Difficulty communicating verbally

[SectionOne]

Hi,

I'm trying to learn Italian.
Private teacher, one hour a week + one hour repeating last lesson's material prior to each lesson, for the past year.
We've gone over most of the grammar and we try to talk a bit here and there, but even though he's Italian, he doesn't have any experience with "language-learning techniques". He just throws the information at me and answers my questions.

So by now I know almost all of the rules. My vocabulary is decent. But when someone talks to me I can't understand even one word.
If I try to listen to an audio clip of someone talking I can't understand anything (even if it's not fast). They might as well be speaking in Chinese..
If I read the transcript of that audio - no problem.

So obviously after a year of doing these lessons, I'm doing something wrong.

As for speaking, it takes me about 2-5 seconds per word if i'm talking to myself and not an actual person waiting for me to say something. In that case it could take me a year to come up with anything except 'Buon Giorno'.

So what is the correct way of learning how to talk and not only how to read?

[leosmith]

Listening from the beginning

[iguanamon]

Welcome to the forum, SectionOne. I have to ask, based on your post, if all you are doing is one hour of work on Italian a week? You won't make much, if any, progress doing this.

This doesn't mean you need your tutor every day, but you do need to self-study for at least an hour a day. There are plenty of good resources available for learning Italian by self-study and plenty of people here to help you. You need to work on all aspects of the language, you need to train listening, reading, writing and speaking because each skill reinforces the other... they don't have to be worked on equally but they should be addressed.

So, if you tell us more about your language background and experience, your desired outcomes in learning and what you are doing in your present study besides an hour a week, we can help you better.

[reineke]

Hi,

I'm trying to learn Italian.
Private teacher, one hour a week + one hour repeating last lesson's material prior to each lesson, for the past year.
We've gone over most of the grammar and we try to talk a bit here and there, but even though he's Italian, he doesn't have any experience with "language-learning techniques". He just throws the information at me and answers my questions.

So by now I know almost all of the rules. My vocabulary is decent. But when someone talks to me I can't understand even one word.
If I try to listen to an audio clip of someone talking I can't understand anything (even if it's not fast). They might as well be speaking in Chinese..
If I read the transcript of that audio - no problem.

So obviously after a year of doing these lessons, I'm doing something wrong.

As for speaking, it takes me about 2-5 seconds per word if i'm talking to myself and not an actual person waiting for me to say something. In that case it could take me a year to come up with anything except 'Buon Giorno'.

So what is the correct way of learning how to talk and not only how to read?

A year of study or 100 hours spread over a year?

Test your Italian
Dialang web version: http://dialangweb.lancaster.ac.uk/

Vocabulary
Quante parole italiane conosci? Con questo test puoi ottenere una stima valida della dimensione del tuo vocabolario in soli 4 minuti e in questo modo aiuterai anche la ricerca scientifica.
http://vocabolario.ugent.be
"Test your receptive and productive vocabulary in different languages. What percentage of the 5000 most frequent words have you mastered?
http://www.itt-leipzig.de/static/startseiteeng.html

FSI Category I Languages closely related to English:

575-600 hours + several hundred hours of homework to reach “Speaking 3: General Professional Proficiency in Speaking (S3)” and “Reading 3: General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3)” while working closely with a professional tutor. Some people reach S2-2+...

Interagency Language Roundtable Language Skill Level Descriptions - Speaking
http://www.govtilr.org/Skills/ILRscale2.htm

[AndyMeg]

I would suggest the following:

- Find an audio or a video clip that is no longer than 20 minutes. You should have either the transcription of the audio/video-clip or the english translation. Listen to the audio/video-clip three times: first time just as it is (without any trasncript/translation), second time while reading the transcript/translation, third time just as it is (without any trasncript/translation). Repeat this process with many audios/video-clips (try to find and choose things/topics you feel genuinely interested in).

- Listen to, and try to sing along, music in italian. Do this as often as you can.

