german2k01 wrote:In regards to listening to 100 audiobooks in Spanish. How did you go about it? How long did it take you to achieve this feat? How was the ratio between unassisted listening vs L-R? Average books/month. Total listening time of those 100 audiobooks combined(recorded somewhere?)
I am thinking about doing it with my German learning. I will be recording the title and audiobook duration.
The timing of your question is excellent as I am deciding on how to pursue a similar idea most naturally in German now. With Spanish, sourcing the audio material was a tougher consideration. Youtube, iVoox and Librivox were major audiobook sources for me. The German landscape for the same is a bit different as I understand it. I believe to max out audiobook options, audible.de, Youtube and one or two of the major paid subscription sources for German audiobooks will likely do the trick. The key element may be making sure there is plenty of variety to maintain interest and having a broad selection really helps.
Now and back then, I pre-load(ed) my listening by downloading all of my audiobooks to .mp3 or .mp4 format and use
Smart Audiobook Player as my primary listening application with Kindle+Audible (Whispersync now if available) for material sourced from Amazon. I use over-ear headphones with a 60-hour charge to make it where I can listen under almost any life circumstance such as doing work with semi-loud equipment, exercising in various forms, long commutes with road-noise, and mountain hiking without an internet connection. I would often load 100+ hours at a time to make sure I did not run out and that the transition between one book and another would not involve much administration and decision making time. I remember it being important for me to have a good 5-10 books loaded so that I could choose freely and wasn't forced into a given book selection that I might not want. Thinking back on it, I also found it very helpful to have both podcasts and audiobooks loaded side by side so that neither skill area would slip and I could choose the most appealing option in the moment.
If text is desired as an accompaniment, I like to use .epub files and
Calibre to convert to a .mobi file if wanting to send to Kindle and to .txt for counting words precisely and making parallel texts. Lately, I haven't used .pdf files very often since they scale poorly compared to .epub on my smartphone.
How long it took me in Spanish? More than six months as I recall: 3-4 months as an initial intense burst followed by a slow blended version alternating podcasts + audiobooks. I remember being able to leisurely consume an average-length audiobook in a few days and not feel rushed at all. Almost all of that listening was unassisted. Given the length of an average audiobook, it likely amounted to more than 600 hours of listening in total, but I don't have exact data to support that. I remember getting to a point where most audiobooks felt too easy and I needed to switch to podcasts to keep the difficulty level up.
With Spanish, listening was a much greater hurdle compared to other areas of language competency for me and that explains a lot of why I put in so much effort with audiobook listening. With German, I have a much more balanced repertoire of skills and am as tempted to improve via reading hard texts as I am by listening (not to mention working on my non-existent writing/speaking skillset and an ever-dwindling grammar disaster-set).
I saw you mention Dostojewski in another thread and am glad you found the plot interesting. I had been considering the same several books and may end up incorporating them into my listening as well, even if they are not perfectly matched to my current listening ability. I like that they are all Whisperysnc compatible and relatively affordable. It might be the right moment for Crime and Punishment soon. Recording title and audiobook duration is likely a good idea for me as well, even if some of my future listening is not at 100% attention and involves a strategic alternation between text and audio.