Learning to Listen and Listening to Learn

[olim21]

But what makes you think it's a misconception? Your personal experience?

I think it's a misconception because I have a better explanation for the phenomenon that makes sense given everything I already know and it is confirmed by my own experience.

Read my story in response to Serpent. It should give you a good idea of my position.

I've seen examples of people (not on this forum) that have read MASSIVE amounts of literature in English language, but still weren't able to comprehend aurally rather simple English speech (could only understand some intermediate learner's audio material),

Yep, I used to be one of them.

which I had no problem with (having listened to a lot of audio material and gotten used to normal fluent English speech).

Yes, I'm not surprised. I certainly agree that listening is good to develop your pronunciation and such. And I think you should not read massively before you have a decent pronunciation.

My disagreement is about what cause what. In my opinion and for all the reasons I expressed in the previous posts, I think that most of the so called "listening problems" can be better explained once you realize they are more likely "comprehension problems", and/or "pronunciation problems" if you haven't worked on it from the beginning.

You may argue that they didn't learn proper pronunciation first, or haven't achieved "real" understanding (didn't read properly). It's all anecdata anyway.

Sure, we can't know for sure. I don't know them, maybe you can ask them. But that's likely what happened, I think. And it matches perfectly my own story.

I don't think one could achieve good enough pronunciation after a few hours to go reading books with impunity.

So, I said a few hours because I didn't count. I don't know how many exactly. I'm sure it varies from language to language. So let's say 100 hours. Can we agree on that?

The exact number is not important. What is important, I think, is that once you pronunciation is good, you can reduce your amount of listening drastically and spend that time reading instead where the real learning happened.

When one has a good "sound model" of the language in their head one could go do that, of course.

Ah, finally we agree on something.

Still, to be able to understand not very well articulated speech just reading isn't enough.

How is it different from your first language? You have never met someone with a slurry speech that forces you to give all your attention. After a while we just get used to it.

So, it works the same with another language. If your comprehension is good enough you will be able to do the same. It will require some concentration for a little while and you will get used to it.

But you can't (and don't have to) prepare for every possible scenario.

Of course. Or you need to be shown where those boundaries are and get used to them.

Not really. Those boundaries are purely artificial they don't exist, your brain doesn't need them. It's just a feeling you have.

Think about the word "bathroom" if tomorrow everyone decides to write and say "bath room" instead, do you think it will make any difference? As long as everyone agrees, it will not.

Think about the word "une salle de bain" (in French), this is also one word, yet we write it with spaces. Do you think it's different from "bathroom"? It is not.

Think about language like mandarin written with no spaces, yet you can read them just fine if you understand the language.

Or think about Greenlandic, with words corresponding to what we call in English phrases or short sentences.

If the concept of a word is already fuzzy to begin with, word boundaries are worse. Those boundaries arise because of our thoughts process. Because certain sequence of sounds give rise to full thoughts we tend to think that they are somehow separate from the rest. This is just a point of view.

One can also start noticing (even subconsciously) frequent chunks of sounds after some time and start recognizing phonetic words boundaries in real speech without even comprehending its meaning.

Yes, I'm aware of that. But are those boundaries the same boundaries that speakers of the language have? My guess is not really. I know that if you try to transcribe what you hear at that stage, it's extremely painful and error-prone. And what you realize then is that those boundaries are not that clear after all. Without understanding, your transcription will be poor because your speech segmentation it not really accurate.

What I'm not realizing is how reading alone is supposed to solve listening comprehension problems fully.

Because they are not "listening comprehension problems", they are just "comprehension problems". They appear when you listen and so you think they come from a lack of listening. But those problems are also there when you read, you just don't notice them because they are not blocking you. You can stop and work out the meaning. But working out the meaning means that you do not really understand. Once you read without stopping and have a good enough pronunciation, your listening will be good too.

The only thing I could do to "realize" that is to believe (take on faith) that excessive deliberate reading will just solve it sooner or later.

What do you want me to do? I tell you what I think, what you do with it is your problem. Their is no way I can prove it to you. This is not mathematics. What you can do maybe is try for a little while: listen less and read more. Or not, your choice.

One can, of course, have awful pronunciation and good listening comprehension.

Yes, but this is something different. This is more like when I hear a song in my head. It sounds perfect in my head but when I try to sing, the result is awful.

Here, what you have is a speaking problem. Which comes from a lack of pronunciation training at the beginning. This is a problem that should be addressed as soon as possible. When you read, ideally, you should be able to sound out reasonably well.

