Rdearman 2016-24 You Can't Have Your Kate and Edith Too.

[rdearman]

OK, I've gotten to a computer so I can give a longer answer to some of the posts. I've been studying French and Italian for 10-15 years and I'm stuck forever in the intermediate loop. I don't know an official level, Diag tests put me about A1+ and Zenmonkey figures I'm about B1/2 after a couple of hour long conversations. I read very well in French for two reasons, a ton of cognates, and a ton of reading. I don't read so well in Italian because I've not read as much, although I can still read pretty comfortably in Italian. I understand spoken Italian better than French. I believe this is for 2 reasons. The Italians don't swallow their words and mumble so much and I have watched a lot of Italian TV without sub-titles.

To me you seem to be looking at your french skills as a glass half-empty rather than half-full. You have reading, listening and speaking skills in french that are imperfect, but you're not french so they should be imperfect.

Yes, you're right. But the reason for my frustration is my expectation is after more than a decade in both languages I would be able to watch a fecking TV show.

But if time with french is winding you up, then absolutely spend time with italian instead.

I'm actually frustrated with both, I kept bringing up Italian in that post simply because I was thinking of dropping everything except one language, and since I started with Italian I would like to just get somewhere.

I should add that TVMonde thinks my overall level of French is borderline A2-B1. My understanding of just spoken French is probably B1-B2.

It measures your ability?

Whoops, I realized it was years and changed my response but you were too fast for me!

LOL. Don't worry.

[DaveAgain]

I should add that TVMonde thinks my overall level of French is borderline A2-B1. My understanding of just spoken French is probably B1-B2.

It measures your ability?

They have a mock TCF test on their website.

[zenmonkey]

But the reason for my frustration is my expectation is after more than a decade in both languages I would be able to watch a fecking TV show.

I get this. I really do, I've been here 8-10 years actively learning German, tested for B2 and still at least half the shows I'm lost. There is even one show were I'm looking up every other sentence (Charite). I know part of it is sound clipping off of the TV, but it is still really frustrating.

[jeff_lindqvist]

Can I make a suggestion for something you can try for two weeks and see if it helps create some automatisms? Take Pimsleur or Glossika or FSI and go through 30 min in the morning and 30 min at night of pure old listen and repeat, listen and repeat. Something not too easy but that forces you to produce. Really just learn those sentences and make them come out right. BUT REALLY SPEAK OUT LOUD LOUDLY LIKE LoudyMacLoudy!

If it doesn't help, sure go watch movies silently.

And how exactly would this help my listening comprehension?

On a minimalistic phoneme level, I've heard some people say that you can't produce what you can't hear. Others say that you can't hear sounds you can't produce. The chicken or the egg? Who is right? Both?

I don't know to what extent this really applies to language learning, but from my music experience, I'm better at processing what I hear if I'm also able to play it myself. I think there is at least something to the idea of skillsets reinforcing each other.

As Zenmonkey said, you can at least try it for two weeks.

[javier_getafe]

... but I have always been supposing it is part of the learning process, unless you actually live abroad in the country of your target language.

I own B2 certificated level of english after 6 years studying hard (roughly 15 hours every week between class, studying book, listenning, anki words and so on) and still is impossible to me to understand films or tv shows without captions in English. The most of time, when watching an easy film, as yesterday (Black Panther) I have the feeling that I don't need the subtitles, therefore I switch off the subtitles only to see that again I am not able to follow the conversations. Frustrating!!

Perhaps, and this is only my self-opinion, when you fall down in the learning plateau, one of the thing that you need is to know if you is improving or not, in order to avoid this kind of depressing situations.

Maybe you should try to assess yourself, through any site in internet from time to time.

[rdearman]

I'm thinking about doing a little experiment this year. Because I'm working away from home for the next 12 months, I have ample opportunity to watch television shows in my hotel room. My wife is obviously not interested in watching French or Italian television or films without subtitles. When I'm away I do have the evenings to watch whatever I want. I've done some calculations and think I could probably watch 4.5 hours 4 nights a week. Also I have a 4 hour drive there and back again. So I believe that it is easily possible for me to watch 800 hours of Italian television or listen to audio books.

So I've worked out that there is 42 weeks until Christmas. If during this time I spent the evenings in the hotel watching Italian television and listening to audiobooks in my car then I could easily go over 800 hours. I'm targeting 800 hours because that has come up recently in a thread as the threshold for a listening comprehension.

I'm thinking that this will probably be extensive listening not intensive listening. And the reason that I have selected Italian rather than French is because I have literally hundreds of AVI files in Italian with no subtitles. With French it is a little too easy to switch over and read subtitles.

Now I realise there's a drawback with this which is that I'm not speaking writing or Reading. Which means I'm going to have issues with vocabulary. But time is a problem for me because if I take out an hour or two to read then I wouldn't hit the 800 hour target.

So before I commence on this little experiment I would like to try and gather some advice. Do you think I should try to do 600 hours of TV and 200 hours of Reading for example? Or do reading and television 50/50? If you had this idea and these constraints what would you do?

[gsbod]

I don't think you'll need 800 hours.

If it was me, I would aim for about 1.5 hours of TV a night and if I'm not too tired a bit of vocabulary or grammar study. Also some repeated listening and repeating with short excerpts where I have transcripts, which I use to make sure that I understand everything. The TV listening is extensive, but occasionally if the plot seems to hang on a word that I can't figure out I'll look it up. That's basically how I learned to follow Japanese TV dramas, building on the foundation I already had through "traditional" textbook study etc.

[zenmonkey]

If I was doing that type of undertaking I’d try to stack in mostly massive listening as an experiment and I’d throw in some advanced learning material like Assimil Perfectionnement or sound-only Anki cards to try to stay in an active listening mode. Personally I probably couldn't effectively listen for 4+ hrs every night / 4 days /for a year. Commit to 6 weeks, see what’s up.
I’d spend a lot of time selecting material that was “hard but not too hard” for this and try to go from 60-70% subtitles in L1 to some scheme of subtitles in L2 to then none ... mixed thoughts about subtitles but a big factor is to reduce the level of frustration you are currently experiencing...

[StringerBell]

My suggestion is instead of spending that whole time watching 4.5 hours of TV in Italian, reduce that a bit and substitute some reading. Even if it's only half an hour, I think it will make a difference. You could do the listening extensively, and the reading intensively.

And if you are more interested in getting a decent level of conversational Italian, I'd focus more on listening to podcasts in the car instead of audiobooks, and I'd spend the reading allotment on articles, not novels...basically, not focusing on literary stuff that's heavy on passato remoto in the narration, something that is written closer to how people speak. You probably already know that I am a big fan of the articles on Efficacemente for this purpose, but it could be any kind of blog that interests you. It could even be Twitter feeds or Instagram posts in Italian. This is what I did, and it worked really well. If you want some podcast recommendations, let me know.

[Brun Ugle]

I think you’ll do anything to get out of a few hours of actual study.