Listening practice

[poru]

Hi all,

Sorry if this has been discussed widely elsewhere, but I ran a quick search and didn't come up with anything useful. I am wondering how everyone goes about listening practice in a foreign language. What do you listen to? How often? What do you do when you're listening? And so on. Basically, I am looking to get a better handle on listening strategies.

Every day going to and from work, I listen to some language mp3 files. I try to update the material regularly, I add hard material, I add basic material, and essentially I switch it up every day. Depending on what my goals are for the month, I'll listen to something according to those. Usually Japanese, Mandarin, or German.

However, I am really looking to maximize my listening and improve on it. I have searched scholarly articles and forums around the web and have only found a handful of solutions. My personal favorite is manipulating the audio speed to make it slower or faster. But beyond this, I really don't have any other listening strategies so to speak. If I am at home at my desk, I like listening to something with a transcript. First I just listen to it freely and then I'll listen a second time with a transcript and read along. However, this is not feasible when I am walking outside.

I am wondering what I can do to improve my listening as I make my commute to and from work every day? I am hoping this can generate an interesting discussion helpful to all people not just me.

Thanks in advance.

[Jbean]

I found it more helpful to read the transcript, put it away, and then listen. I can't listen and read at the same time and when I try, reading gets all the attention. Other than that, I replay difficult passage several times until I understand them.

[coldrainwater]

With respect to accumulating podcast listening hours, I have a couple of tricks that might help. Rather than thinking about times where I can squeeze a target language into my busy workday, I plan on having it playing much like I would music throughout the day. That way my default state is as close to on as it is off with respect to listening. Listening doesn't get the short straw using the approach I take.

To get this going, I do the following:

• Pre-load a variety of podcasts on the smartphone.
• Attach smartphone to forearm/arm to make an 'amazon one-click' type of experience.
• Listen while falling asleep and especially while taking naps.
• Train 1-2 hours per day and always play the target language while working out.
• Pause any time there is a need for full focus on work tasks.
• Conversely, listen when working tasks are unavoidably mundane or repetitive.
• Go with one-ear listening when needed. Great for times that you 'might need to hear', but can mostly listen to your target language.
• I delete after first listen knowing that I have an unlimited podcast supply.
• Intensive listening covered separately.

I have an interest in academic and university level material so I make sure to include domain-specific choices so that I have time to get used to the vocabulary of that arena. For example, if I want the field of psychology, I might front-load 50 hours of psychology podcasts just to make sure I am comfortable with the jargon and have heard it enough times for it not to sound so foreign. Next related cast then sounds a bit easier and I make telenova/tv styled progress (different but similar game).

[M23]

I am wondering how everyone goes about listening practice in a foreign language. What do you listen to? How often? What do you do when you're listening? And so on. Basically, I am looking to get a better handle on listening strategies.

This is going to depend on what stage you are at with each language. For Spanish (where I am at an intermediate level) I will listen to the news or music and I will try to pick out every single word, and repeat things if possible. If I am listening to something I can repeat I will re-listen to blurry areas (i.e. parts of a sentence that just sounded like mush to my ear, and that I cannot pick out individual words) and try to get what I am missing. If it is music, and I cannot get what the lyric is, I will look it up and re-listen to try to get my ear to distinguish what is being said.

On the German side of things - where I am a total n00b - I mainly just try to give my ear more exposure to the sound of the language, and try to get my ear to isolate words so that it is not just auditory soup. It is hard to look up words when your ear cannot isolate it so that it is repeatable. I try to listen to sounds and pair them with letters to see if I can spell something just by hearing it. I listen for dropped parts of a word (e.g. "hab" instead of "habe"). I will check what I think I hear against lyrics to make sure my ear is picking things up right. I will try to pick out words that I know or just learned, and often if a new word suddenly comes to the foreground in something I have been listening to I will try to see if I can get more of the sentence that surrounds the word to see if I can repeat or understand what is being said.

In short, for beginner level listening I work on getting my ears used to how the language sounds, and working on getting my ear to distinguish words in the stream of foreign sounds that I am hearing. In the later stages I am drilling down more and trying to add more detail so that the task of listening becomes more automatic.

Really quantifying this into "what I do" is hard because I am applying some abstract skills that I picked up by playing music, so I apologize for not having something more concrete for you.

