I sampled the large number of the podcast that people suggested for me. Most of the podcasts weren't really up my street. I don't feel personally that a political event is actually a historical event necessarily. I am a bit of a foodie so the suggestions for the food podcast was really quite good. I do appreciate all the other suggestions it's just they didn't seem really to fit for me.
I have been speaking outside of the forum to quite a few polyglots. I've been asking questions about listening comprehension. I have a real problem with listening comprehension and I'm not really sure why. I suspect that it is a lot of different factors combined. For example my hearing isn't particularly good after a number of years working on jet aircraft. Another problem of course is that I don't do it enough. I used to watch a lot of television last year it has tailed off recently.
The suggested corrections for this problem included a lot of hard work. At the moment because of my disillusionment with languages a lot of hard work doesn't really appeal to me. This presents a conundrum which I'm not actually sure what I'm going to do to solve. Although I don't mind doing the work for Italian I certainly am not prepared to do that amount of work for French.
Someone told me recently that they were amazed at how far I gotten with French since it was a language that I actively dislike. The suggestion was to switch back to Italian and throw French away. This line of thinking appeals to me however the problem is that I still have the sunken cost fallacy in my head. Another issue is that I have actually met the odd French person that I wouldn't mind speaking to. It isn't that much of a problem because they all want to speak English.
Mandarin and Setswana are still fun languages because they're in the beginner's stages. That honeymoon period when it all seems to be going wonderfully and your learning lots and lots. French and Italian however have me in the intermediate doldrums. The horrible place where you need to work really really hard to see any significant increase in ability. Another issue which seems to be derailing my language learning is a very stupid reason. It is because I have too much free time! You would think that if you had a lot of free time then your language learning could progress quite rapidly. However my problem is that I'm not using this time for language learning.
The reason I'm not using this time wisely is because I have no structure around which to work at the moment. Previously when commuting I always had 2 hours a day at least where I had time to myself to spend on language learning. Now because I don't have that structure and I have to mplement a structure for myself. I haven't been using the time efficiently. However, while I have done lots of languages exchanges recently these don't seem to help in the improvement in other areas. Many people have noted more fluidity in my speech in both French and Italian but this doesn't help with things like listening comprehension. I do understand better when I'm speaking one to one with someone but not as well as I would like. And I certainly don't deal well with television broadcasts.
Some of the suggestions which I have received have been.
Transcriptions
Pronunciation practice
Vocabulary expansion
And of course that old tired worn out advice of "just listen more".
So basically I don't know what I'm going to do. What I know I must do in order to improve is set myself up a schedule and maintain a more rigorous application of time management. I need to spend sometime being a bit more pedantic and a bit more rigorous in my methods.
So if anybody else has got any advice about getting out of the intermediate doldrums or improving listening comprehension I'd be very grateful for any advice. And some point in the future Dave and I might make a podcast about this very topic and it would be nice to actually have some answers.
Just a quick update on what I've done this week. Not a lot. A large number of the language exchanges I had planned have fallen through mostly because people had other things to do, which was fine. So this was actually a very strange week for me because I only did two language exchanges. Where as normally I would do two language exchanges a day minimum.