- After a while, complement the above activities with shadowing what you listen to. Do not read any transcription. Just try to copy what you hear and, if possible, record yourself and compare it to the original audio. Keep doing this until your pronunciation, prosody and speed is similar to that of the audio. For this activity, and all the others I've listed, it is better if the audios or video-clips are by natives for natives. This way you'll get used to the way italian is spoken in real life.

[tastyonions]

If you have a decent vocabulary and no (physical) hearing problems but still can't understand, you may have a poor model of the language's sounds.

How much of this sample can you transcribe (it's a few sentences long)?: https://speakfrench.neocities.org/it_sample.mp3

[garyb]

At risk of being overly simplistic... If you want to improve at listening, you need to practise listening. Same goes for speaking, but listening is more important at this point - there's not much point in speaking if you won't understand the response. I'd work on listening as much as you can between the weekly lessons, and maybe your teacher can help with it too.

[SectionOne]

So, if you tell us more about your language background and experience, your desired outcomes in learning and what you are doing in your present study besides an hour a week, we can help you better.

Well, I'm doing 1 hour a week with a tutor, and one hour by myself. And that's pretty much it. I'm a computer programmer so it's easy for me to understand rules of grammar and remember them. But for some reason that doesn't work when I hear someone speaking.
I lived in Italy for 6 months in the past 2 years (spread around). Not speaking to anyone in Italian just yet..

A year of study or 100 hours spread over a year?

100 hours spread over a year. I'm working almost full time, plus I'm multitasking a lot on personal projects and hobbies in my life so I can't make this my life's project right now...
I don't know how long it should take to be able to understand and speak at the same level and speed that I'm able to read and write.
Because right now there's a huge difference and i'm not sure why.

I would suggest the following:
- Find an audio or a video clip that is no longer than 20 minutes. You should have either the transcription of the audio/video-clip or the english translation. Listen to the audio/video-clip three times: first time just as it is (without any trasncript/translation), second time while reading the transcript/translation, third time just as it is (without any trasncript/translation). Repeat this process with many audios/video-clips (try to find and choose things/topics you feel genuinely interested in).

I'll try that. My purpose of creating this thread was to find out what the best way (cognitively) to learn how to communicate verbally.
Because it seems I've got the reading / writing thing down and it's progressing in a good pace.

If you have a decent vocabulary and no (physical) hearing problems but still can't understand, you may have a poor model of the language's sounds.

How much of this sample can you transcribe (it's a few sentences long)?: https://speakfrench.neocities.org/it_sample.mp3

Mmmm.. 10%?
Can't seem to figure out where a word starts and ends.. And by the time I start thinking about a it, already 5 more words have passed over my head...

[reineke]

I'm doing 1 hour a week with a tutor, and one hour by myself. And that's pretty much it. I'm a computer programmer so it's easy for me to understand rules of grammar and remember them. But for some reason that doesn't work when I hear someone speaking.
I lived in Italy for 6 months in the past 2 years (spread around). Not speaking to anyone in Italian just yet..

A year of study or 100 hours spread over a year?

100 hours spread over a year. I'm working almost full time...
I don't know how long it should take to be able to understand and speak at the same level and speed that I'm able to read and write.
Because right now there's a huge difference and i'm not sure why.

Learning to Listen and Listening to Learn

teasers

"Memory is fleeting. New material rapidly obliterates previous material. How, then, can the brain deal successfully with the
continual deluge of linguistic input?"

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...

...the core language items must be recycled extensively through listening/speaking across as many contexts as possible -not simply reading and writing..."

"In many language curriculums, listening is still often considered a mysterious `black box', for which the best approach seems to be simply `more practice'. Specific skill instruction as well as strategy development still need greater attention in order to demystify the listening process."

What makes listening difficult?

Factors affecting second language listening comprehension
"Speech rate—How quickly someone talks can hurt comprehension, but slower speech rates do not necessarily help. L2 listeners may mistakenly attribute difficulties caused by other factors to a too-fast speech rate."

