Anecdotal evidence for extensive TV series

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reineke
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Re: Anecdotal evidence for extensive TV series

Postby reineke » Sat Apr 22, 2017 5:13 pm

rdearman wrote:
sillygoose1 wrote: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...

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.


Re: How efficient are TV shows for improving listening comprehension?
Mon Apr 25, 2016 4:17 pm

sillygoose1 wrote:Very efficient. However, you need to be comfortable with seeming like you're wasting time and just trucking through it. For me to get to the level I am now in French, it took me all 7 seasons of Fais pas ci fais pas ca, all 5 seasons of Engrenages, and all 3 of Braquo. That's not counting the short series that are 3-4 minutes per episode like Kaamelott and Bref as well as all of the movies. All of that, and I still miss sentences here and there. I watched about the same amount of stuff in Spanish and it's the same deal.

It's basically all about getting out of the study mold that you've set for yourself. Textbook lessons aren't how real life conversations are held and besides living in the country or speaking with others who speak your TL every day, TV shows and movies are the best you can do.


You can take a look at silly goose's logs and then ask him about it. Here are some snippets:

"I've watched many movies/shows but I didn't bother to note them. Listening comprehension still varies and it annoys me to no end."

"Rue Sesame"
"Very Bad Blagues"
L/R La Chute by Albert Camus.
L/R' HP
"L/Ring Candide by Voltaire, Discours de la Methode by Descartes, and Stupeur et tremblants by Amelie Nothomb"
"Assimil and Linguaphone are coming along great.."
"Using French... "
"I watch a bunch of movies, tv shows, and listen to the radio too just about everyday. "
" French youtubers..."
"30 Vies..."
"Kaboul Kitchen..."
"Family Guy"
"Norman fait des videos"
"Cache (Hidden), & Polytechnique"

This is from 2012 and early 2013 and my thumb is getting numb... I still didn't see Fais pas ci fais pas ça or Braquo. Apologies to silly goose for quoting him like this. I cannot remember all the stuff I watched in Spanish and I did all my watching early last year.
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Re: Anecdotal evidence for extensive TV series

Postby rdearman » Sat Apr 22, 2017 5:19 pm

@reineke : I have seen your SC stats and you watch some serious amount of stuff. How about an educated guess as to how many hours per CEFR level?
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Re: Anecdotal evidence for extensive TV series

Postby aaleks » Sat Apr 22, 2017 7:01 pm

English. C1/C2 level. More than 2000 h, I guess. And I think it took me about 1000 h to get from B2 to C1.
Unfortunately, my productive skills are not so good :(
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Re: Anecdotal evidence for extensive TV series

Postby emk » Sat Apr 22, 2017 7:09 pm

French: I started watching Buffy contre les vampires somewhere around a solid B1. When I started, I could:

  • Read a transcript of the dialog, though I had to stop and decode and occasionally look stuff up.
  • Get the rough gist of maybe 40% of the dialog in an episode. This was typical: I understood maybe 40% to 60% of RFI Français Facile, and a bit less of regular radio news. Movies were hopeless.
  • Read a real book in French, though somewhat awkwardly and slowly, missing a fair bit of detail. I'd probably read between 500 and 1000 pages of actual French at this point.
I used transcripts intensively for the first episodes, watching them a couple of time each. I also watched episodes 3 and 4 twice, I think, without subtitles. The I just started watching straight through without subtitles. By the end of season 1 (~12 episodes at ~42 minutes each), I could understand maybe 70% of the dialog. The latter seasons had about 20 episodes apiece, and by the end of season 3, I could understand comfortable over 90% of the dialog. By the end of season 5, I was in the high 90s.

Afterwards, I watched about 3 seasons of Angel, the sequel to Buffy. At first it was slightly tricky, but once again, I improved rapidly.

