german2k01 wrote:I would love to read about your experiences regarding developing good listening skills obviously apart from interacting with natives when living in your target country. What else can you do as a learner more so as a self-independent learner? How did you approach it? or do you think with time (i mean in years) it will get better? or do you think using "the right" resources/tools is key to developing good listening skills? Strategies? Active listening (working with transcriptions), repetitive listening? Increasing your overall vocabulary perhaps?
Boring stuff first. Time is the main factor, but not just time alone. Time spent in many sorts of repetitive interactions, for the sake of familiarity. There's also the social and work situation to consider, or if a person is perhaps a student. All of these mean the difference between lots of real-life input and not much real-life input at all. If, e.g. a person sits in an apartment, doesn't go out much and only opens the door to the postman, it will be slow.
Stuff to do. I don't know if "the right resources" exist. Before it was trendy I already listened to music in the language and tried to learn the words. So back in the past, the late 80s and 90s, I was e.g. listening to 'Cantopop' (borrowed from a Chinese girlfriend) and I genuinely liked and enjoyed it. You have to have that actual enjoyment and then it's not 'work', but passion. I've done it with with German and Dutch, Indonesian and Spanish.
I posted a reply to garyb's log today about the use of media which is less taxing. Have a look at it. If you can find less taxing media like that with content you REALLY find absorbing, rather than pretending to be interested in it for 'learning purposes', then it makes a great difference.
In the country though, as you are, I don't think you should be relying very heavily upon media for majority results. Before replying to you I tried to think hard about how much non-course media I actually used for German and Dutch, so as not to give a false reply. The truth is it wasn't that much in comparison to how much I've used for say Cantonese in the past and then Indonesian and Spanish much later on, because I am not in those countries. To my mind heavy media use is for when you
can't get much of the real thing.
However I listened to the news (TV or radio) in both German and Dutch and I do so in Spanish. Just one source, the main TV or radio news, every morning and evening for the TL. Catching the bulletin repeats for a second chance at listening/understanding. I chose a couple of TV programmes and watched them. Just those, no others. I also threw myself into both German and Dutch films from the past looking for the gems, asking people what the classics were. Some of these films are now in my own lists. So I suppose it's about digging deep into the shared popular culture, the things everyone speaking the language as a first language knows and loves. TV is different now, because you can get it on demand and sit there binging on multiple episodes over the space of two weeks. I don't know if that's a bad or good thing.
Then there is study. What can I say about it? People can do it or eschew it. I've always done it. Everyone can dispute until the cows come home about its effectiveness, but after ten or twenty years has passed and you're already easily comfortable enough in the language it will be still be impossible to know if study was responsible or if it was media or creating opportunities for interactions. Likely all of them play a role and I take a
Pascal's Wager view of it. I hammered the audio for the course
Levend Nederlands and also the audio for the German Linguaphone course. I also do coursebook exercises, all of them, in whatever book I'm using.
Stuff I didn't use up until recently:
Anki or any SRS. For Dutch in particular I did no type of flashcard thing at all. Not even regular lists. In old exercise books I found about four short lists. What I did the most was reading books and accruing vocabulary. Same as I've done for any language I've ever attempted. And in the past it was the main activity aside from trying to find audio material. I have nothing against Anki, I use it, but it's clearly possible to learn a language without it, so I'm guessing it's just speeding things up or whatever. The jury is out on it and I do it because I think it is useful and anything that increases vocabulary is useful.
Conscious shadowing. I say 'conscious' because thirty or twenty years ago I didn't know about anything called 'shadowing'. However like a lot of people I copied people speaking. Thinking, hey I like the way that fellow speaks German, so sort of copied his style of speaking. I used to copy people from the Belgian news (though I also had real life examples too). All of this is dual-function really. To do 'shadowing' you have to listen to the people speaking and therefore you're listening.
Some last bits and pieces... I have to reiterate 'time'. It's a fairly long game and longer/shorter for different people for who-knows-why? So many factors feeding into this. Boldness of character leading to interaction? Better memory? Good ear? Studied a lot? However the outcome is that anyone actually studying and using a language with bone fide intent will eventually be able to use it more comfortably. It's surely impossible to hear the same sorts of things day-in and day-out without them becoming familiar. But also... you won't learn everything and what you learn is always only parts of things because there is so much. It's why I focus initially on 'ordinary language'. To want to talk (and understand other people talking) about e.g. 'science' or labour economics of programming languages is a speciality area to be developed on top of this 'ordinary language' base, but you need the base first. Which means several years of just chit-chat. Learning how other people say certain things and collecting these to use. That's what listening is to me.