Listening to content while exercising

[Severine]

Personally, I've always tended to listen to songs when I can't guarantee full attention. It's quite normal for most of us to listen to songs in our own languages without thinking too much about the words and then at some point just sort of "click in" to the song and just realise what it's about and suddenly be drawn to listen.

So I have a couple of crank theories about language learning. One of my favorites is "Comprehension is an earworm plus an epiphany."

What I mean by that is that sometimes I'll hear something lots of times before I understand it. But one day, I'll hear the word or the expression in the right context, and it will suddenly become obvious. After that, it's hard to forget.

This tracks with my experience, FWIW.

For light exercise (evening walks), I can and do listen to new spoken materials. One of my strongest motivations to walk regularly, in fact, is that it gives me time to listen to podcasts.

For more strenuous exercise, I generally don't have the focus for listening to new material, but I use it as an opportunity to re-listen to podcasts I've listened to before and enjoyed, but for which my comprehension was less than 100%. You might be surprised by how often some detail that escaped me on the first listen becomes clear the second time around even when I'm huffing and puffing through my workout.

[Iversen]

When I walk around or do gardening I don't listen to anything, but I can't see it would be more taxing than listening to music. The condition is that the activity can be done more or less automatically, and one risk could be that you listen so intently to the content that you get run down by a lorry.

Call me pedantic, but listening to music isn't the same thing as listening to songs. When you're listening to music, that's not really engaging the language parts of the brain (or at least not all of them). Listening to songs is an edge case, because you can listen to songs without paying attention to the language, or you can listen intently to the words. If you let a spoken podcast fade into the background, that's probably not being listened to as "music" though...

I prefer instrumental music which means that I don't have any distracting words to listen to. That solves the main part of the problem - but leaves a residue because I might want actually to LISTEN to the music, and then the competing task would have to be fairly simple.

In this moment I'm watching Anglophone TV with the sound on, and at the same time I'm working on my computer, which calls for some reading in Danish. That combination means that I skip back and forth between the two tasks (both language related), and to get anything out of that I have to maintain the continuity of both 'streams'. Now, let's assume hat the program instead had been in for instance Greek - or it could have been a Youtube video in Greek. Then I would have to focus so much on the language that I couldn't have worked with any other language related task - not even in Danish. But I could have been eating or sewing or walking. Listening to music .. well, that would be harder because I actually take music seriously. Listening to two streams of speech would also be too hard, and that's why I hate the kind of dubbing where you hear the original voice below the dubbing voice.

So instead of requiring that only one of them activate the language centers in the brain it may enough that they occupy different sensoric areas AND that they either both are relatively easy so that you can switch OR - if one of them is more taxing - that the other activity doesn't involve languages in any way. And walking or running or eating or just looking out of the window all fulfill that requirement.

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[PeterMollenburg]

A while ago I decided to get back into kayaking in a serious way...

Early on I realised that given I was planning to do this activity around 5 times a week (sometimes more, sometimes less) and each session would be at least an hour usually, it'd be a good idea to listen to language 'stuff'.


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These three paragraphs aren't completely relevant to the thread but speak of my personal experience working out what hardware was suitable for listening while kayaking (skip if you please).

Given I'm on the water (large lake with 2 small rivers that feed into it) and there's a risk of falling in (haven't done so yet in past 2 years - I'm not doing white water kayaking, but flatwater marathon kayaking), I need to ensure a waterproof system. I got onto a system sold by Underwater Audio (no kickbacks here for me with any companies discussed, just mentioning it), which is a fully enclosed waterproof wired headphone set-up that attaches via to a small ipod, and marketed predominantly at swimmers. So I used this set up while kayaking for a good 12 months clipping the little ipod onto my hat (instead of a swimming cap), but got tired of having to connect to my computer to put new content on the ipod fairly frequently. My phone was old and not waterproof. I didn't want to use bluetooth set-ups either (long story). My phone then died when it was ironically affected by water (heavy rains, outside digging an emergency drain)....

I bought a new phone, waterproof apparently, but not wanting to risk it, I bought a waterproof 'pocket' we'll call it, to take the phone with me while kayaking. Still refusing to use bluetooth (I like to make things difficult for myself), the case has a wired 3.5mm outlet on the back for headphones and is designed for the phone to be plugged into a wired 3.5mm connector inside the case that feeds to the outside connection thereby not compromising the water-tight design. New pockets/cases like this assume the user will use bluetooth, so I bought this old case specifically for it's wired capability but designed for older, smaller phones. I cut a hole in the bottom of the case creating the space needed with the convertor attached and feeding back inside to the wired system. I resealed the cut thoroughly and tested successfully afterwards while submerged. Now I don't have to resync constantly and I now have access to my phone's massive library of podcasts, music and other language content with (yes I'm backwards apparently) wired headphones! I turn it to flight mode (I'm not out to make or receive calls) and get on my way.