To learn oral pronunciation, I use Anki. I pick one chapter of an audiobook. Split it into short sentences, aligned the audio for each sentences, generates a bunch of cards for Anki, and repeat the hell out of it. At that stage I don't care about the meaning.

That part certainly help to develop a good sense of how the language sounds.

You can use glossika as an alternative (maybe).

One does not understand all English accents, though, at once by achieving some universal English comprehension.

Yes, but even a native speaker doesn't understand every accents. Is this really a problem? As a second language English learner myself I understand a wide range of accents and I never trained for it. What happens is for a few minutes I need to pay more attention. And then I get used to it essentially. I have all my comprehension supporting me, most accent don't resist for long.

And sure, you can find impenetrable accents, but native from my world don't understand them either. So why should I care. If one day I meet someone speaking with one of those accents, I will work on it but until then I have better things to do.

You get the aural input, but your brain hasn't been molded properly to get it, and you need to listen to do that.

It has, since you know how the language sounds and when you read you hear it. So yes you brain has already the right shape. It doesn't have to be precise down to the neuron, it just have to be close enough. Your brain treats what looks alike (to a degree) the same.

You need to listen a lot, because this process of molding the brain doesn't get perfect results from a few tries.

What few tries? You have been reading a lot, remember?

Also it gets easier and easier. After a while you know almost all the words in each sentence, and the one you still don't know kind of pop out making it easy to learn them.

And the brain still needs to learn to do all of that pattern recognizing job and gather words, phrases, the way they sound, etc. By being molded.

If you want, but all those things can be learn by reading, so.

I have a general idea of what "neural networks" are (or the illusion of it - which can't be dispelled by some simple "mold" analogy explanation).

Well, it's telling me that you don't. This "mold" analogy is at the heart of it.

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OM

[reineke]

What makes listening difficult?

[Serpent]

All that to say that what I think happened here is that by listening while reading you fixed your pronunciation (or some of it). And it's still not a listening problem, you could have used the Forvo method I described above and obtained the same result in maybe less time. But this is certainly less boring to read a book.

I had used short passages before (news, youtube, individual words). I also listened to music.
In my experience there's no substitute for listening to longer speech segments (30+ mins). I've had great results with Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, Croatian, Romanian.

[Dragon27]

My disagreement is about what cause what. In my opinion and for all the reasons I expressed in the previous posts, I think that most of the so called "listening problems" can be better explained once you realize they are more likely "comprehension problems", and/or "pronunciation problems" if you haven't worked on it from the beginning.

A huge chunk of it, no doubt. But again, not to the extent, that all of listening comprehension problems could be solved by just... reading it away.

So, I said a few hours because I didn't count. I don't know how many exactly. I'm sure it varies from language to language. So let's say 100 hours. Can we agree on that?

100 hours is certainly a lot. Depends on how one uses it, of course.

How is it different from your first language? You have never met someone with a slurry speech that forces you to give all your attention. After a while we just get used to it.

This is my native language. I've had LOTS of listening in my native language. Listening to people with extremely various pronunciation. I've had many cases, where I couldn't understand a person sitting right next to me and speaking on the subject I'm well versed in, no matter how much attention I've given to them. There has been a lot of opportunity to train my brain to listen better. I don't have that in my foreign languages.

So, it works the same with another language. If your comprehension is good enough you will be able to do the same. It will require some concentration for a little while and you will get used to it.

Sometimes it's not a little while. Accents could be very different and change your familiar phonemes in completely unexpected ways. I find it useful to read some explicit theoretical information about these accents, it helps me accept some of the changes and predict them.
And this "getting used to" is surely the process of training your listening skill for that accent, isn't it?

Not really. Those boundaries are purely artificial they don't exist, your brain doesn't need them. It's just a feeling you have.

Think about the word "bathroom" if tomorrow everyone decides to write and say "bath room" instead, do you think it will make any difference? As long as everyone agrees, it will not.

If you're talking about purely written words, then of course it doesn't have to coincide with phonetic words. And "bathroom" is one word in my opinion, whether it's written with space, hyphen or with no separators at all, that's just an orthography question (sometimes even personal preference).
In real speech things like "should not have" are usually perceived as one connected word (should'n'v), unless they are pronounced separately with emphasis.

Think about the word "une salle de bain" (in French), this is also one word, yet we write it with spaces. Do you think it's different from "bathroom"? It is not.

That's why I separate written word from a spoken one (which is real speech). Written language is definitely not the same as actual language (which is based in speech).

Yes, I'm aware of that. But are those boundaries the same boundaries that speakers of the language have? My guess is not really. I know that if you try to transcribe what you hear at that stage, it's extremely painful and error-prone. And what you realize then is that those boundaries are not that clear after all. Without understanding, your transcription will be poor because your speech segmentation it not really accurate.

