How do I build (French) listening skills?

[Le Baron]

Shadowing works for listening[/url] too. So to see an instant improvement in understanding you must have a degree of reading skill already.

That's working on how to separate sounds and recognise them, not how to understand meaning. No relationship between those was demonstrated. The chap in that video just said 'it's proven', then mentioned 'a paper'. Great. This is just possibles. Though fair enough things should get a hearing.

I think shadowing is good, I even do it and also 'dictation'. This is for working on pronunciation, production and listening recognition. What I am driving at in my question - and probably annoying a lot of people, but I can't help that - is that the claim made was:

I would actually disagree that it's noise. I think noise is when you can't properly hear the sounds and can't understand the meaning.

Well yes, that's fairly obvious. And yet the reason words do pass by anyone in a foreign language they are learning isn't necessarily because they couldn't recognise the sounds. They may even be vaguely familiar with the word or be completely familiar with all its sounds and have even heard it before, but that they just don't know what it means!

The other implication is that the opposite of doing the thing suggested is more or less 'not listening'; since you're focusing on every last word. Yet isn't that what people do when they listen to content? It's what I do, I'm paying full attention to things like videos or TV or films. I'm listening to to someone talk, sometimes you can't tell where the odd word stops or starts, or if you're more advanced you can 'hear' and separate all the words, but you just don't know the meaning of those words you missed. That's the problem. Just go and look them up. Review them and then hopefully when you encounter then again during further listening, they'll strike you when you're listening.

Is what we're talking about here just: paying attention to listening? Fine. That's good. Mimicking speech patterns to develop listening facility? Also good. Helps you recognise listening better. Was there an implication that this somehow facilitates knowing the meaning of content? Rather than merely assisting in recognition?

[luke]

focusing on every last word. Yet isn't that what people do when they listen to content?

You're probably like the children in this quote:

above_average.png

@aranold's "focusing on every last word" reminds me of @Iversen's "listening like a bloodhound". They aren't the same, but they are both "in the moment". There's a qualitative difference they're both referring to.

[Le Baron]

I think I'm more likely below average because I don't seem to know what's going on in language learning quite a lot of the time.

[aronald]

but if I get lazy for a while and go back to listening and letting words just pass by then I notice my listening comprehension starts decreasing. Luckily, once you listen in this way for several days then your brain seems to speed up considerably and your comprehension improves without even realizing it and you feel like you're not even trying to keep up anymore and everything feels normal.

The position seems to be that by not focusing on comprehension (the meaning) at all, the comprehension improves without one realising it. I confess I'm sceptical about this. I assume that you are otherwise discovering the actual meanings of words? Since just repeating sounds can't reveal the meaning of them, especially non-intuitive ones. Everyone has fluently repeated words and phrases as a child (and adult) without ever knowing the meaning until it was revealed.

What am I not understanding about this? Perhaps I'm missing some step or key idea?

Le Baron,

The premise is that you already know the what the written word means but just aren't good enough with listening skills to understand it at spoken full speed. So if you have a high reading level but don't understand spoken language well, then listening in this way is very helpful. I guess I didn't mention that specifically already.

[aronald]

Shadowing works for listening[/url] too. So to see an instant improvement in understanding you must have a degree of reading skill already.

That's working on how to separate sounds and recognise them, not how to understand meaning. No relationship between those was demonstrated. The chap in that video just said 'it's proven', then mentioned 'a paper'. Great. This is just possibles. Though fair enough things should get a hearing.

I think shadowing is good, I even do it and also 'dictation'. This is for working on pronunciation, production and listening recognition. What I am driving at in my question - and probably annoying a lot of people, but I can't help that - is that the claim made was:

I would actually disagree that it's noise. I think noise is when you can't properly hear the sounds and can't understand the meaning.

Well yes, that's fairly obvious. And yet the reason words do pass by anyone in a foreign language they are learning isn't necessarily because they couldn't recognise the sounds. They may even be vaguely familiar with the word or be completely familiar with all its sounds and have even heard it before, but that they just don't know what it means!

The other implication is that the opposite of doing the thing suggested is more or less 'not listening'; since you're focusing on every last word. Yet isn't that what people do when they listen to content? It's what I do, I'm paying full attention to things like videos or TV or films. I'm listening to to someone talk, sometimes you can't tell where the odd word stops or starts, or if you're more advanced you can 'hear' and separate all the words, but you just don't know the meaning of those words you missed. That's the problem. Just go and look them up. Review them and then hopefully when you encounter then again during further listening, they'll strike you when you're listening.

Is what we're talking about here just: paying attention to listening? Fine. That's good. Mimicking speech patterns to develop listening facility? Also good. Helps you recognise listening better. Was there an implication that this somehow facilitates knowing the meaning of content? Rather than merely assisting in recognition?

There seems to be a lot of confusion that I can hopefully clear up in this post.

When someone says "I have bad listening comprehension" I think it implies that they know the written words fairly well but they struggle when it comes to hearing the same words spoken. I don't have any statistics on this, but I'd be willing to bet that most language learners have much better reading comprehension than listening comprehension until that've reached a very advanced level in a language simply because listening has the speed constraint and speech variation from person to person. How many times have you heard something that you didn't understand well but then see the text and think "Oh I know almost all of those words!"? If a person has bad reading comprehension and bad listening comprehension then they just have bad language comprehension (aka they don't know the language).

