang):2, aventure:1, criminal/war:1, cartoon:1, lawers:1, sci-fi:1, other:the remaining.
Total calculated, for the time being: 463 hours. (usually one episode of a humor series last 25 minutes, and the other between 40 and 50 minutes). Several series have been watched twice or thrice over the years to measure the progresses and to reactivate the known material.
On the 38 series, 9 have been watched with russian subtitles or transcripts, 2 with english subtitles (I'm french, but finding russian series subtitled in french is impossible: I know only two series partially subtitled in french but I didn't watch them because I wasn't interested by the plot). These 9 series have been or will be watched also intensively, looking for all the unknow words in the dictionary, by little chunks of 10/15 minutes (10/15 correspond to 1 hour of work: listening once, reading the text, looking for the unknown words, noting the unknown words in a notebook, listening again several time until what I hear is clear enough and that I understand everything: it's very time-consuming and I don't count that in the 463 hour I mentionned.). The remaining has been watched without subtitles.
Some have been watched with lot of attention, other in the background or during lunch-time or in the evening while doing other things (so not very seriously, just to have a russian audio background).
Now, I'm watching less series and concentrate more on radio, podcasts, reading and audiobooks. On the whole, I think I have progressed by watching Tv series, but not by "leaps and bounds" as other people often say. It's a slow and "painful" progress, in my case (perhaps not enough repetition: Perhaps I should have watch again the same series more often, perhaps I'll do that in the future...my method to learn languages is not very elaborated, it's more a constant "trial and error" process)
That's all folks, thanks for reading

[iguanamon]

My most recent experience with using TV in language-learning was with Portuguese. To be fair, I already spoke Spanish to a high level when I learned it about six years ago.

I did a multi-track approach with DLI, Pimsleur, NHK news with a transcript, chatting and a private tutor who spoke no English. After finishing DLI, my tutor suggested I watch a novela that she had recently watched and we would use that as my means of instruction. The novela had no subtitles and no transcript. It had 79 40-50 minute episodes. My first task was to watch the first episode and write down unknown words (with timestamps) and we would talk about them. It was, as emk describes "mind-melting". I remember going over the first episode without pausing or writing down anything. Then I started listening intensively and pausing frequently to write down time stamps and what I thought was the word until I had several pages of my notebook full of my almost incomprehensible personal shorthand and timestamps. We had an hour session where we covered the first 25 minutes of the first episode and a day's break til our next session. I then watched the episode again with my notes from our tutoring session. I was able to edit the second half of my notes a bit eliminating a few words. The next session we did the second half of the episode. The next week's session was me giving a review of the episode, scene by scene which took two sessions to complete it. This process went this way for the first month. It was very intense and difficult. I was thrown into the deep end and I had to learn how to swim.

Gradually over the next month, my listening became easier as I got used to the actors' voices and accents. Vocabulary would repeat. I was at a point where our first tutoring session of the week was devoted to unknown words and the next session of the week was my review which I got to where I could do in an hour and a half.

Somewhere around 25 episodes, things began to click for me and there were fewer unknown words. My review was beginning to fit in an hour. When I got to around 40 episodes my unknown words only took up about 10 minutes of time and I could review an episode in that hour and the next day another episode. By around episode 50, I could do two episodes a week. By episode60 or so, I could do three a week.

After I finished the series, my comprehension had dramatically improved. I have since continued to watch several more series, hundreds of episodes, and continued to improve. Now, I can listen to almost anything in Brazilian Portuguese as if it were English.

Had I given up when I first started doing this because it was "too hard", I don't believe I would be where I am today with the language. I don't think I can quantify my routine in terms of hours because it was so multi-faceted- conversation, reading, study, prior listening with a transcript, etc, plus I already knew Spanish.

If I were learning a next language which has TV, say German, French or Italian, I could do this on my own without a tutor. I would be using a dubbed series I know well with a subtitle transcript as a check against my comprehension. Since I don't have the computer skills to do subs2srs, I'd probably make a parallel text of the transcript and read it before hand by reading TL first, then with L1, then I'd watch and listen while taking notes. It would be the "poor man's" subs2srs without the srs.

I didn't comment on the other thread because, to be frank, the general discussion has started to become a minefield with people citing study after study and setting up either/or situations where it isn't always either/or. Sorry, rdearman, that I can't help you with hours because I don't keep track of such things, never have and probably never will. I haven't taken any tests other than online because of where I live and the expense involved in traveling far away and time away from work.

I wish that Ladino, Haitian Creole and St Lucian Creole had TV series I could have watched. It would have made things much easier.

I know that probably most people don't have the patience or tolerance to do what I did with Portuguese. I also know that few tutors would have the patience and tolerance either, but it worked well for me. The more I learn languages, the more I think that what separates learners who move into the advanced levels from those who seem to get perpetually stuck at intermediate levels is a lack of tolerance for ambiguity and/or perfectionism while learning. I could have thrown up my hands and said, "No, I don't like this. It's too hard. I don't want to deal with this." All of that was true, but I'm glad I stuck with it. It served me well training listening with Haitian Creole with audio and a transcript.

[blaurebell]

French: 270h extensive listening, of which 245h were dubbed TV series, the rest native movies and France culture. I would estimate my listening level at B2, since I still run into problems with too much slang or with certain accents - especially foreigners speaking bad French. With certain movies I also have to concentrate a lot.

Spanish: At least 680h of extensive listening, of which 420h were dubbed series - about half in neutral latino dubs, half in Iberian dubs -, the rest native Iberian Spanish and Argentinian series and movies. I would say C1 listening skills, since I can understand pretty much anything in any situation even with background noise or if half the information is missing, unless the accent is super weird. It's sometimes hard to gauge though since my main issue with Spanish is vocabulary, especially literary vocabulary and regional slang. Spanish seems to have a lot more regional vocabulary than other languages too, which makes the gap between B2 and C1 seem particularly wide. In any case, if I don't understand people it's usually because of vocabulary. I can listen to most Spanish native material also when I'm not concentrated at all.

English: Already re-watching Star Trek amounts to something north of 2000h and you can probably at least double, maybe triple that, since I've spent about 10 years watching 3-8h TV / movies a day and was enrolled on a Film Studies course at some point. Apart from really thick Scottish accents I can understand everything in any situation always, even when I'm sick or half asleep. C2.

[James29]

I don't keep track anymore. A rough calculation makes me think I've watched about 500 hours of TV in Spanish. My level is probably around C1. It is hard to say how much of my progress was TV time because I think reading so much before watching most of the TV really helped. TV seemed SO much more beneficial when I was in the B2/C1 range. When I started fiddling around with watching TV in the B1 range I don't think it helped much. My belief is that it is much more efficient to learn the vocabulary through other methods. If one has a good solid B2-ish vocabulary then watching a ton of TV is going to be extremely helpful.