Then I watched several kid's series: Ulysse 31 (a couple of short seasons), and Avatar (3 seasons of 20 episodes, ~21 minutes each). With each new series, my comprehension started out weak, but after a couple of seasons, I was watching comfortably with comprehension well above 90%. By the end of Avatar, there were occasional easier episodes where I missed maybe one or two lines of dialog in the whole episode.

All the time, I was also reading intensively. I'd probably read at least 2,500 pages by the time I finished the TV series mentioned above, and could read quite comfortably. But after watching those three series, and maybe 1 or 2 others, I did about 15 hours of channel surfing of actual French TV, without following any series in particular. At the end of that period, I could channel surf French TV and easily find something to watch: Maybe 50% of the shows on French TV were pleasantly comprehensible with no "warm up." This is also about the time that I finally started to understand what people in Montreal were saying to me, despite never having done any real work on the accent. :-)

The only intensive listening or reading I did during this time was using Anki, and it was mostly sentence comprehension cards—around 1,500 sentences or short highlights taken from books I was reading.

Spanish: For Spanish, I wanted to try to recreate Judith Meyer's Subs2SRS project, where she started Japanese from zero and could understand "the majority" of a Japanese TV series which interested her after 30 hours of work.

You can see my Subs2SRS experiment in my log. I started Spanish from zero, although I had a substantial discount thanks to English and French, and did about 30 hours of Subs2SRS sound cards and related activities. I basically learned the dialog of the four early episodes of Avatar, and then I started watching the series. Here are my reactions as I went along:

emk wrote:Episode 5 (studied with subs2srs): 80+% comprehension.
Episode 6 (reviewed without subs2srs): Variable, but good overall.
Episodes 7 & 8: Less than 50% comprehension, but I could follow the plot pretty well! Definitely fun.
Episodes 9 & 10: Definitely harder than 7 and 8. Rough going overall.
Episode 11: Not as good as 7&8, but definitely better than 9 and 10.
Episode 12: Wow, this was great! I followed almost all the story, and I understood some sections solidly.

By the end of 60 episodes, I was pretty comfortable watching Avatar. I doubt that my comprehension ever went over 60%, even for the easiest episodes. And in each case, I was vaguely familiar with the plot, because I'd already watched the series in French. But I was watching it and it was fun.

So then I continued with Korra. At first, I remember it being very rough. But after 3 or 4 seasons, I could once again follow the plot and understand about half of the actual dialog. And these were new episodes I'd never seen before! All in all, I was enjoying watching TV within 100 hours of starting Spanish.

I'm pretty certain that if I wanted to make real progress, I'd need to laboriously wade through a real book or two to fill in the less common vocabulary. My ability to understand 40% of what was going on in Korra was based on familiarity with the vocabulary of the show, and the fact that—as s_allard likes to point out—the most common 300 words do a lot of work. So basically listening is my most advanced Spanish skill by far; my boss used to laugh at the fact that I had to read Spanish aloud to understand it. But to get my comprehension much higher, I'd need a lot more vocab.

So, yeah, Judith Meyer studied Japanese (with no background in any related language, though I gather she knew the kanji thanks to Chinese), and I studied Spanish (with a big French+English discount). And yet, she got roughly the same results in 30 hours that I got in 100 hours. I think we have to admit that Judith Meyer is a way better language learner than I am. On the other, I was really happy with my progress in 100 hours!

(And it seems to have stuck. I've barely touched Spanish in a year or two now, but if I start rewatching those earlier episodes I studied with Subs2SRS and Anki, the comprehension comes back really quickly.)
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Re: Anecdotal evidence for extensive TV series

Postby reineke » Sat Apr 22, 2017 7:37 pm

rdearman wrote:@reineke : I have seen your SC stats and you watch some serious amount of stuff. How about an educated guess as to how many hours per CEFR level?


My foreign language exposure is heavily skewed towards listening and I don't fit any typical language learning profile.

You need to take a look at age, learner background, general language background, learner attitude towards language learning and listening, learning strategies, aptitude and previous TL study.