I'm not striving for 100% accuracy from the beginning. At the beginning I need to at least get used to the rhythm of the language.
We teach our kids for a very long time to write properly in schools (basically, teach them a new "written" language and make them merge it with the one they already have - "spoken" language). A person, who can speak and use and understand the spoken language perfectly (being a native), but doesn't know how to write, would make all sorts of mistakes if you force him to transcribe his speech (teaching him some alphabet first).

Because they are not "listening comprehension problems", they are just "comprehension problems". They appear when you listen and so you think they come from a lack of listening. But those problems are also there when you read, you just don't notice them because they are not blocking you. You can stop and work out the meaning. But working out the meaning means that you do not really understand. Once you read without stopping and have a good enough pronunciation, your listening will be good too.

But that's not the case. People continuously complain about these problems - they can easily understand what is being spoken from the subtitles, easily understand the written text, at a glance, without slowing down to decipher it (people can get very adept at reading subtitles), but just can't hear it without it. There are many variations on this problem: a person can't recognize the spoken phrase, sees the text and understands it, listens to it again and still can't hear the phrase, or a person doesn't hear the sounds, reads the text, and then suddenly (having read the text) hears it properly, with all the sounds they've missed, but then goes to some other phrase and runs into the same listening comprehension problem.
I remember one time when I listened to the phrase multiple times and it sounded like absolute phonetical nonsense to me. I didn't have the text for the phrase. But I woke up the next morning and listened to it again and understood it immediately. And wondered how I didn't understand it earlier, it was so simple.

What do you want me to do? I tell you what I think, what you do with it is your problem. Their is no way I can prove it to you. This is not mathematics. What you can do maybe is try for a little while: listen less and read more. Or not, your choice.

It just flies in the face of my experience. Your experience may be different - you're a different person with different aptitudes.

I have all my comprehension supporting me, most accent don't resist for long.

Except the really weird ones (your "impenetrable accents"). They can stump a learner for quite some time. But steady and consistent practice will solve it eventually. The brain will learn to comprehend new aural input.

It has, since you know how the language sounds and when you read you hear it. So yes you brain has already the right shape. It doesn't have to be precise down to the neuron, it just have to be close enough. Your brain treats what looks alike (to a degree) the same.
...
What few tries? You have been reading a lot, remember?

You're essentially saying "learn to listen first and then read away". This first listening stage should include a lot of listening experience, so you still learn to listen. How does it not prove that listening is a skill? And you still will run into some difficult listening input later, but with all your reading experience it would be easier to train your brain to handle that. But not magically automatically get it at once.

If you want, but all those things can be learn by reading, so.

No, you should learn to listen first, you said it yourself. Only when you have good phonetic model (to sound out new words for yourself and hope these personal sound patterns will be close enough to the ones natives are using) you can go reading. When you encounter a word in real speech you will understand it (if it's not too garbled) and connect it to the word you already know, and your brain will hook on this success by rewiring its neural network to receive this new input.
It's like... when you know the rules of orthography and the script and you already have good reading skill, and you fly through the text with all the familiar words (and if an occasional word contains a typo you'll probably miss it, cause at that speed you won't pay attention to small details - most of the other letters are right), but then you run into a completely unfamiliar word with some different pattern of letters. It may contain letter combinations you already know, so you can read it relatively quickly, or some unexpected letter combinations (a foreign name or something), so you will have to bring to bear your orthographical knowledge, but either way, you slow down and read it, and your brain adds this new word (letter combination pattern) to its library (or molds itself, if that's how you prefer to call it), and you move on. You may have to encounter this word multiple times to solidify it in your brain (reading is much easier in this regard, though, when you read fast enough your inner articulation is suppressed to a certain extent, and good speed-readers can suppress inner articulation completely), but when you do, you just read it like any other word. You've trained your brain to read this particular word (react to this particular input) fast, and you should train your brain to hear and quickly understand the aural input too. It is much easier when you already have decent listening comprehension (which you achieve, according to your way of learning, before starting to read on an industrial scale). And it gets easier in the future with more listening exposure.
And still, you can always encounter this word pronounced in an unexpected manner and have to recalibrate your brain a little bit more. Listening is a skill, there's just no way around it.

[reineke]

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[olim21]

I had used short passages before (news, youtube, individual words). I also listened to music.

Was it listening? Or more like hearing?

When I talk about listening before reading, I mean very intensive listening. I generally train my pronunciation at the same time. So a lot of out loud repetitions, too. I use Anki for that part (full sentences with audio). If I look at the stats on my decks I see around 50 hours of training for one language.

