Understanding regular every day conversation between natives

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ryanheise
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Re: Understanding regular every day conversation between natives

Postby ryanheise » Wed Sep 18, 2019 4:43 pm

Thank you golyplot! Added :-)
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Re: Understanding regular every day conversation between natives

Postby ryanheise » Wed Sep 18, 2019 5:02 pm

golyplot wrote:On the other hand, I've noticed that conversations involving families with small children are usually relatively easy to understand.


I'd like to find more of this type of content too, actually. It's so interesting to see how children acquire languages and which sentence patterns they acquire first. It's also really interesting to notice that despite their simple use of language, they often express thoughts in a far more native way than you or I could.

So I wonder if that could be another benefit of listening to conversations of children, or interactions between children and their parents, whether maybe you would start to pick up on more of those subtle things they're doing and you're not doing, and actually acquire those language features in the same order that native children do?

It seems that there are actually a lot of families with young children who vlog and post videos to YouTube in various languages, too. E.g. This one just popped up in my recommendations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiL7TxqV8XA
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Re: Understanding regular every day conversation between natives

Postby Axon » Thu Sep 19, 2019 4:25 pm

ryanheise wrote:
Axon wrote:You should definitely check out Easy German! Hundreds of conversational German videos about any topic imaginable.


For me it says the channel does not exist. Did the link work for anyone else?

By the way, if you find any good podcasts or YouTube channels for language learning, please consider sharing them here. It's a little project I started to make it easier to find N+1 podcasts and YouTube channels in a foreign language. I might write about this project a bit more later, but the goal is to try to build up a large collection of freely available audio content that the language learning community can search for and rate on a number of metrics that are actually relevant to "language learners" in particular, such as the language difficulty level, the type of language used (dialogues, conversations, stories, lessons), speech speed, audio quality/intelligibility i.e. things that a language learner might want to search by, and I do also want to add transcripts. I was thinking that if I had the transcripts, I might actually be able to come up with a computer algorithm that automatically estimates the language difficulty by comparing the transcript to word frequency lists and other factors. In a future dream world where all of that has taken place, I'm imagining that I and other self learners will be able to easily find our next N+1 comprehensible input to study that also matches the type of content we're after.

German is on my wish list so I'd like to collect some useful links to resources like this for later when I take it on (currently German and Japanese have the most entries).


Thanks, I fixed the link. That's a great site you've made!
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Re: Understanding regular every day conversation between natives

Postby ryanheise » Thu Sep 19, 2019 6:34 pm

Thanks 2x :-) That channel looks really good!

I watched the most recent video, and it was kind of interesting to me how he sets out from the beginning to speak slow German, but as the video progresses he sometimes slips into a natural faster speed. We are all native speakers of some language so I'm sure we can all relate that native speakers just can't help it sometimes because we're so used to saying certain sequences of syllables really quickly without thinking about it, and I'm sure as second language learners we can also all relate to how frustrating this can be as an absolute beginner trying to follow it :-)
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Re: Understanding regular every day conversation between natives

Postby mentecuerpo » Sat Oct 26, 2019 1:34 am

Speakeasy wrote:I was about to respond from my own experience and suggest that there are at least three factors at play:

(1) Sound Signal: That is, when eavesdropping on a conversation, it is possible, if not very likely, that the sound signal is not directed at the surreptitious listener who can capture but a muffled, interrupted portion of what is being said. Other factors, such as background noise, air currents, or other types of interference will impede the arrival of the sound signal in sufficient strength and clarity for a good understanding of the conversation.


I was at work and as I was trying to understand what this person was saying but we were not face to face and it was a noisy background. I thought about your blog and it is really true, but we just take it for granted and we do not pay attention about the process of the communication, the cognitive processing communication in the language requires other sensory elements that can work in favor or against it, like background noise, being able to observe the patient's face, lip movements and gesticulations also help convey the message. Good points you make. I think we need to maximize what we now about these elements when speaking or listening to our foreign language. For example, eye contact when communication face to face, gesticulations and facial expressions, try to keep the intonation consistent with the language we are speaking (not use our own native language intonation), seek for a less noisy background when we speak and less background distractions among other things.
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Re: Understanding regular every day conversation between natives

Postby Speakeasy » Sat Oct 26, 2019 2:29 am

mentecuerpo wrote: … the process of the communication, the cognitive processing communication in the language requires other sensory elements that can work in favor or against it, like background noise, being able to observe the patient's face, lip movements and gesticulations also help convey the message. Good points you make. I think we need to maximize what we now about these elements when speaking or listening to our foreign language. For example, eye contact when communication face to face, gesticulations and facial expressions, try to keep the intonation consistent with the language we are speaking (not use our own native language intonation), seek for a less noisy background when we speak and less background distractions among other things.
You raise some very important points.

Another example would be telephone conversations versus face-to-face conversations. There are clearly differences in the “quality” of the sound signal which might degrade our ability to fully understand our interlocutor. Nevertheless, telephone conversations between native speakers are, generally speaking, examples of efficient and effective communications, even in the presence of differences in pronunciation and dialectical speech. However, as many language-learner would readily attest, talking on the telephone in one’s L2 can be a harrowing experience. I am not sure at which level we become truly “comfortable” in such situations, but I suspect that it might be in the CEFR C1 area, if not higher.
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