You're all familiar with the FSI scale, DALF/DELF estimates etc.

Takala (2010) estimates B2 at 1000 hours and C1 at 3000 hours. See CEFR in practice, page 99. The progress up to B1 is not so problematic. One can easily triple the amount of effort since the total price will amount only to a few hundred hours. However, "not anybody can get to C2 in German in 1,000, 2000, or even 3,000 hours."

While we know a lot about the process, listening comprehension is still in many ways comparable to a black box.

In light of the above, I cannot give you an easy answer. Hopefully this will prove useful:

Eleven intervention strategies for underachieving L2-listeners

1. Caveat: No quick fix

For your students’ listening skills to improve substantially you will need three to four months of systematic work...

"Listening skills are notoriously slow to develop because they require the mastery of a vast array of challenging micro-skills that must be executed at very high speed in the brain (words lingering in working memory for only about 2 seconds). Hence, you need to be systematic, patient and resilient, mindful of the fact that the improvements your students will be making will be invisible for several weeks to come but will definitely show up in the end.

2.Daily exposure to substantive amounts of aural input
...
3.A holistic approach

In order to improve your students’ listening skills you shouldn’t see listening-skills building as separate from reading, speaking, writing and grammar instruction. By ‘holistic’ I mean two things..
...
There is no chance of getting your students to enjoy listening unless they experience some degree of success at it.... "

https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2 ... listeners/

"Of all the tasks graduates carry out at post in the foreign language ordinary conversation is the one area of language use in which they unanimously claim to experience the most difficulty, noting specifically problems in following the threads of conversations in multigroup settings... In a sense, conversation is more about listening than about speaking..."

FSI's Lessons learned...
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Re: Anecdotal evidence for extensive TV series

Postby daegga » Sat Apr 22, 2017 9:29 pm

For Swedish (my 3rd Scandinavian language):
Dec 2013: B1 listening at online placement test, previous exposure ca. 30-40h (mostly audiobooks) plus huge discount from other languages (same test in Norwegian >= C1)
May 2015: >=C1 listening in same test (highest mark possible in this test), ca. 170h listening (about 1:1 audiobooks:TV), 5500 pages read, all deltas between the two tests, total numbers would be meaningless because of the initial boost from the other languages.

Other scores in the same test were similar, low B1 in first, C1 in second test attempt.
During this period I also used Assimil and attended a university course in Swedish for 1 semester.
Occasional use of TL subtitles, but mostly watching without any.

My current total is 300h listening and 11000 pages read and I still don't feel I 'own' the language...
For English 1000+h of TV made a difference, so way to go there.
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Re: Anecdotal evidence for extensive TV series

Postby NoManches » Sat Apr 22, 2017 10:40 pm

I'm glad this thread was made because I've never bothered to calculate how many hours of television I've watched.

Based on Netflix only, I have watched a measly 188 hours or so of television :oops: :oops: It may be more than this, but with Netflix I can go back and see how many shows and movies I have watched. note: I edited this post because I completely forgot about a roughly 38 hour long series that I watched last year.

This does not count the many hours of regular Spanish television I've watched nor the many hours I've spent watching stuff on YouTube. Most of my listening has come from frequent travel to Mexico (3 separate projects for college + weekly and monthly trips all over Baja California), college classes (both Spanish language classes and classes designed for native speakers), and many, many hours of practice with two separate tutors over the course of 1.5 years. So, it's a bit difficult for me to say how much television has helped me since it only makes up a tiny portion of my listening practice.

I rate my Spanish at a B2, with my speaking skills being better than my listening skills.

Lately my language learning routine has revolved around watching as much Spanish television as I can. Although I can't say how much television has helped me up to now, I do know that in the next few months the only Spanish practice I'll have will be with television and movies. This should make it very easy to measure my progress since everything else (speaking, reading, writing) will be held to a minimum.