[aokoye]

What has worked for me is similar to what Morgana said - I have watched a ton of TV and documentaries in German. I don't have any numbers but let's just say I used to use shows on ZDF (a German broadcaster) to procrastinate. I still do but not nearly to the extent that I did even a few years ago. I also occasionally listen to podcasts, but that probably takes up no more than 5% of the German I listen to.
All of what I watch that isn't on Youtube is aimed at native speakers - the only thing that isn't aimed at L2 speakers, Youtube or not, is Deutsch mit Marija. While I do have a high level of German I think I started doing this when I was probably at A2 level. Almost none of the shows/movies I watch/watched are dubbed but that's because I don't actually like dubbing, no matter how well it's been done. There are a few exceptions but by and large my preference in any language is subtitles.
When I was a beginner I would focus on material that was easy for me because I knew the subject matter well in English - this meant watching a lot of cooking shows. Yes TV does often give you that crutch of seeing what they're talking about which is a pro and a con, but given how much I can understand when talking to L1 German speakers (in person or on the radio) it's clearly been useful. Again, almost all of my listening "practice" has been watching TV and documentaries and I've never been intentional about it. Engaged yes, but I've never focused on it as a learning tool, rather a source of entertainment in the same way English TV can be a source of entertainment for me. The only times I have trouble understanding what someone is saying occur because I don't know the definition of a word or phrase which is more an issue of vocabulary acquisition not of listening.

I think speeding up audio is an interesting idea but I can't imagine it being any more useful than just listening to material aimed at L1 speakers. What exactly are you trying to accomplish by speeding it up? I guess my suggestion is find something you like and listen/watch it a lot. I know, not academic in the least though I'm sure there are a number of studies out there (behind paywalls).

[aaleks]

I’ve not had any serious problem with listening itself. Usually if I know a word I’ll be able to hear it in a flow of speech. Unknown words, mental translation into my native language were the things which usually hindered my listening comprehension. In case with vocabulary I guess everyone has a preferable approach to build and expand it (mine is reading). To fight off a mental translation I’ve used a sort of “mental shadowing”, i.e. while listening to or watching something I mentally repeat the English words I hear, which leaves no “room” in my head for any translation.
And, of course, I’ve listened really a lot of native materials.

[galaxyrocker]

I found it more helpful to read the transcript, put it away, and then listen. I can't listen and read at the same time and when I try, reading gets all the attention. Other than that, I replay difficult passage several times until I understand them.

See, I'm the exact opposite. When I was really working on my Irish listening, I would listen to the segment first, picking up what I could. Then I'd read the transcript and listen again, making sure I understood everything. Then I'd keep repeating reading/listening until I could understand everything without the transcript. By understand I mean parse all the words; I didn't worry about meaning as much as picking up everything. Later on, I started making my own transcripts before checking the official one.

But I found it was always best to listen first, to get a basic idea of where I was without the transcript and to avoid using it as a crutch.

[jeff_lindqvist]

With respect to accumulating podcast listening hours, I have a couple of tricks that might help. Rather than thinking about times where I can squeeze a target language into my busy workday, I plan on having it playing much like I would music throughout the day./.../
To get this going, I do the following:(...)

Wow, this is what I call a hardcore listening approach! Your post is an echo of AJATT.

[IronMike]

I listen to an Esperanto podcast to/from work (pola ret-radio). For Russian, I listen to my work colleagues.

[buylow12]

For intensive listening practice I highly recommend GLOSS. It's a free website built by the US government for people to practice listening and reading comprehension from anywhere in the world. It's meant for state department employees, intelligence agents, diplomats, and just any government employees who are being taught a language. It's however is free for anyone to use.

You can find it here https://gloss.dliflc.edu. For some reason I always get a warning message for some reason (government spying, lol?) but there's nothing wrong with it. The listening exercises have a several minute clip that you listen to in parts and answer questions and then at the end you listen to the whole thing. It's incredible listening practice. They are sorted by levels. I started at 1 and each time it got fairly easy I moved up. There are lessons for like 80 languages with the more popular languages having 100+ lessons.

You can also go to the main page at http://www.dliflc.edu and then click on "online learning ". They have many more resources here including an accent library for several languages, the Spanish one contains 100 recordings with each one recorded in a neutral accent and ten regional accents. They also have a collection of phone conversations in multiple accents. It was very useful to prepare before I went to Ecuador.

As far as extensive listening, for me, lots and lots of documentaries in Spanish on YouTube.