Primary focus on listening comprehension

General discussion about learning languages
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rdearman
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Re: Primary focus on listening comprehension

Postby rdearman » Fri May 28, 2021 4:32 pm

You might prefer substudy, it does more and was written by one of out moderation team.

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... php?t=8925

I did a set of videos on how to do it. (I use linux)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... EZYzYC2Tfw
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Re: Primary focus on listening comprehension

Postby Gordafarin2 » Fri May 28, 2021 4:37 pm

Le Baron wrote:Is Subs2SRS available for Linux? The download at Sourceforge is only for Windows.

No, but Substudy is, which does the same job.
Edit: Beaten by rdearman :)
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Re: Primary focus on listening comprehension

Postby Le Baron » Fri May 28, 2021 4:39 pm

Right, I'm at GitHub now and I'll watch your vids tomorrow. I'll see how this goes! Cheers.
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Re: Primary focus on listening comprehension

Postby aaleks » Fri May 28, 2021 4:43 pm

Initially my goal for English was listening comprehension. Back then I didn't know that it was called listening comprehension though :) . I just wanted to undrestand some videos, series in English. Learning the language wasn't exactly a goal, so that was mostly the reason why I started listening to/watching naive aimed content since the beginning. I didn't have English in school but it's not so easy to avoid English these days, plus I'd made a couple of (unsuccessful) attempts to learn the language before, so I knew a handful of words, and didn't start from a complete zero.

For four months it was only listening. Then I came to the conclusion that I needed to start reading books if I wanted to increase my English vocabulary faster. (Maybe reading books can be replaced with some kind of SRS-ing?)

I think these first four (or maybe five?) months of listening is the reason why I've never had any serious problem with my listening comprehension of English. But, of course, I could understand things at my level, not above it. If my overall level was ~ A2 or B1 that would be the level of my listening comprehension, meaning I wouldn't be able to understand a C2 level content.

I might be wrong but I believe that starting to listen to the TL at the real-life fast speed since the very beginning is the key for avoiding the problem with listening at higher levels. I don't mean replacing learning materials with real speech, just adding this kind of listening to the language learning routine.
Last edited by aaleks on Fri May 28, 2021 4:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Primary focus on listening comprehension

Postby gsbod » Fri May 28, 2021 4:46 pm

rdearman wrote:I think because it is one of the hardest skills to develop. Certainly for me, and for many others I've spoken to. Your mileage might vary of course, but most people find this part of language learning the most difficult. Native speakers talk fast, they use slang, they slur words, they run words together when they speak, etc. TV and Radio are just as bad since they are typically at native speeds. So if you can get to the point you said "understand everything except the occasional rare word" is like finding El Dorado. :)


Back when my main language learning experience was high school French, I would have agreed with you entirely.

And then I learned Japanese, where once I'd reached an intermediate level it became easier for me to level up my listening than my reading skills, to the extent that I could happily watch TV shows, but reading novels was too much like hard work. But then, Japanese has a uniquely challenging writing system, and it's not as if I could describe my listening ability as being advanced using the OPs definition.

And then I learned German. I have definitely achieved advanced listening comprehension in this language. And whilst I am quite happy to read books in German, I would say that listening is the skill that was the first to cross over into the advanced level, and is still my strongest skill (although you'd be hard pressed to objectively assess the difference between my listening and reading comprehension, maybe now listening just feels easier). It's not that I understand everything I hear, I don't even do that in my native English. It's just that my brain is able to reliably fill in the gaps when it encounters things it doesn't recognise, in real time, without me consciously noticing, much like it does with my native English. To be clear, this isn't about consciously making a best guess according to context, it just happens automatically, and, as I said, reliably. It's very clever. Reading, on the other hand, still feels a bit slower and more cumbersome than reading in English. I'm also a relatively slow reader in English. I tend to get hung up on details, re-read sentences a lot, and am easily distracted. And my attention span has been ruined by my smartphone...

Anyway, my point is that listening doesn't have to be the hardest skill to develop, and for some of us it's the easiest. I wouldn't say I did anything particularly special in terms of developing my listening skills, other than making sure I had a reasonable model of how the language is supposed to sound, and using lots of audio resources from the outset (starting with audio courses aimed at beginners before graduating on to native materials).

That being said, I do wonder if listening for languages like French or Danish is actually more challenging, relative to the other skills.
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Re: Primary focus on listening comprehension

Postby tungemål » Fri May 28, 2021 4:59 pm

Yes, it is the holy grail..
But there might be differences beween people. For me it's hard, and I've also come to understand that it's the most important skill.

You need to practice and practice... it takes time. Spanish is especially hard for me. Japanese also, contrary to gsbod's experience.

You can check out my Spanish log, in particular page 3-4, where I document how I practised listening comprehension. I have improved, but I'm not yet at an "advanced" stage in Spanish.
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Re: Primary focus on listening comprehension

Postby gsbod » Fri May 28, 2021 5:05 pm

tungemål wrote:Yes, it is the holy grail..
But there might be differences beween people. For me it's hard, and I've also come to understand that it's the most important skill.

You need to practice and practice... it takes time. Spanish is especially hard for me. Japanese also, contrary to gsbod's experience.


I wouldn't say that listening comprehension in Japanese isn't hard. It's just not as hard as reading (in my experience)!
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Re: Primary focus on listening comprehension

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Fri May 28, 2021 8:23 pm

I’ve focused on extensive reading and listening with French, if only because it was hard to make myself sit and do a whole textbook when I could already flip to the end and just read the last chapter. I did a passive wave of Assimil, then dove into dubbed series. I have a very high tolerance for ambiguity! During the two or three years it took me to watch all fifteen seasons of dubbed ER, I also read novels, mostly YA and light fiction. I also went through 19,949 sentences in Clozemaster... Today I can watch native series. I don’t get everything, but I can easily follow the plot on Call my Agent. I’d say am a solid B2 in reading and listening, probably an A1 in speaking. My speaking skills are entirely based on input. It’s wild to hear yourself say things you don’t know you know how to say.
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Re: Primary focus on listening comprehension

Postby rpg » Sat May 29, 2021 5:33 am

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?
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Re: Primary focus on listening comprehension

Postby DaveAgain » Sat May 29, 2021 8:05 am

AML wrote: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.

If so, did you achieve advanced comprehension ("advanced" = understand everything except the occasional rare word), and what did you do to get there?
For French I watched something every day. Cartoons > documentaries with accurate subtitles > sitcoms. For parsing I found using YouTube very helpful, when there was/is a passage I cannot understand I slowing down the audio, and repeating the tricky section are simple to do with YT, then once identified I looked up any unknown words.
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