How do I build (French) listening skills?

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Lawyer&Mom
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Re: How do I build (French) listening skills?

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Tue May 17, 2022 12:25 am

I’m firmly team No-Subs. Just dive in and start swimming. Yes, you miss a bunch, but it’s just television. Who cares? If you really, truly need to understand a key moment, rewind and turn on the subs, but this should be a very occasional last resort. Otherwise you are practicing reading, not listening.
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Re: How do I build (French) listening skills?

Postby badger » Tue May 17, 2022 10:18 am

Lawyer&Mom wrote:Pick a show you actually want to watch (probably not Peppa). A French dub of an American show you are already familiar with is perfect, especially if it has lots and lots of seasons.

I second this. I'm doing the X-files in French at the moment.
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Re: How do I build (French) listening skills?

Postby jeffers » Tue May 17, 2022 11:52 am

Some random thoughts:

First of all, don't diss Peppa Pig. There's a whole thread about the value of using Peppa Pig for learning languages: https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=10596&p=143007. If you enjoy it well enough, it's not a bad idea. I find it's too easy for me now, but I really wish I had considered it in the early days of my French studies.

The thing that helped me get a leg up in the early days was what I called "audio-first reading". I had a few of those beginner readers with CD, and I would listen to the CD several times, usually while taking a walk. On the first listen, I would understand very little, but by the third or fourth pass I got most of the gist and flow of the stories. Only then would I open the book and read it. Besides easy readers, I used the CDs from the original Petit Nicolas book. The narrator reads very fast on this, but again, after a few listens I finally understood most of what was going on. Again, after doing that I picked up the book and began to read it. I find this method works quite well with shorter books, and I don't think I could do it this way round with a full novel. Le Petit Nicolas was longer than most, but it was funny enough that I was laughing even on the first pass, so that kept me engaged. The same thing could easily be done with intermediate podcasts + transcript, such as Balades or InnerFrench. If you want more ideas of intermediate to advanced French podcasts, I started a thread about them: https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=17152&p=193289. Of course, out on the street you don't get to listen to a person 3-4 times, but this is about building a skill up, and learning what to listen for.

I get the idea of starting with full native audio, and I would recommend mixing some of that in, but don't feel bad about working your way up to that. The important thing you should be learning is what to listen for. That's something that comes with practice, but it feels to me that using transcripts or native subtitles help a lot. Besides book+CD combos and podcasts with transcripts, another great way to do this is using the Language Learning with Netflix plugin for Chrome. It has a handy mode which pauses after each subtitle; you press the spacebar to continue.

Dictations (dictées) are a great, and very French, way to work on both your listening and your spelling skills in French. This is probably the top of the list of "things I wish I had done from the start". I practice this on and off using the Orthodidact website https://dictee.orthodidacte.com/, which has free dictées for natives and for learners of all levels. Currently, my level for dictées is well below the level at which I can watch or listen comfortably, but it certainly helps.

Vocabulary is something that is easy to overlook in relation to listening skills, since we compartmentalize our learning. I never really thought about it until Cavesa mentioned this in a similar thread a year or two ago. Our gaps in vocabulary translate automatically to gaps in listening comprehension.

As a final point, I want to say that the only good method is the one which keeps you working on it. Sometimes we like to work out the most efficient way to learn a particular skill, but an efficient method of practice is useless if you get bored of it quickly... even if you keep doing it! Engagement matters. Hence my signature line: "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien" (roughly, the perfect is the enemy of the good). So find methods that work and that you enjoy, and keep at it. With skills like listening, the biggest difference between being lost and being skilled is exposure. Lots and lots of exposure that interests you.
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Re: How do I build (French) listening skills?

Postby dustinmacdonald » Tue May 17, 2022 1:21 pm

Thanks everyone! I have some great ideas for how to proceed now.
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Re: How do I build (French) listening skills?

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Tue May 17, 2022 2:36 pm

badger wrote:
Lawyer&Mom wrote:Pick a show you actually want to watch (probably not Peppa). A French dub of an American show you are already familiar with is perfect, especially if it has lots and lots of seasons.

I second this. I'm doing the X-files in French at the moment.


I did all 15 seasons of ER, which did the trick.
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Re: How do I build (French) listening skills?

Postby rdearman » Tue May 17, 2022 5:27 pm

I would like to add one other thing. Listen for what you do know, not what you don't. Unless you are trying to find new words. But if you listen for what you know you will not worry so much about what you don't. (In my head this makes sense)
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Re: How do I build (French) listening skills?

Postby Dragon27 » Tue May 17, 2022 5:43 pm

rdearman wrote:(In my head this makes sense)

Matt vs Japan talks about a similar thing in his video: if you can't understand a sentence intuitively, that means it's too many steps above your level; you should find the sentences that you can understand as a whole, which means that they're right for your level and will push your understanding forward ("your cutting edge of intuitive language ability").
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Re: How do I build (French) listening skills?

Postby zgriptsuroica » Wed May 18, 2022 5:23 am

My experience was that reading actually helped a tremendous amount for my listening. I think it had to do with just broadening my vocabulary along with giving my exposure to lots of collocations. I had a pretty long period where I didn't do much listening at all and just read, and when I came back to reading, found it much easier than I recalled. Even if I didn't have a perfect pronunciation of it in my head, I think just knowing a word and having a guess as to how it might sound made it easier to pick out once I actually did hear it in speech. Picking up those collocations also made it a bit more forgiving if I had a fuzzy understanding of what I heard but could take a reasonable guess of what I thought it tended to be in similar situations.

Beyond that, just listen and listen. Then find someone with a different accent and feel like you don't understand a damn thing and do it again. With time, it gets somewhat better.
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Re: How do I build (French) listening skills?

Postby philomath » Wed May 18, 2022 2:31 pm

A while ago I did some intensive listening in French, and I think it really helped my comprehension. This is what I did (quoted from my language log):
philomath wrote:Today I did an interesting listening exercise using a video from the YouTube channel Christelle Lebailly Auteur. The video is called "Les Auteurs Sur Les Réseaux Sociaux". In it, Christelle acts out how different types of writers interact with others on social media. It's only 9 minutes long, so I figured it would be a good video for an experiment. (A lot of her videos are much longer.)

Here's what I did:
  1. First, I watched the whole video once.
  2. Next, I downloaded the audio and imported it into Audacity.
  3. I began listening to the audio sentence by sentence. Whenever I encountered a sentence that I didn't understand, I cut it out and pasted it into another Audacity project. Even if I got the gist of a sentence, if I wasn't able to transcribe it, I counted it as one I didn't understand. At the end of listening to the audio, I had one Audacity project containing the sentences I understood, and another project containing the sentences I didn't understand. Based on the length of each project, I estimated that I understood 64% of the speaking in the video.
  4. Finally, I took some of the sentences and decreased the speed in an effort to understand them better. I listened to each sentence two or three times each. This actually helped my comprehension a lot.

This was a very time-consuming exercise, but I think it was worth it! It was exciting to quantify my level of listening comprehension, and I hope I'll see my comprehension increase over time. I also learned some new phrases and noticed some interesting things about French pronunciation. Slowing down the sentences made it easier to hear how Christelle combined a lot of words in order to speak faster. I definitely want to try this again sometime with another video.
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Re: How do I build (French) listening skills?

Postby german2k01 » Wed May 18, 2022 5:34 pm

After listening to a few audiobooks back to back in a week and then watching a television show I have experienced an increase in my audio understanding of the television show even without using subtitles. Massive language exposure in a short span of time really helps with making inroads. An 8-hour audiobook is very dense in word density.
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