Intensive listening

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Nicola1990
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Intensive listening

Postby Nicola1990 » Tue May 10, 2022 5:36 pm

How can a highly motivated student go from A1 to B2+ in listening-speaking in 100 days if he\she devotes 70 hours a week to guided listening and speaking and if she\he already has a B1 in reading comprehension?
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Re: Intensive listening

Postby Odair » Tue May 10, 2022 10:58 pm

There's no way a noobie can pull it off, he will loose all his motivation after a few days of this regime.
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Re: Intensive listening

Postby leosmith » Wed May 11, 2022 5:20 am

Nicola1990 wrote:How can a highly motivated student go from A1 to B2+ in listening-speaking in 100 days if he\she devotes 70 hours a week to guided listening and speaking and if she\he already has a B1 in reading comprehension?
1000 hours? It's probably possible, especially if your L2 is similar to L1. Do a ton of listening and speaking. Continue to read daily, preferably out loud. Do some form of vocabulary memorizing/drilling, some grammar study and some writing. (I assume your pronunciation is already quite good if you already started reading.)
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Re: Intensive listening

Postby BeaP » Wed May 11, 2022 5:49 am

Get good quality dialogues with transcriptions. In my opinion the best choice is a series of CEFR-aligned coursebooks. For the B1-B2 levels get the audio material of more books (2-3). These are often free on the site of the publisher. Listen, read. Mark the rhythm (small stops in speech) with a pen in the transcription. Start looking up things you don't understand. Listen, read, imitate (repeat). Pay attention to the rhythm and the intonation, imitate them well. Use highlighters, color pens for key expressions, anything that helps you. Pay attention to the things that help you learn better. Develop your own system. Listen ad nauseum, until you know the dialogues by heart. Try to reproduce the dialogues in speech and check yourself. In the breaks of study sessions watch youtube videos. Continue looking up things with google (grammar points, expressions). Do some exercises from the coursebook.

Bottomline: The dialogues of CEFR coursebooks contain both very useful expressions and some presentation of the grammar points. If you want to achieve quick results, I think the best way is intensive study. A limited amount of well-chosen materials, dense in information, repeated and reinforced until they become automatic. If you just do listening and speaking without control you'll meet many things that will only be important later (at C1-C2) and lose time. With extensive studying you'd gain a lot of passive knowledge that again is rather something for C1-C2. Focus.
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Re: Intensive listening

Postby jackb » Wed May 11, 2022 12:33 pm

Welcome Nicola1990,

Can you provide some context to your question? It will be easier for people to provide more helpful information if you added things like what's happening at the end of the 100 days or what the L1 and L2 are. Prepping for a B2 exam is very different than getting ready to move to different county for aid relief.

I hope you come back to discuss your plans and again at the end of 100 days. In any case, good luck.
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Re: Intensive listening

Postby MaggieMae » Thu May 12, 2022 11:54 am

Let the B1 in reading help support your speaking and listening skills. Watch tv with subtitles, read books out loud, listen to audio books while reading the text, etc. Find short dialogues that you can do with a partner. If you can get a native speaker partner, even better. Then you can learn the right pronunciation, rhythm, melody, ect.

One exercise that I've found particularly helpful, and should do more often myself: once a day pick a short paragraph or dialogue (4-6 sentences), read it out loud, and record it, BUT DON'T LISTEN TO IT YET! Then read it 10 times out loud without recording, and once more with recording at the end. Then, and only then, do you listen to the recordings, back to back. The first will be godawful, I promise you, but the last will show lots of progress, and then you can hear where something might sound different from the way a native speaker would say it.

What you're doing with this exercise is training the muscle memory of your mouth muscles. Your mouth needs to go through the lessons just as much as your brain does!

I hope this helps!
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Re: Intensive listening

Postby lusan » Thu May 12, 2022 3:13 pm

Nicola1990 wrote: How can a highly motivated student go from A1 to B2+ in listening-speaking in 100 days if he\she devotes 70 hours a week to guided listening and speaking and if she\he already has a B1 in reading comprehension?


Potential burn out.
There is so much the brain can take without resting.
Why the rush?
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Le Baron
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Re: Intensive listening

Postby Le Baron » Thu May 12, 2022 3:33 pm

lusan wrote:Potential burn out.
There is so much the brain can take without resting.
Why the rush?

Exactly. There seems to be a never-ending stream of these questions. The time scales are nonsensical and as you say 'why the rush?' I wonder what the thought processes are that lead up to the typing of these crazy questions from impatient fantasists.
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Re: Intensive listening

Postby BeaP » Thu May 12, 2022 3:56 pm

Le Baron wrote: I wonder what the thought processes are that lead up to the typing of these crazy questions from impatient fantasists.

I wonder why you suspect a thought process in the background. It's just marketing. Bikini body in 30 days, the perfect relationship in 3 easy steps, learn Malayalam in 10 days, become an entrepreneur and a multi-millionaire in 2 weeks. If you don't know how, it's all there in a convenient pdf for the low price of 1999.
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Re: Intensive listening

Postby Le Baron » Thu May 12, 2022 4:18 pm

BeaP wrote:I wonder why you suspect a thought process in the background. It's just marketing. Bikini body in 30 days, the perfect relationship in 3 easy steps, learn Malayalam in 10 days, become an entrepreneur and a multi-millionaire in 2 weeks. If you don't know how, it's all there in a convenient pdf for the low price of 1999.

That itself is a thought process. Not a sophisticated or realistic one I grant you, but something considered - and seemingly rather successful considering the volume of sales of these types of annoying fake magic methodologies. And the numbers of gullible true believers.
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