Finally, I think it is safe to say that one of the things I don't have in common with others who have posted in this thread who are more advanced than me, is lots of hours watching television. Maybe this lack of input is one of the reasons why my listening is weaker than my speaking skills. :roll:
Last edited by NoManches on Sun Apr 23, 2017 10:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Anecdotal evidence for extensive TV series

Postby s_allard » Sun Apr 23, 2017 4:01 pm

I regret to have to say to rdearman that I haven't the slightest idea of the number of hours that I've spent watching TV to arrive at specific levels of proficiency in my target languages. But I do want to share some thoughts on the question of the value of watching TV in the target language.

About a year ago and over a period of a month I watched all 175 episodes of the Colombian telenovela Sin senos no hay paraiso on Netflix. That's about 130 hours of television. I enjoyed the experience very much. But did it improve any aspects of the Spanish? I'll have to say that I certainly picked up some vocabulary and Colombian slang but overall I felt it was not very efficient in terms of actual progress. In fact I got so angry about spending all this time watching TV that I decided to cancel my Netflix subscription. I've been quite happy ever since.

While I have no doubt that watching a lot of television is an excellent learning activity in general, I do believe the real noticeable progress was/is made after periods of focused structured study - often with a tutor or native speaker - of samples of spoken language. This similar to what iguanamon has discussed earlier.

The fundamental idea of this strategy - and old hands will see me coming - is that relatively small samples of spoken language will contain nearly all the grammar and some vocabulary of the larger ensemble To use my Colombian example, I think that one episode probably contains nearly all the grammar I would hear in all 175 episodes. It's not exactly the same for vocabulary because this depends a lot of the topics in the various episodes.

So the idea is to work in depth on relatively small samples. What does this mean? Basically it means getting an in-depth understanding of all the grammar, vocabulary and meaning: how and why things are said. This takes time and effort, but the rewards are great. When this is done diligently, and preferably with outside help, the learner will establish a solid foundation that will make everything else so much easier.

Many people have heard this from me before but this time I want to give a concrete example. Here is the transcript of two minutes of a Quebecois speaker on youtube talking about the difficulty of speaking in public.

- Bonjour, je suis Annie Bienvenue des Communications Portevoix et je vous souhaite la bienvenue à ma capsule de vidéo de coaching. Alors aujourd’hui, j’ai décidé de répondre à une question qui m’est très souvent posée. Lorsque je parle de...de l’importance de la préparation lorsqu’on a à faire une présentation en public, je parle souvent, comme pour les athlètes professionnels, de visualisation. Et c’est là qu’on me dit très souvent:”Mais comment se fait-il que oui je fais ça, je le visualise, je la vois ma présentation, je l’entends dans ma tête, tout est clair, les mots sont fluides, les idées sortent. Je suis bien, je suis à l’aise. Mais quand j’arrive en public, il y a plus rien de tout ça qui est valide. Qu’est-ce qui se passe?“
-Je vais vous expliquer. Faut continuer à faire la visualisation, c’est excellent. Sauf que tout seul ça peut pas fonctionner. La différence entre ce qui se passe dans votre cerveau, dans votre imaginaire et ce qui arrive quand vous êtes dans la réalité, c’est justement ça, c’est la réalité qui vous ...rattrape. Le stress, le trac et ça demeure dans votre esprit. Et il faut le concrétiser, il faut l’amener dans la réalité. Et c’est ce transfert-là qui parfois est très difficile. Je vous explique pourquoi. En fait, ce que vous oubliez de préparer c’est votre corps. Parce que dans l’imaginaire l’émotion on la gère très bien. Dans la réalité le corps doit absorber une dose d’énergie, une émotion et c’est celle-là qui vient bloquer, les muscles se contractent, les mus(tes)...les muscles ne sont pas prêts à laisser aller ce qui est dans la tête parce qu’ils sont sujets à ce stress, à ce trac, à cette émotion intense. Donc, comme un athlète, faut aussi préparer son corps, faut le réchauffer. Un orateur, son outil c’est son corps.


This is a tiny sample of course. But if you were to master all the contents of this sample, you would not have a problem understanding any video or speech on the same subject by this speaker and probably by any other speaker. How is this possible? It's pretty simple. This kind of speaking is highly redundant. The vocabulary and the grammatical structures are very common.

For example, there are 35 verbs in this sample. Here are the most common verbs and their occurrences:
être - 22
falloir - 5
faire - 4
avoir - 2
aller - 2
se passer - 2
préparer - 2

All the other verbs are used exactly once. Despite the tiny sample size, the above results are exactly in line with what we know about French verb frequencies. So, these are the verbs to study.

The same could be said for every item of grammar here. When the person says: "J'ai décidé de répondre à une question qui m'est très souvent posée." this is very rich syntactically. Understand how this works and you have a pretty advanced understanding of French.

You could read that text in a minute and say "No problem, I understand 90%. Let's move on". Or you could spend hours analyzing how it is put together. The difference is in the latter case you have true comprehension that will take you very far. All with only 2 minutes of speech.

Obviously I am not saying that all speech can be reduced to 2-minute samples. What I'm saying is that intensive focused study on relatively small samples can lead to more enjoyable extensive listening or watching.
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Re: Anecdotal evidence for extensive TV series

Postby gsbod » Sun Apr 23, 2017 5:45 pm

I watched a lot of TV when studying Japanese. But it was a few years ago now and I didn't keep records, so it is impossible to say how many hours were involved. I started watching lots of shows with English subtitles and I now believe that this was a waste of time in terms of language learning, although I suppose it satisfied a need for entertainment. I turned off the subtitles once I was able to understand just enough to follow along (which often meant careful choice of what show to watch) and over the course of a few months my listening ability skyrocketed. When I came to sit the N2 exam after around 4.5 years of studying the language overall - which I think is broadly comparable to B2 although only when it comes to comprehension - the listening paper was the one bit where I felt I could relax and almost enjoy myself and this was reflected in the scores I achieved, with a significantly higher score for listening. Throughout the time I spent on Japanese my rather patient husband also sat and watched a lot of Japanese TV with me, including after the subtitles were switched off. As my listening skyrocketed, his did not - meaning that as time went on we developed hugely different opinions of the shows we were watching, since he was relying mostly on body language and didn't pick up any of the important details from the dialogue! My TV watching was backed up by lots of other activities, including book work, classes (online and offline) and language exchanges. I believe that the impact of TV on my listening ability was only possible because of the other stuff I did, but at the same time my listening would not have improved so comfortably without the TV.

For German I can maybe provide some more concrete numbers. I am trying to figure out when I took that Goethe practice listening paper and got a score of 86% as I don't appear to have noted it in my log and didn't note the date on the paper, but I'm sure it was some time in mid to late 2015 so anything up to 87 hours but could be as low as 60. I did log that I scored a C1 on the Dialang listening test on 21st June 2016, at which time I'd watched 128 hours of TV. Again supported by book work, classes and a few tutorials on iTalki, but my listening is still far stronger than all other skills, including reading.
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Re: Anecdotal evidence for extensive TV series

Postby rdearman » Sun Apr 23, 2017 6:06 pm

s_allard wrote:To use my Colombian example, I think that one episode probably contains nearly all the grammar I would hear in all 175 episodes. It's not exactly the same for vocabulary because this depends a lot of the topics in the various episodes.

Oh I'm not arguing the small sample size of the vocabulary in a TV series, personally I believe the benefit is probably in the repetition of those 300-500 common words.
gsbod wrote: I believe that the impact of TV on my listening ability was only possible because of the other stuff I did, but at the same time my listening would not have improved so comfortably without the TV.

I have no doubt that a student cannot simply use TV alone to learn.
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