"If capable and motivated, listeners can apply particular metacognitive strategies while listening, such as preventing themselves from fixating on a particular word they missed, which can improve comprehension."

"Research on passage complexity suggests that negatives and infrequent vocabulary increase difficulty, as does more culturally specific or implied information. Improving comprehensibility for L2 listeners through simplifying the sentences in a passage is not consistently successful, however."

"This review argues that the first language one was taught to read, and the instructional method by which one was taught, can have profound and long-lasting effects on how one reads, not only in one’s first language, but also in one’s second language."

The Impact of Orthography on L2 Phonolexical Acquisition

"The acquisition of L2 sound contrasts is notoriously difficult. ...Difficulty at both the phonetic and phonological/lexical levels..."

"depleted attention from the auditory input..."

The influence of foreign scripts on the acquisition of a second language phonological contrast

"Besides revealing, for the first time,that foreign written input can significantly hinder learners’ ability to reliably encode an L2 phonological contrast, [/b]this study also provides further evidence for the irrepressible hold of native orthographic rules on L2 phonological acquisition[/b]."

"what if the lexical representation does not match the perceived input?"

"...a very serious hindrance arises when a distinction that cannot be perceived in the input is incorporated in the lexicon."

"L2 learners are doing themselves no perceptual favor at all by incorporating into their lexicon (whether by using information from orthography or from any other source) a distinction that they cannot reliably perceive in the input."

"...phonemic repertoire is not the only phonological information that L2 learners must master."

"Phonotactic constraints are language-specific and ...L1 phonotactics can interfere with L2 listening even at very high levels of L2 proficiency... Suprasegmental information such as pitch can be lexically distinctive in one of a speaker’s languages but quite irrelevant for distinguishing between words in another. The phonological shape of words differs across languages, as does lexical
prosody... While alphabetic writing systems provide reasonably good information about phonemic repertoires (especially when grapheme-to-phoneme mappings are highly consistent), the rest of the phonological information that L2 learners need to acquire is hardly available from reading at all..."

"Can simultaneous reading and listening improve speech perception and production?"

"Alphabets are generally invented in a monolingual, monocultural context. The complex, not to say
contradictory, needs of the multilingual community are ignored. Consequently, pedagogical engineers and
designers of activities for foreign language learning must strive to destabilize the effects of early conditioning
– ‘fossilised’, intractable L1 sound / symbol associations – and prepare the human brain for
a host of new, unfamiliar L2 cognitive activities."

"What was striking, in France, during initial pre-course testing, was the omnipresent nature of L1
interference. The term ‘stress deafness’ is by no means excessive even if it does not refer to a real
physical impediment."

"Among annotation errors in keywords chosen by the students themselves for their presentations (level
B2) we noticed:

• Offence, infringement, analysis, linguistics (from a doctoral student studying ‘linguistics’) economics (from
an economist), enigmatic, distressed, paranormal, understanding, incomprehensible, accident, sequence,
realisation, development..."

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =14&t=5698

[reineke]

Mmmm.. 10%?
Can't seem to figure out where a word starts and ends.. And by the time I start thinking about a it, already 5 more words have passed over my head...

The first hurdle was determining the word boundaries within the language of your ancestors. Where do single words begin, where do they end? The sound wave per se does not confer information about the boundaries between single words.

To show the magnitude of the task you face in a new language, try to delimit the word boundaries:

"Delimitingwordboundariesinaspeechstreamisnoeasierthantryingtodeterminetheminthepreviousparagraph...

Delimiting word boundaries in a speech stream is no easier than trying to determine them in the previous paragraph.

The letters would need to be fused together, pulsate and disappear from the screen within fractions of a second to give you a better idea about what's happening.

Prosody does offer clues that can help listeners detect word boundaries. Prosodic cues are largely absent from orthographies.