French listening skills still virtually non-existent

[Sayonaroo]

I think your listening skills are virtually non-existent because you barely listened to French compared to your native language. As others have said, you just have to put in the time. I think even mass passive listening could make a significant difference. Also when you do massive listening be sure to mix it up whether it's the playback speed (ie playing the 24 hour french news at 1.5x speed from time to time or the content. )

If you want to experience fast results you can try this exercise (after doing it you'll definitely hear whatever it is better than the first time around but there's still no guarantee you'll understand it 100%). People recommend using VLC player for adjusting the playback speed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearni ... ench_help/

copy paste from reddit

I devised another method, much less involved, here's the rough outline.

1. Read the transcript to a podcast/GLOSS-lesson/anything else really, write down all new words on paper and translate them
2. Read along as you listen to the audio
3. Slow the audio down to 80% speed and listen to it with your eyes closed
4. Speed it up to 120% and read along while it plays
5. Slow it down to 90% and listen eyes closed
6. Speed it up to 150% and read along
7. Listen to it eyes closed at normal speed, at this point you should understand almost everything

[badger]

copy paste from reddit

I devised another method, much less involved, here's the rough outline.

1. Read the transcript to a podcast/GLOSS-lesson/anything else really, write down all new words on paper and translate them
2. Read along as you listen to the audio
3. Slow the audio down to 80% speed and listen to it with your eyes closed
4. Speed it up to 120% and read along while it plays
5. Slow it down to 90% and listen eyes closed
6. Speed it up to 150% and read along
7. Listen to it eyes closed at normal speed, at this point you should understand almost everything

that's the much *less* involved method?! ye gods

[aokoye]

I think your listening skills are virtually non-existent because you barely listened to French compared to your native language.

It's far more complex than that. If listening to an L2 in comparable amounts to an L1 was the primary way people were able to gain listening comprehension in their L1, I and most people would have terrible listening comprehension in their L2(s). Does the OP need to listen to more French? Yes, of course. Does it need to be somehow coming even kind of close to the amount of their L1 that they've listened to since they were in utero? No.

For what it's worth, my German listening comprehension skyrocketed when I found a few shows that I liked to watch and started watching them in my spare and not so spare time (I would use it to procrastinate). That occured over the span of maybe 7 months - within the first year of my studying German as an adult. I'm currently attempting to figure out how to do this with French as well but am having a bit more trouble with the shows because of the apparent lack of non-region restricted content that aren't fictional television shows on Netflix. Essentially I need a French version of ZDF (no, no Arte). No - I will not be watching hours of Peppa Pig

[DaveAgain]

I'm currently attempting to figure out how to do this with French as well but am having a bit more trouble with the shows because of the apparent lack of non-region restricted content that aren't fictional television shows on Netflix. Essentially I need a French version of ZDF (no, no Arte). No - I will not be watching hours of Peppa Pig

What sort of programmes do you watch on ZDF?

[Kraut]

Are these geo-blocked?

https://www.alsace20.tv/Live.html

https://www.lachainenormande.tv/

https://canal9.ch/direct/
there seem to be French subtitles, at least this one has them:
https://canal9.ch/les-centres-scolaires ... e-romande/

https://www.viavosges.tv/Direct.html

[Flickserve]

I find listening to Mandarin Chinese rather difficult.

One day after getting fed up of understanding not much, I decided to improve listening skills. I had already been listening to the radio almost everyday for over half an hour for a year for passive listening.

I tried the dictation method. I.e. listen to a sentence many many times over. It was a failure due to my own lack of vocabulary.

I happened to making anki cards from some dialogue and its transcript. It entailed making a .srt file so each sentence would have the exact start and finish time of each sentence. A five minute dialogue would take me just under an hour to process as there were many repetitions to get the timing exactly right. Over the six weeks, I did this daily without online lessons nor anything else. When coming back to lessons, my online teachers remarked on improvements in listening, speaking and sentence construction. After a long break, I recently came back to this exercise regularly and I do feel listening comprehension is better again.

I don't spend endless hours watching material I cannot understand. It may work for some people but I don't find any joy in that.

[Flickserve]

Hi.

I would be grateful for some motivational advice.

I have been learning French, seriously, now for about a year and do not seem to have made any real improvement as far as my listening skills go.

My reading is getting pretty good, now. I can read articles from "20 minutes" and certainly understand the majority of what is being said. I also feel that my writing is not too bad and I feel that I could probably "get by" in terms of speaking.

Despite all this, I just cannot seem to understand any natively spoken French. Even speech that is slowed down and intended for foreign learners, seems just too difficult.

I often obtain transcripts and find that I can read it with little problem, so it is not the case that I just do not have a wide enough vocabulary.

It also is not the case that I hear a word that I recognise but am not fast enough to remember what it is in English.

It just seems to be the case that I am hearing noise and my brain just struggles to decipher the sound into words that I know.

I have made particular attempts to improve but nothing seems to help.

......

Given that I also have a few years of learning French at school (though I sadly dropped it in favour of doing my GCSE in German), I am starting to find it very frustrating that I still cannot watch and understand anything.

Any pointers would be much appreciated.

I think a year with that vocabulary should be pretty good as a springboard. What you can do is reallocate the proportions of time to each learning activity. For instance, I allocate something like 2/3 of my language time to listening practice. I remind language partners to send me some voice messages instead of just texting and drop them if they don't comply or maybe use glossika for listening skills (Listen before reading the sentence). The other day, I analysed a single sentence from a video on my PC. That one sentence that took me around 5-10 minutes to dissect out and work out where he dropped some consonants and dropped words. Actually, I think I learnt more from that one sentence than spending 20 minutes watching the whole video.

[aokoye]

Are these geo-blocked?

https://www.alsace20.tv/Live.html

https://www.lachainenormande.tv/

https://canal9.ch/direct/
there seem to be French subtitles, at least this one has them:
https://canal9.ch/les-centres-scolaires ... e-romande/

https://www.viavosges.tv/Direct.html

All of those work! Thank you so much! It also looks like https://www.6play.fr isn't geo-blocked.

[aokoye]

I'm currently attempting to figure out how to do this with French as well but am having a bit more trouble with the shows because of the apparent lack of non-region restricted content that aren't fictional television shows on Netflix. Essentially I need a French version of ZDF (no, no Arte). No - I will not be watching hours of Peppa Pig

What sort of programmes do you watch on ZDF?

Typically 37 Grad, ZDFzoom, and various cooking shows.

[golyplot]

The geo-blocking is definitely an issue with French compared to German (and Dutch). For some reason, there's lots of German and Dutch public television online, but almost everything French is geo-blocked. IIRC, I ended up mostly relying on Youtube for French. Nowadays, there's tons of French content on Netflix as well.