smallwhite wrote:Thanks, but I mean real experience rather than guesses.
Well, anyone who'd pay for an expensive B2 exam and then try to pass it on 10-20h listening no matter whether intensive or extensive is excessively optimistic in my eyes, so I can't help you with "real experiences" like that
In fact, I doubt that anyone will be able to answer your question if you discard guesses, since most people wouldn't consider burning money on experiments like that. And mock exams tend to be different from the real ones - sometimes actually more difficult.
Yes, my guesses are just guesses, but I gave you some numbers on real world applications and those say a lot more about listening comprehension than what's required in exams, at least in my opinion. What does it really say to be able to dissect some 5min "radio interview" about some high brow topic, which is obviously just some text read by voice actors who make an effort to enunciate reasonably well? Real people don't enunciate well and rarely speak in full sentences. They also leave out essential information or there is a car passing in just the wrong moment. Maybe 10-20h of intensive listening can prepare you for a B2 exam where intensive listening to pristine recordings is all that's required. It's hardly enough for the real world though where things are much more messy and complicated. I think taking some complicated movie as a measure says probably more about listening comprehension than a B2 mock exam.
So one more datapoint along those lines: I could understand the movie La Vénus à la fourrure almost completely, 97-98%, after 250h of extensive listening - mostly dubbed series and France culture - and that's a movie that changes registers every couple of minutes with high brow literary language and low brow slang and insults. One probably wouldn't run into a real world situation out on the street as difficult as this - hardly anyone switches registers from one minute to the next - and it's unlikely that something like this would come up in a B2 exam. And I would personally think that one can pass a C2 exam in Spain, watch 1000h of TV and still not understand most slang in the Argentinian movie Nueve Reinas. My husband is Argentinian and only understands half of the slang himself! We don't have to go to such extremes though - take any Ricardo Darín movie where he speaks as if he has a shoe in his mouth and you have a better measurement for your skills than a B2 mock exam. And understanding such a movie still doesn't mean that you will understand that old man on the street who randomly starts talking to you about bus time tables without mentioning that he's talking about buses at all. My husband fails at that even as a native speaker
And the ultimate test is of course 3 drunk friends in a pub trying to talk about 2 different topics at once!