Need Advice: Listening Comprehension for Minority Language

Ask specific questions about your target languages. Beginner questions welcome!
NkhSun
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue May 30, 2023 7:53 pm
Languages: English (N), Hmoob Dawb (Upper Beginner)

Need Advice: Listening Comprehension for Minority Language

Postby NkhSun » Tue May 30, 2023 8:03 pm

Hello,

A while back I posted here briefly about my journey to learn Hmong, specifically White Hmong. I’ve at the point of my journey where beginner courses are too easy for me but native material is very difficult. So, I’m hit a bit of a plateau and was hoping to hear what others have done to progress past this point. I would really appreciate some advice from experienced language learners.

What have some of you done to bridge this gap. Hmong has a plethora of listening material, but many do not have transcripts or subtitles. I was wondering what an effective method to tackle this challenge might be when my comprehension for many native videos is a sentence here or there.

Thanks for reading and I’m excited to hear from those with more experience than I have!
0 x

User avatar
jeff_lindqvist
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3135
Joined: Sun Aug 16, 2015 9:52 pm
Languages: sv, en
de, es
ga, eo
---
fi, yue, ro, tp, cy, kw, pt, sk
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=2773
x 10462

Re: Need Advice: Listening Comprehension for Minority Language

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Tue May 30, 2023 9:35 pm

NkhSun wrote:A while back I posted here briefly about my journey to learn Hmong(...)


These topics?
Ramblings of a Hmong learner
Need Input Training Advice
3 x
Leabhair/Greannáin léite as Gaeilge: 9 / 18
Ar an seastán oíche: Oileán an Órchiste
Duolingo - finished trees: sp/ga/de/fr/pt/it
Finnish with extra pain : 100 / 100

Llorg Blog - Wiki - Discord

NkhSun
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue May 30, 2023 7:53 pm
Languages: English (N), Hmoob Dawb (Upper Beginner)

Re: Need Advice: Listening Comprehension for Minority Language

Postby NkhSun » Tue May 30, 2023 11:03 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:
NkhSun wrote:A while back I posted here briefly about my journey to learn Hmong(...)


These topics?
Ramblings of a Hmong learner
Need Input Training Advice


Yes! Those are the ones. I’m under a different username because I couldn’t for the life of me get into my old one. I even did a password reset and it never sent.

I’m past the point of using the resources listed and am diving into native material, but the comprehensible input gap for Hmong is rather difficult. So I’m having difficulty deciding how to proceed.
0 x

NkhSun
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue May 30, 2023 7:53 pm
Languages: English (N), Hmoob Dawb (Upper Beginner)

Re: Need Advice: Listening Comprehension for Minority Language

Postby NkhSun » Tue May 30, 2023 11:12 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:
NkhSun wrote:A while back I posted here briefly about my journey to learn Hmong(...)


These topics?
Ramblings of a Hmong learner
Need Input Training Advice



Thank you so much for finding these! I completely forgot that I had posted that second topic and perused through it and found some additional answers that will assist me further. I really appreciate it!

Any additional advice is always welcome! I find that I know a lot of religious terminology, but I’m struggling to understand more colloquial expression. But, this might be something I have to brute force work through. Thanks again!
Last edited by NkhSun on Wed May 31, 2023 2:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
0 x

User avatar
leosmith
Brown Belt
Posts: 1341
Joined: Thu Sep 29, 2016 10:06 pm
Location: Seattle
Languages: English (N)
Spanish (adv)
French (int)
German (int)
Japanese (int)
Korean (int)
Mandarin (int)
Portuguese (int)
Russian (int)
Swahili (int)
Tagalog (int)
Thai (int)
x 3104
Contact:

Re: Need Advice: Listening Comprehension for Minority Language

Postby leosmith » Wed May 31, 2023 5:01 am

NkhSun wrote:Hmong has a plethora of listening material, but many do not have transcripts or subtitles.
I sometimes pay someone to transcribe stuff I like. I've had transcribed conversations made too, but that's another level of expensive, and I've never don it for Hmong.
1 x
https://languagecrush.com/reading - try our free multi-language reading tool

User avatar
Saim
Blue Belt
Posts: 676
Joined: Sun Nov 15, 2015 12:14 pm
Location: Rheinland
Languages: Native: English
Others: Catalan, Serbian, Spanish, Polish, Hungarian, Urdu, French etc.
Main focus: German
x 2314

