My listening comprehension is awful! How to improve it?

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Cavesa
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Re: My listening comprehension is awful! How to improve it?

Postby Cavesa » Thu Dec 15, 2016 9:45 pm

sfuqua wrote:Cavesa, how long do you think it takes to get to something like C2 in listening and reading comprehension?
250 hours listening and 25000 pages reading? I seem to remember you did double challenges on the first super challenge.

My 75 hours listening 6000 pages reading did wonders for my Spanish, but I still have quite a way to go.


In my case, it was approximately 250 hours listening and 10000-11000 pages reading. Yes, I signed up for the double challenge, but didn't finish it on time. I finished the book part sometime this year, I think in April or Mai. THese numbers are from B2, not from zero.
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Re: My listening comprehension is awful! How to improve it?

Postby Serpent » Thu Dec 15, 2016 10:58 pm

I'm not learning French but I highly recommend http://lyricstraining.com/ and GLOSS 8-)
At GLOSS you can choose specifically listening lessons. (But even if you do reading lessons, you can click "source" to read the whole text with a recording and a translation)
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Re: My listening comprehension is awful! How to improve it?

Postby buylow12 » Sat Dec 17, 2016 3:45 am

Serpent beat me to it but I highly recommend using GLOSS, I've been doing several of the listening exercises each week over the past two months and have moved from 1 to 1+ to 2 and am now at the 2+ level. It really is just an amazing free resource provided by the US government.
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Re: My listening comprehension is awful! How to improve it?

Postby MarkLondon » Mon Dec 26, 2016 6:05 pm

Find a French film you love - preferably one with lots of different characters in different situations - and watch it with subtitles and then re-watch it many times.

Another great aid - albeit one that is not as "facile" as you might think - is RFI's Journal en Français Facile. It's from Radio France International. Unlike DW's Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten, this is actually not primarily intended for learners, but for people for whom French is a L2 or L3 (or 4 or 5 etc.) e.g. in Francophone Africa. It's a great daily fix of real but somewhat simplified French. But the speed and level is actually quite high so it is a great ear trainer.
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Re: My listening comprehension is awful! How to improve it?

Postby Elenia » Tue Dec 27, 2016 12:33 pm

Chai wrote:Has anyone here gone from understanding very little of a spoken language to improve immensely by doing something similar? If so I would really love to hear about it or if you have a better plan I would appreciate that as well. Thank you!


Yes, actually, I have. I wouldn't say I understood very little of the spoken language as I could get by okay in France at the start of my year abroad. But I understood very, very little of my lectures. By the end of the ten teaching months, my comprehension had improved massively. But this took a LOT of intense listening. Lectures were usually about three hours long of almost solid talking from the teacher - student participation was extremely low. I was naturally taking notes, and taking notes meant pretty much copying word for word what the teacher said. At the start, I was missing pretty much everything important, where as by the end I could get pretty much everything in the first two hours of a lesson. (By the third hour I was usually doodling all over the previous two hours work :roll: )

It's intensive, and you'd get by a lot quicker and a lot more easily using something with a visual aid but it is entirely possible to get better with just listening alone and no tutor feedback.
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Re: My listening comprehension is awful! How to improve it?

Postby Brun Ugle » Tue Dec 27, 2016 2:44 pm

I've made a tremendous improvement in my Spanish listening comprehension during this past year just by watching highly addictive TV shows. When I started, I couldn't really understand much Spanish, but I could follow the basic plot of the show even without understanding a lot of the dialogue. I didn't really worry about actually understanding what they said; I just enjoyed the show and by the end, I didn't have much problem understanding the dialogue. It's a very lazy method, but it works. You might have to watch 50 or more hours before you notice any difference, but it doesn't require a lot of effort, only time.
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Re: My listening comprehension is awful! How to improve it?

Postby YtownPolyglot » Tue Jan 03, 2017 6:40 pm

Keep calm and keep listening.

Don't think of your comprehension as "awful." Think of it as "pre-fluent" or something along those lines. These things take time for all of us.
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Re: My listening comprehension is awful! How to improve it?