After that I can mostly read. And listen from time to time to make sure my pronunciation has not shifted.

In my experience there's no substitute for listening to longer speech segments (30+ mins).

Well, there is if you trained correctly from the beginning. Understand that I'm not trying to dissuade anyone from listening, far from it. What I'm trying to make people realize is that most of the learning happens during reading. In my opinion (and experience), 50/50 is not necessary, you get the same result if not better with 90/10 or 80/20 if you prefer.

What I find a little surprising is that people are fighting me on this when that forum, and HTLAL before it, are full of failed experiments of people trying to learn just by listening. Is there even one success story?

Because if you listen without understanding, what are you supposed to learn? One solution to resolve this would be to lower the amount of vocabulary tremendously and increase the amount of context and repetition. Basically trying to recreate the situation you have when reading. And in that case you will be able to learn again. It will be slow, painful and boring but it will work. However that's not how I would like to learn, looks too much like torture to me.

It reminds me of one of the members here (don't remember his name, sorry), who described how he learned Thai and it worked quite well apparently. But that's very different from watching the news, listening to a podcast, or a movie.

I've had great results with Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, Croatian, Romanian.

I have no doubts it works.

--
OM

[olim21]

A huge chunk of it, no doubt. But again, not to the extent, that all of listening comprehension problems could be solved by just... reading it away.

Are you sure? Do you know or is this just your feeling? Because I do know. I tried both. I can compare.

My conclusion is that with a proper training at the beginning (~100 hours) and a very good reading comprehension, you will have a good listening comprehension.

Will that solve everything, will you be able to understand right away accents you never heard before? Of course not. But like you said yourself, you can't do it in your native language either. What do you expect here?

100 hours is certainly a lot. Depends on how one uses it, of course.

Yes, it is a lot. But Compared to the amount of reading you will have to do to develop your understanding to a level comparable to your native language, this is nothing.

This is my native language. I've had LOTS of listening in my native language. Listening to people with extremely various pronunciation. I've had many cases, where I couldn't understand a person sitting right next to me and speaking on the subject I'm well versed in, no matter how much attention I've given to them. There has been a lot of opportunity to train my brain to listen better.

So you are telling me that in your native language, with a lots of listening, lots of experience, comprehension and everything, you still can't understand, yet somehow you expect to do better with a second language?

I don't get it.

And this "getting used to" is surely the process of training your listening skill for that accent, isn't it?

Sure, but is it part of language learning? This is something you can do later when you already understand the language. When you have the best chance of success.

It looks to me that you think you should prepare yourself for every accents possible in the eventuality you will somehow, one day encounter such a speaker. This is kind of an endless task. Unless this is really your goal, I think this is futile. You are better off working on your comprehension (what words mean and how they are used in conjunction with other words), which will increase significantly your chance to understand an unknown accent.

And "bathroom" is one word in my opinion

Well, yes, I agree.

My point was that the concept of word if unclear making it difficult to know where those spaces should be put.

Think about creoles, that are created from partial knowledge of one or more "original" language. What you often see is fused words, two or more words from the "original" languages that have become one word in the new language. It happens because the first generation often doesn't read very well, so they don't know where those spaces are supposed to be, so they make up their own way of saying things that make sense to them.

It works because those spaces are arbitrary, they are there because we are used to think that way. But at the end of the day, there are no spaces.

That's why I separate written word from a spoken one (which is real speech). Written language is definitely not the same as actual language (which is based in speech).

Oh, that's what you meant earlier? Sorry I misunderstood. I thought you meant that the spoken language was the real language or something, while the written form was some sort of fake language. Which is not true.

I'm not striving for 100% accuracy from the beginning.

Of course not, who is? I'm not even sure it means something.

At the beginning I need to at least get used to the rhythm of the language.

I agree. No need for thousands upon thousands of hours for that.

A person, who can speak and use and understand the spoken language perfectly (being a native), but doesn't know how to write, would make all sorts of mistakes if you force him to transcribe his speech (teaching him some alphabet first).

Well, yeah. I was thinking about that too. Small details though, that person will have a low level understanding of the language. In other words they understand natively a small chunk of the language in comparison to other natives. Being native is not the same as having a good understanding. I don't know for you but I don't want that. This is not a good thing.

But that's not the case. People continuously complain about these problems - they can easily understand what is being spoken from the subtitles, easily understand the written text, at a glance, without slowing down to decipher it (people can get very adept at reading subtitles), but just can't hear it without it.

Exactly. I you read my first response to Serpent, you know I was one of them.

