What do you like to do while listening when listening is the main point?

[mdbusinessenglish]

I think it's important to spend a lot of time listening to your TL with listening as the main or only goal, rather than doing something you'd do anyway and trying to squeeze in some listening.

What do you like to do physically when you want to give all your attention to the audio and any physical activity you engage in is only meant to support that goal? Do you like to sit still, or walk around, or fiddle with objects, or...?

I like to take a walk while i am listening to something important. It makes much concentrated to the audio.

[Khayyam]

I think it's important to spend a lot of time listening to your TL with listening as the main or only goal, rather than doing something you'd do anyway and trying to squeeze in some listening.

What do you like to do physically when you want to give all your attention to the audio and any physical activity you engage in is only meant to support that goal? Do you like to sit still, or walk around, or fiddle with objects, or...?

I like to take a walk while i am listening to something important. It makes much concentrated to the audio.

Me too! IME, this is one of the best ways to concentrate on it.

[tiia]

And because I know you asked me in another thread about juggling and listening: no I don't think I have tried that. Or if so, only for a short time. There are simple reasons for it:
- I prefer music for juggling and especially for playing with poi.
- When I discovered audiobooks for myself, that was because I wanted to relax my eyes when I wrote my thesis, which was mainly work with screens and reading. So the first audiobooks I listened partly with my eyes closed.
- when I still practised juggling, that was mainly not at home, not with my own audio. It definitely would not have been suitable for my to put on headphones there to listen to some kind of speech.
- practising new tricks or not just the very basics needed way too much mental resources. No way I would have been able to do language practice at the same time.

But what about, say, listening while doing the basic three-ball cascade? I'm not saying you should bust out the juggling balls and try it if it doesn't seem like your style; I'm just saying I've had good results with that. (Ugh, that probably sounds like bragging. I don't mean it that way.)

I guess I could do a three ball cascade while listening. It just sounds quite boring to limit myself to something like that (and a few other easy tricks) for an hour.
(The Swedish podcast I use usually is about one hour long, Harry Potter chapters were often too. Today's episode of the Swedish podcast was even longer: 1:25 h.)

[CaroleR]

I used to listen while hiking in the local park, but I stopped after a cyclist yelled at me because I hadn't heard him behind me. So now, I mostly listen while making lunch and whatnot. Lately I've been listening while doing jigsaw puzzles and that seems to work quite well. Supposedly, it's also good way to improve and/or maintain visuospatial function.

[Khayyam]

I used to listen while hiking in the local park, but I stopped after a cyclist yelled at me because I hadn't heard him behind me. So now, I mostly listen while making lunch and whatnot. Lately I've been listening while doing jigsaw puzzles and that seems to work quite well. Supposedly, it's also good way to improve and/or maintain visuospatial function.

It really sucks that now you feel like you can't listen during your hikes. That'd kill me.

I'm extremely stubborn about my right to hike while listening with noise-cancelling headphones. Mountain bikers are pests and hikers should not be required to accommodate them in any way--that's my position on the matter. If I ever just suddenly stop posting here, it'll likely be because I got creamed by a mountain biker. (Or possibly a mountain lion, but the biker is the safer bet.)

It's occurred to me before to do a puzzle while listening, but I haven't yet tried that. Maybe I will. A jigsaw puzzle would likely be better than a Rubik's cube, which was my first idea. I suspect the cube would take too much concentration to enable total focus on the audio.

Unless...unless maybe I learned the trick to solving it and then repeated it until I could do it mindlessly, and then added in the audio.

[Eternal Foreigner]

My current approach is using my audio-only resources when I have something I'm already doing (cleaning, taking the train, walking in nature, etc). When I set time aside deliberately for listening, I tend to choose video resources instead.

This works well for me now, because the audio resources I use (such as InnerFrench) are more comprehensible and made for the intermediate level, so I don't have to focus so much and there isn't as much unknown vocabulary. But I'll use video resources aimed at native speakers such as series and movies when I have the time to really try to focus on the dialogue, rewind a lot, and make anki cards for lines of dialogue that were difficult.

[CaroleR]

If I ever just suddenly stop posting here, it'll likely be because I got creamed by a mountain biker. (Or possibly a mountain lion, but the biker is the safer bet.)

Jeeze, be careful out there! We've had reports of mountain lions (we call them cougars) here, which is weird since I live on an island. Those cats don't mind the water apparently. I'd be more afraid of them than the bikers. My main gripe with the bikers is how they churn up the trails leaving great swaths of mud in their wake, but I digress.

Anyway, back on topic, the only way I've really been able to really focus on listening is through transcribing. But that only works with audio clips around two minutes or less, since I have the attention span of a gnat. So far, though, the puzzles have been second best.

[Severine]

It really sucks that now you feel like you can't listen during your hikes. That'd kill me.

I'm extremely stubborn about my right to hike while listening with noise-cancelling headphones. Mountain bikers are pests and hikers should not be required to accommodate them in any way--that's my position on the matter. If I ever just suddenly stop posting here, it'll likely be because I got creamed by a mountain biker. (Or possibly a mountain lion, but the biker is the safer bet.)

I was in San Francisco over the weekend visiting some friends, and one morning when they were busy with a family engagement, I decided to walk over the Golden Gate bridge and back. Only one walkway was open, so it was shared by cyclists and pedestrians. A speed limit was clearly marked for cyclists, but a lot of spandex-clad road bikers whipped along at twice that at least. I saw one biker cross onto the pedestrian half of the pathway to overtake a slower cyclist, almost hit a small child, and then scream at the parents for not keeping the kid out of the way. Madness.

Perhaps such cyclists (for it was far from all of them) have decided to treat pedestrians exactly the same way some cranky motorists treat them.

And watch out for mountain lions on bikes. They always attack from behind.

It's occurred to me before to do a puzzle while listening, but I haven't yet tried that. Maybe I will. A jigsaw puzzle would likely be better than a Rubik's cube, which was my first idea. I suspect the cube would take too much concentration to enable total focus on the audio.

Unless...unless maybe I learned the trick to solving it and then repeated it until I could do it mindlessly, and then added in the audio.

The problem with a Rubik's cube is that once you know how to solve them, they don't take very long. So you'd have to solve it, mess it up again, and so on. Maybe that'd work for you, but it'd start to feel pointless to me, at least compared to a puzzle where you're working toward one logical goal.

I like to listen to audio while cleaning and doing household maintenance, especially major projects like cleaning out and washing the fridge, sharpening all the knives and tools, raking leaves, washing windows, etc. For me, it's not just about keeping my hands busy, but doing a physical activity with sufficient structure and purpose. That being said, I still get less out of this than I do listening with a pen and paper and taking notes. As such, I have to pick and choose what audio to listen to while doing something else, and what I want to focus on more closely.

[Khayyam]

Well, I'm at least glad there are areas nearby where I can hike without worrying much about bikers. They're just not as close as the bike-infested trails, so I always have to decide if it's worth going farther.

I think you're right about there being a lot of the negative variety of pay-it-forward going on here.

I guess one answer to both mountain lions and bikers would be to play my stuff out loud using a speaker, but then I'd be the guy who spoils other people's peace and quiet out there.

Rubik's cube: well, I'd have to try it and see, but I think that being able to easily and repeatedly solve the puzzle without thinking about it would actually be a good thing as far as listening to languages goes. I find that it's very easy for my concentration to slip if I have to think at all about the task that I'm engaged in. If I'm totally on autopilot doing the dishes, I can concentrate better than if I had nothing at all to do physically, but if even a tiny thing comes up that forces me to think about the task rather than the audio (can I fit this pan in the dishwasher?), I lose the thread momentarily.

[Khayyam]

I just tried listening to a YouTube video in German while making a vocab list for my Persian study. It went pretty well, since making the list is largely a mindless data-entry kind of task.