Any value in listening to things you don't really understand?

[DangerDave2010]

When listening to advanced audio, you will meet again and again pieces that you have already met.

This process, in my experience, it where learning and consolidation takes place.

You will grow from picking up familiar words here and there, to picking sentences... till you understanding most of it, provided that you vocabulary is big enough.

[Soclydeza]

Thanks for all the input!

I definitely see its value for beginners, the idea being that one would be familiarizing themselves with the general rhythm and sounds of the language; but for a intermediate, we should be pretty familiar with those things so, though it would be beneficial to listen to something you don't understand for the sake of further familiarization, it would only yield diminishing returns.

I do have plenty of material for listening practice - material slightly below my level to practice getting use to hearing rapid speech, as well as material at or about my current level that helps me grow vocabulary and more complex grammar structures. But if maximizing my exposure by, say, listening to news while working (where I can't really continually focus on it, so it would just be more background) or while walking around campus would actually be helpful, that would be great. However, I also like to think a lot, so I generally don't like to listen to anything unless there is some kind of purpose to it (plus constantly having earbuds in my ears is a nuisance). I suppose the best way to find out is to run a personal experiment.

[Soclydeza]

You will grow from picking up familiar words here and there, to picking sentences... till you understanding most of it, provided that you vocabulary is big enough.

That's what I was thinking. For some stuff (like native news broadcasts) I am confident that my vocabulary is big enough to at least get the general gist of what is being said, but I still have trouble getting anything out of it a lot of times.

[DangerDave2010]

But really, if you can find pieces with a transcript to study first, then listen and re-listen a few times till you get 100%, your listening comprehension will evolve waaaaay faster.

[Serpent]

I think this depends on various things:
-the level, ie what exactly you consider intermediate and whether you literally understand nothing.
-the content, especially how repetitive it is, whether there are visual clues, whether it's predictable. (basically the benefits of football )
-your skills wrt reading and vocabulary. if the audio is full of words you are "supposed" to understand, you can probably train that.
-the language. is it opaque or mostly transparent? is it reasonably easy to learn to write down what you hear?
-motivation and determination. is it fun? wil you stick with it?

for me being able to learn from the "favourable" kind of content is part of the definition of the intermediate level, so

And yeah I've definitely experienced familiarity being helpful, in Finnish and also Indonesian.

[Pesahson]

I think the intermediate level is THE time to bombard yourself with native input really. If you're intermediate, you should be able to understand something from shows/podcasts about any topic, unless we have a different understanding of the word "intermediate".
Also, it could be that your listening skills are poor (and if you haven't tried listening, they probably are) and there is a lot of vocabulary that you know, but you don't recognize because it's spoken too quickly. The only thing to help that is to ... listen a lot. Listening with reading at the same time will help to train your brain to combine the sound with spelling, but I achieved it by passive listening to podcasts in French. (I actively studied french for several months by that time). It took me a long time, but at one point I realised that suddenly I understood what they were talking about even though I did no studying. The only thing I had the energy to do was stick some podcasts on my ipod while I was walking, commuting.
French spelling is pretty consistent and follows clear cut rules. You will know you have good listening skills, when you hear a word you've never heard before and you can figure out its spelling and look it up. I don't know how else you can achieve that without getting yourself used to how natives speak.

[snowflake]

In addition to vocabulary there are also different accents, various ways of saying the same thing, and commonly used slang. And there are people whose natural vocal qualities can pose a bit more of a challenge to language learners. Listening to a wide variety of "advanced audio" generally helps us to learn to deal with these types of things. Not everyone speaks like a network news broadcaster who generally tries to cultivate a “neutral accent” and pays more attention to standard usage.

[YtownPolyglot]

I agree with what has been said here about beginners learning the rhythm and the sound systems of their target languages. I would add that video with audio seems more helpful than audio alone. With video, you see what the native speakers are doing with their mouths. You also get some context that could help meaning.

At a somewhat more advanced level, it is probably good to listen to things that are just beyond your real comfort level. This is what my TESOL instructor referred to as L+1. I remember a sort of dictation class when I was in a college intermediate French class where we had to write down what we heard in a detective story. There was one line that threw everybody. I kept rewinding and listening (this was years ago) and getting "pour tant que je dis" instead of "Pour quand? Pour jeudi!"

[PaleoPaul]

I am a beginner, just a few months of study, but I have been listening to Spanish language radio since I started learning. I don't know whether my progress is faster because of it, but I do believe it has "trained my ear" to hear the Spanish words more easily.

Of course, it's not going to teach me Spanish by itself, but I am sitting in the car on my way to work for an hour a day. Why not use that time to immerse myself in some Spanish? I suppose it could be argued that I could use that time more profitably by listening to Coffee Break Spanish or News In Slow Spanish, but it's just easier to keep my radio tuned to CNN Espanol!

[reineke]

Yes. Really (In lieu of a bump). It's very useful and it can teach you more than you can imagine. Figuring out the hows and whys is ridiculously hard.