That problem is very common, sadly. And it comes from a difference between expectation and reality. You have trouble connecting what you hear with what you already know because your pronunciation is flawed in some way.

The other part of the explanation is that people tend to overestimate their reading comprehension because it is difficult to tell the difference when reading between a phrase you understand "natively" (for lack of a better word), and a phrase you understand only from the context, you know what it's supposed to mean, but you don't really understand it yet. The first kind of phrases cause no troubles when listening, the second kind are a problem. Note however that listening is still not the cause here, the real cause is lack of understanding. Those listening problems are symptoms that your pronunciation or comprehension is not good enough, and often both.

Except the really weird ones (your "impenetrable accents"). They can stump a learner for quite some time. But steady and consistent practice will solve it eventually. The brain will learn to comprehend new aural input.

As a language learner it makes not sense to worry about that kind of thing before you reach a native level. Even in your native language you can't do it...

You're essentially saying "learn to listen first and then read away". This first listening stage should include a lot of listening experience, so you still learn to listen.

Sure, we can agree on that if you want.

But this is a very small part of my learning. If I look at my Anki decks that I use for that purpose, it tells me that I trained for about 50 hours. And during that time I mostly repeat. I listen to the card, repeat, repeat, repeat until I can pronounce it decently, listen again to make sure my pronunciation is good enough, repeat a bunch of time, then go to the next card. I also listen to get used to the rhythm, intonation, etc for a few hours (let's say 10h). That's it. I could do more listening but it will essentially take away from my reading.

Only when you have good phonetic model (to sound out new words for yourself and hope these personal sound patterns will be close enough to the ones natives are using) you can go reading.

It's what I have been telling from the beginning, so yes. We just disagree on the most efficient way to get the same result. As far as I can tell my listening comprehension is at the same level than my reading comprehension. So what am I suppose to get from more listening?

Listening is a skill, there's just no way around it.

I have the impression that you can't separate the hearing part of listening and the comprehension part of it. If you remove comprehension from the equation, what you hear is noise, so what are you supposed to learn from noise beyond a few intonation patterns?

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OM

[olim21]

Since I don't know you I can't really judge and compare with what I know. But I have a few comments. I will try to be nice, however if you feel offended by some of them, feel free to ignore.

I've been able to read French books fairly easily for about a year now.

Just to be clear, here. It's not really about being able to, but more a question of level.

For example, I can read Finnish quite easily this days, but my vocabulary only cover 70-80% of the words of a random text still. So despite being able to read and understand quite a lot, my listening is still not very good, yet. I can read better, (or so it seems), because I can break some of the words I don't know into pieces that I do know, or use the context to infer the meaning of some other words, or reread to solve issues when I misunderstand.

But if you remove all the advantages that help me read better, my comprehension level is the same whether I read or listen. It has been this way from the beginning and when my reading improves, my listening improves with it.

I've also read out loud for various French people in order for them to criticize my pronunciation

I don't know why you need someone else to evaluate your pronunciation. Can't you do it by yourself? Because then you have to interpret what they mean. What do they mean by good pronunciation? Does that mean, they can understand you? Does that mean this is not that bad for an English speaker? Does that mean this is very impressive?

Although it's always nice to here, we can't really use it to judge anything, because we don't know what it means.

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OM

[tastyonions]

I don't why you need someone else to evaluate your pronunciation.

Because it is easy to fool yourself. Ever meet people who claim with seeming sincerity to have a good accent in a language, or not to have any problems with some aspect of a language, and then when you actually hear them speak it, they fall far short of their own description of their abilities? I certainly have. And I don't think that they're all a bunch of liars out to impress. Mostly they're fooling themselves.

[olim21]

Because it is easy to fool yourself.

Why? You can't compare between what you hear and what you pronounce? I can. I'm not talking about fine details like accent, or intonation, I'm talking about basic pronunciation which is the biggest part with the biggest impact.

My comment was more in the context of this thread, though. It seems to me that too often people use that native thing as some kind of proof. But here, where I don't know any of the protagonists, it doesn't add to the discussion.

Ever meet people who claim with seeming sincerity to have a good accent in a language, or not to have any problems with some aspect of a language, and then when you actually hear them speak it, they fall far short of their own description of their abilities? I certainly have.

I can't say that I have. You can always find oddballs, I guess. What I have seen very often however is comments below a youtube video telling the guy in the video how amazing he is, speaking flawlessly, with no accent, like a native, when I would have described the performance as crappy at best.

And I don't think that they're all a bunch of liars out to impress. Mostly they're fooling themselves.

Sure, maybe they are. But what about most us?

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OM