The reason why we don't understand spoken language (assuming that we know the words) isn't just because we don't know the meaning. We have to not only recognize the sounds but also recognize the sounds quickly and accurately, and also be able to recognize the sounds in context with other sounds (aka when the are grouped together). Another important thing in listening comprehension is auditory memory. If I can remember the sounds of an entire phrase or sentence then it lets my brain figure out the meaning of those sounds in the small gap of time between sentences. This is very important.

The other implication is that the opposite of doing the thing suggested is more or less 'not listening'; since you're focusing on every last word. Yet isn't that what people do when they listen to content? It's what I do, I'm paying full attention to things like videos or TV or films. I'm listening to to someone talk, sometimes you can't tell where the odd word stops or starts, or if you're more advanced you can 'hear' and separate all the words, but you just don't know the meaning of those words you missed.

Why is that the implication? Please read my original post when I talk about two methods of listening. The second one was listening to focus more on understanding meaning. The first one is this "shadowed listening" approach. In my experience, the shadowed listening is carving out a place in the brain to improve sound recognition and overall more intense listening that the passive listening can then use to understand with less effort.

I don't know if there is any consensus on what exactly is passive vs active listening, but to me, passive listening means you aren't really trying hard to pay attention and a lot of times your attention is directed at another activity. On the other hand, active listening is devoting full attention to what you're hearing (maybe you're lying down with headphones on and eyes closed). I'd say this shadowed listening is an extreme version of active listening since it requires your brain to be operating at the level of the last spoken syllable (and even ahead of it if you realize which word is being spoken before the speaker finishes the word). Furthermore, there seems to be another parallel process running in the brain that does actually pay attention to the meaning of the sentence.

[aronald]

Back to the OP's original question:

Another really helpful technique for improving listening is reading the text with audio (reading + listening). Find an audiobook at your reading level that you can easily read at full spoken speed (not above your level) and play the audio while reading. The really nice thing about this activity is that you can actually let your reading lag behind your listening so that your first encounter with the word is the spoken one before seeing it written. So if you hear it and really don't understand it then you can read it and it won't hinder your comprehension of the story. It's like training wheels for listening.

[Le Baron]

Why is that the implication? Please read my original post when I talk about two methods of listening. The second one was listening to focus more on understanding meaning. The first one is this "shadowed listening" approach. In my experience, the shadowed listening is carving out a place in the brain to improve sound recognition and overall more intense listening that the passive listening can then use to understand with less effort.

It obviously is the implication because, as you also state in the second paragraph below, one isn't really listening, but the audio is just running whilst one is distracted. This is equal to 'not listening'. Certainly not to the attention level one ought to be if one doesn't know the language in question. So what you originally described seems to be just: listening, but not specifically thinking about meaning.

The reason why we don't understand spoken language (assuming that we know the words) isn't just because we don't know the meaning. We have to not only recognize the sounds but also recognize the sounds quickly and accurately, and also be able to recognize the sounds in context with other sounds (aka when the are grouped together).

This is true, it's not just meaning, it's also about sound recognition. You are positing someone who is already an advanced reader as the 'normal learner' and this is possibly the case for quite a lot of learners who have neglected listening in favour of reading - certainly some in that scenario here. It means this advice is for those people, but it still has its issues. Namely that recognising aurally what you know visually isn't easily facilitated by just mentally focusing on its auditory version. Certainly not in French (the language in question here). It may also point to the need for learners to get on with aural recognition in tandem with reading when first embarking on a language, in order not to have to play catch-up way down the line when things are advanced.

I don't know if there is any consensus on what exactly is passive vs active listening, but to me, passive listening means you aren't really trying hard to pay attention and a lot of times your attention is directed at another activity. On the other hand, active listening is devoting full attention to what you're hearing (maybe you're lying down with headphones on and eyes closed). I'd say this shadowed listening is an extreme version of active listening since it requires your brain to be operating at the level of the last spoken syllable (and even ahead of it if you realize which word is being spoken before the speaker finishes the word). Furthermore, there seems to be another parallel process running in the brain that does actually pay attention to the meaning of the sentence.

Shadowing is not specifically for listening (though as Dave mentioned the view is that it's also for that). It's for developing oral facility by mimicking a model speaker (the so-called 'language parent'), presumably saying things you can understand. So it's an active practise, not merely a (comprehension) listening practise. I obviously can't know how everyone uses this, at what level of comprehension they are willing to engage in it, but I don't just parrot sounds. I mostly repeat words comprehensible to me, though I can see the value in exposure to and repeating unknown words, of which you'd later learn the meaning.

Back to the OP's original question:

Another really helpful technique for improving listening is reading the text with audio (reading + listening). Find an audiobook at your reading level that you can easily read at full spoken speed (not above your level) and play the audio while reading. The really nice thing about this activity is that you can actually let your reading lag behind your listening so that your first encounter with the word is the spoken one before seeing it written. So if you hear it and really don't understand it then you can read it and it won't hinder your comprehension of the story. It's like training wheels for listening.

Look at this thread: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... ng+reading