Postby mjd550 » Tue Jan 10, 2017 3:25 am

Brun Ugle wrote:I've made a tremendous improvement in my Spanish listening comprehension during this past year just by watching highly addictive TV shows. When I started, I couldn't really understand much Spanish, but I could follow the basic plot of the show even without understanding a lot of the dialogue. I didn't really worry about actually understanding what they said; I just enjoyed the show and by the end, I didn't have much problem understanding the dialogue. It's a very lazy method, but it works. You might have to watch 50 or more hours before you notice any difference, but it doesn't require a lot of effort, only time.


I am interested to hear more about this. I am currently trying to improve my Spanish comprehension. I have netflix and access to star trek dubbed, if I watch some series and many episodes of it will my listening comprehension improve that much? Depending on the speed at the moment I understand about 40% of it. Thanks
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Re: My listening comprehension is awful! How to improve it?

Postby smallwhite » Tue Jan 10, 2017 4:37 am

mjd550 wrote:I am interested to hear more about this.


See this, page 2 of the thread What is the optimum "level" when selecting audio input?, where Cavesa wrote about her approach, then I asked her a couple of questions, and then she wrote more about her approach. The dialogue continued in her log but these 2 posts of hers were the most relevant to your question.
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Brun Ugle
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Re: My listening comprehension is awful! How to improve it?

Postby Brun Ugle » Tue Jan 10, 2017 7:54 am

mjd550 wrote:
Brun Ugle wrote:I've made a tremendous improvement in my Spanish listening comprehension during this past year just by watching highly addictive TV shows. When I started, I couldn't really understand much Spanish, but I could follow the basic plot of the show even without understanding a lot of the dialogue. I didn't really worry about actually understanding what they said; I just enjoyed the show and by the end, I didn't have much problem understanding the dialogue. It's a very lazy method, but it works. You might have to watch 50 or more hours before you notice any difference, but it doesn't require a lot of effort, only time.


I am interested to hear more about this. I am currently trying to improve my Spanish comprehension. I have netflix and access to star trek dubbed, if I watch some series and many episodes of it will my listening comprehension improve that much? Depending on the speed at the moment I understand about 40% of it. Thanks


That's probably about where I was when I started. At first I only watched a few episodes a week while continuing with my regular studies, but after a while, I got hooked and started watching an episode a day, and then several a day. Soon after that is when I started to really notice a jump in comprehension. I occasionally went back a few minutes to try to catch something I found interesting, but didn't quite understand, and I sometimes noted down words or phrases to look up, but mostly I just watched and enjoyed the show.

I was watching on YouTube and one thing I found helpful early on was to read all the comments before watching the show. I stopped doing that later when I could understand most of it on my own and was tired of spoilers, but during the early episodes I found it useful. It was a popular show and there were a lot of comments. Some people would ask why so-and-so did such-and-such, or comment that it was really funny/stupid/annoying/whatever when such-and-such happened. This meant I knew a bit of what was going to happen in the episode. Also people would write out their favorite bits of dialogue and I could look up any words I didn't know before actually watching.

All this was fun and it didn't feel like any effort at all because I was just watching a show I loved. Of course, I continued to do real study alongside of watching my telenovela. Even now, I still have a lot of work to do on my Spanish even though I can enjoy watching TV in the language.

At present, I am using the same technique to improve my German listening comprehension and this time it's going much faster. This is probably because German is a much more transparent language for me. My level of German as far as vocabulary and reading comprehension are concerned, is much higher than my level of Spanish was when I started watching TV in Spanish. So, my listening comprehension in German has improved very quickly. Again I am watching a telenovela on YouTube. This one doesn't have many comments, but the first 20 episodes or so had a summary written in the description. I read the summary before each episode in order to understand in the beginning, but now I don't need them anymore.

Anyway, listening comprehension is partly a matter of learning to listen and separate the sounds into words, but it is also a matter of knowing the words and grammar as well. In Spanish, I was able to improve both skills at once through massive TV watching combined with regular study. My German listening comprehension is improving faster because I'm mostly working on the first skill.
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