Re: Need Advice: Listening Comprehension for Minority Language

Postby Saim » Wed May 31, 2023 7:04 am

At upper beginner for opaque languages IME you'll experience the fastest gains in listening comprehension by cramming as much vocabulary as you can stomach from written materials, and not necessarily by focusing on listening specifically.
4 x
log

شجرِ ممنوع 152

User avatar
Sae
Green Belt
Posts: 318
Joined: Sun Jun 05, 2022 1:27 pm
Location: UK
Languages: English (Native)
Vietnamese (Intermediate)
Mongolian (Beginner)
Tuvan (Beginner)
Toki Pona (Beginner)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=18201
x 836

Re: Need Advice: Listening Comprehension for Minority Language

Postby Sae » Thu Jun 01, 2023 11:13 am

I've not tried learning Hmong, though whenever I decide to visit Northern Vietnam I will probably go visit the Hmong there, my current plan is for the South, and the minority village I'll probably visit is a Cham one as I'll be going to Chau Doc. But awesome that you're learning it.

My target minority language is Tuvan and in fairness, I've ran into the same problem. It's definitely going to be trickier to understand the content. I don't know how it is for Hmong, but I think songs & song lyrics may be one way to go. But Tuva is known for its music, so it's easier to find songs and translations of those songs and I know a community who have people that don't mind translating a song - they're short so it's not as big of an ask and if you're able to find any online Hmong communities, you may have some luck (and you can find Discord communities for all kinds of things, same with Reddit)

However, the other approach I am looking at using with my Tuvan and kinda have done with Vietnamese (as not everything I find is subtitled) and that's to prime myself with vocabulary & grammar up front and get used to picking out words and rewatching things to see if I pick out more and gradually piece things together until I am able to get an idea of what I am listening to and trying to pick out the most important words to get the meaning. And of course, feel free to slow down playback on a video to compensate people who speak at a normal or fast speed.

And if you're lucky, you might find kids TV shows in that language, it's a long shot but people upload all kinds of things to YouTube. However, generally speech is clearer. My YouTube luck is improved if I know the search terms I need in the target language itself.
1 x
Vietnamese Practicing conversation
Mongolian: Learning vocab
Tuvan: Building Decks & full study plan
Tuvan Song Progress (0/3): Learning Daglarym - Lyrics & Melody Learned
Language Fitness 1.5 hr exercise p/w

User avatar
Axon
Blue Belt
Posts: 775
Joined: Thu Jun 16, 2016 12:29 am
Location: California
Languages: Native English, in order of comfort: Mandarin, German, Indonesian,
Spanish, French, Russian,
Cantonese, Vietnamese, Polish.
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5086
x 3288

Re: Need Advice: Listening Comprehension for Minority Language

Postby Axon » Sun Jun 04, 2023 4:37 am

Like leosmith, I've also paid people to transcribe and record stuff, in my case different Mandarin dialects. I've used Fiverr and Upwork. It can sometimes be fairly expensive and you have to make sure you're on the same page as the transcriber in terms of what you want. My transcriber assured me she could understand the dialect in the recordings, but when it came time to do them there were chunks missing because they were unintelligible to her or the speaker was stuttering and restarting sentences over.

Your listening ability is influenced by two things.

1. Decoding the speech stream (consisting of the speaker's accent, other noises, and the sound quality) into words.
2. Understanding the words in context.

The first one can be artificially trained to an extent by manipulating the audio for things you already understand. You can speed up the audio, add background noise, and lower the quality using an audio editor like Audacity. You could also get someone to rerecord audio you already understand so you can hear it from a different voice. In my opinion/experience, this skill can be trained even by listening to audio you don't understand, maybe with English subtitles. Listening many times to audio you don't understand is another fast and easy strategy.

Your own pronunciation and knowledge of the language's phonology also influences your ability to decode, in a way. If, for example, you're shaky about hearing the difference between certain sounds in Hmong, it becomes harder to understand even words that you do know in rapid speech. Having a really strong grasp of the phonetics also helps when you run into speakers that speak in a non-standard way, perhaps making sounds differently by virtue of dialect or age.

The second part relies on your vocabulary knowledge. If you don't know the words that are being said, then you won't understand no matter how clear the speech is. Like Saim said, you may have to cram a ton of words and be okay with not seeing improvement for a while as your vocabulary catches up to where it needs to be. Perhaps there are Facebook groups or YouTube comments you can mine for written Hmong? You might have some luck going from English to Hmong here - choosing a topic in English and looking up words related to that topic in an English-Hmong dictionary. As you improve, more and more input will become comprehensible and you'll start to automatically fill the gaps that this method leaves.
3 x


Return to “Practical Questions and Advice”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests