Primary focus on listening comprehension

General discussion about learning languages
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Lianne
Green Belt
Posts: 457
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 3:29 pm
Location: Canada
Languages: Speaks: English (N)
Actively studying: French (low int)
Dabbling in: Italian (beginner), ASL (beginner), Ojibwe (beginner), Swahili (beginner)
Wish list: Swedish, Esperanto, Klingon, Brazilian Portuguese
Has also dabbled in: German, Spanish, toki pona
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Re: Primary focus on listening comprehension

Postby Lianne » Sun May 30, 2021 4:43 am

rpg wrote:
Lianne wrote:
Gordafarin2 wrote:Yes, there are two main hurdles in listening comprehension - parsing the speech, and understanding the words. The first one can seem huge, but it's actually the easier of the two. If you expose yourself to comprehensible speech at native speed often enough (from a variety of different speakers, with different accents, in different situations, at different levels of formality), you'll train your ear.

In the last couple of years, my reading comprehension has progressed beyond what I had imagined possible, but my listening comprehension, not so much. So I have not found the "parsing the speech" part to be the easier part!! Although I think there is also the factor of processing speed, like how fast you can understand the words that you "know". That almost feels like it goes somewhere in between parsing the speech and understanding the words.


I feel like it depends a bit on your level as well. At beginner stages it's going to be more about the vocabulary since you simply don't have the vocabulary to understand a lot of what is said. At intermediate stages you may have more vocabulary problems with oral-specific vocabulary (which French has in spades, for example) when you're still new to engaging with authentic native speech. But in general I agree with you that the main difficulty with listening comprehension is parsing the speech; after all, that's the main thing that separates listening from reading, and missing vocabulary affects all four skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) equally--perhaps reading more than anything since a wider vocabulary is used in writing.

There are so many different dimensions of it too. Can you parse regional accents? The speech of a child? The speech of someone crying, yelling, or whispering? Speech with a lot of noise interference? Can you correctly parse where a word you don't know begins and ends / what the surrounding words are, vs the one unknown word messing up your parsing of an entire phrase?

Yeah, that definitely describes a lot of my struggles with understanding spoken French! Regional accents (I understand close to 0% of what my dad says in French), people not speaking clearly due to whispering, etc. (in TV shows that often makes me not catch things), noise interference (I don't even have good auditory processing in English, so yeah), separating unknown words from a long string of sounds (French in a nutshell right there!)...
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: 7 / 100 French SC (Films)
: 0 / 50 Italian Half SC (Books)
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Chupito
Yellow Belt
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Joined: Fri Nov 09, 2018 1:57 am
Languages: French* and English
Learning: Spanish (beginner)
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Re: Primary focus on listening comprehension

Postby Chupito » Tue Jun 01, 2021 2:45 pm

AML wrote:(1)Have any of you ever focused primarily on listening comprehension in your L2? That is, your goal with this L2 was mainly just to understand movies, tv shows, podcasts, radio, etc.

(2)If so, did you achieve advanced comprehension ("advanced" = understand everything except the occasional rare word), and (3) what did you do to get there?

(1) That's what I'm doing currently.

(2) Not yet. I'm still at the beginning of my journey. I can listen with 'advanced comprehension' to a very limited range of content (animes, children audiobooks (think Harry Potter) and self-help audiobooks for adults, about half of the podcast episodes that I've tried), get the gist of the other podcast episodes, and follow the narrative of average adult audiobooks, getting the actions, thoughts, and dialogues but missing a lot on the descriptions. All the rest (movies, TV shows, more challenging podcasts that I haven't tried yet) is still out of reach.

(3) A while ago, I had worked on building a foundation by learning some vocab' on Anki and working through a short introductory course but for the most part, I learn by doing and challenging myself more and more, i.e. listening to increasingly complex content. I started with easy content, reading along and pausing as necessary, then stopped pausing, then progressively stopped reading, then slightly increased the difficulty of the content, reading and pausing again, and so forth.

My native language is related, which is a huge advantage. I was able to start reading easy content almost from the start and many words are transparent. This might not be feasible with an unrelated, more challenging language.
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