I connected the Underwater Audio waterproof headphones directly to my phone (instead of the ipod) now stowed away and protected in my lifejacket should I succumb to an eventful situation and end up in the water. The Underwater Audio headphones, given they are designed for swimmers really block out the vast majority of surrounding otherwise audible sound. Despite being in relatively quiet areas, I got tired of not being able to hear much around me. I like clearly hearing the paddle blades enter the water, as well as a bit of nature and a possible speedboat approaching on the rare occasion (even if most of the time I can see them, or at least hear them as they get much closer). With this in mind, lately I've resorted to using my old AfterSHOKZ (now known as SHOKZ) bone-conduction wired headphones connected to my phone while kayaking. Now I can listen to whatever I like and hear what goes on around me.
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Back on topic. I have a few languages on the go at different levels. For Norwegian it's slow learning content. For Dutch it's faster learning content or maybe a straight-forward podcast. For French it's full podcasts of various types. I can't take in as much while kayaking compared to sitting down at home, especially if I'm doing an intense session, but even for those sessions it's a bonus to be listening to something in a TL than nothing at all. I also much prefer focused intense study but as these exercise sessions will happen regardless, it's a bonus to listen to something. I can be out on the water for up to 3 hours on the rare occasion (2 hours 15min a couple of days back), which is a lot of time for listening and it especially helps pass the time on deliberately slow endurance sessions.

Nevertheless, I've found myself ditching the audio altogether sometimes, listening to English podcasts (couldn't find the same really interesting content in French) or getting nostalgic for the 90s hip-hop and listening to 2pac tracks on random. But hey, sometimes I need a little sanity and I'm not going to pressure myself to learn at every moment when the main objective is to progress in a sport.

In summary, if safety is an issue, look at bone conduction (SHOKZ or something similar) headphones, if you're really frustrated with listening/learning content in your TL while exercising, just don't do it, keep your sanity, but if you can do it (some of the time, all of the time, at random) you are increasing your exposure to the language where you otherwise wouldn't have any - I often count a 1 hour session as 15 or 20 minutes of listening time when tracking my learning time even if I had it playing for the full hour, as it depends on my focus level and I know that 15 minutes of focused listening during an hour of excercise still counts as something.

[Granrey]

I walk for about two hrs everyday while using aps to learn french

[Tumlare]

Like most people here I do a large portion of my listening while walking, but I have also listened to podcasts while doing cardio at the gym. My mind occasionally wanders but it isn't too hard to refocus. Sometimes I will go back to an earlier point in the podcast if I feel that I am missing too much but most of the time I will just refocus and move forward.

One benefit of living in Sweden is that I can do another form of listening to content while exercising: taking group fitness classes in Swedish! While the vocabulary is limited I've learned quite a number of encouraging expressions and body part names. The biggest benefit might be having to focus on processing Swedish under less than ideal conditions--the background music is loud and the microphone distorts the speaker's voice so I really have to concentrate in order to take in the information. It's good listening practice.

[emk]

In summary, if safety is an issue, look at bone conduction (SHOKZ or something similar) headphones,

I can chime in to confirm this—I do my Anki audio cards while walking on a dirt road, using Shokz bone-conduction headphones. I can still hear everything going on around me, and the audio is clear enough for fairly serious listening work. At least until the wind picks up. People around me can't hear the headphones at any reasonable volume.

If you walk or hike while listening, and if you need to keep an ear open for cars (or bears), it's worth considering something like this (at least if you see it on sale). No, I am not being paid for recommending language learning equipment.

[leosmith]

My big fear is that I'm worried about letting myself get trained into "zoning out" when listening to stuff I don't understand. I don't want to start trying to listen to something if I know I'm going to struggle to maintain focus, because I'm afraid of making it into a habit.

Same here. I actually heard about this first many years ago from you, and it still rings true today. Fortunately for me, I don't do a lot of really intense exercise, except cycling, swimming and the occasional super-hard hike. I don't listen during those sports. But walking, normal hiking, indoor light-workouts/stretching, no problem. Music would probably be a better choice for the intense stuff, but I wouldn't expect to get too much out of it.

[Cainntear]

Actually, another memory springs to mind. I used to do MT courses while walking to and from work. One day i was doing it on a pedestrian street and my vision essentially went blank -- it was as though it had switched off. It switched back on, when something in my brain registered that I was getting close to another couple waking the same way as me.

I stopped the MP3 player, cos it was a massive fright!!

That wasn't the end of me doing MT while walking, because I picked it up again some point after that, but it was a fair fight and it probably stopped me for a while. It probably would have stopped me for good if I hadn't already done write a few hours with no bother...!

[rowanexer]

I can chime in to confirm this—I do my Anki audio cards while walking on a dirt road, using Shokz bone-conduction headphones. I can still hear everything going on around me, and the audio is clear enough for fairly serious listening work. At least until the wind picks up. People around me can't hear the headphones at any reasonable volume.

How do you actually study Anki cards while walking? Are you looking down at the screen to check your answers and press the screen? Or do you have another way to study them?

[M23]

What's your opinion on trying to listen to content while exercising?

While I run at the gym I used to listen to the Pimsleur programs for Spanish and German, and that was totally fine. It was a good way to get two things done at once. If I listen to something harder then I prefer to be on a walk.