Listening without reading, but with the aid of a list of translations of unfamiliar words

[Khayyam]

This isn't really a question, just something I tried that I wanted to share, and I thought this was probably the best place to write about it.

I just tried a new way of listening to my TL (Persian in this case), and it works so well that I have to share it. As I'm learning new material, I have a list of English translations of stumbling-block words that I can refer to as I read and listen. For some reason, it only occurred to me just now to try only listening while referring to this list, and it works great.

To illustrate, here are my first ten stumbling-block words from chapter five of the Book of Acts, which I was just working on:

1. to inform
2. steps
3. some/a quantity
4. authority, liberty, option, mandate
5. inborn, institutional
6. listeners
7. authority
8. shroud, graveclothes
9. approximate(ly)
10. adventure

As I begin to listen, I know to assign the meaning "to inform" to the first word that sounds like gibberish. And then the next gibberish word will be "steps," etc. It only took three times listening to the track with the aid of the list to be able to listen without the list and get pretty much everything. (And there were 80 unfamiliar words!) That's a lot faster than it normally happens when I try to go straight from reading+listening to just listening. It really seems to flatten the learning curve.

[Severine]

Do you note any indication of where in the recording (timestamp or something similar) each word occurs? I wonder whether it would be disruptive if the unknown words were unevenly distributed, say three in the same sentence and then no new words for several minutes.

Another question: do you pause when you reach one of the unknown words, and/or rewind a bit to repeat the section in question? When I try to imagine myself doing this, it seems that by the time I noticed I didn't understand a word and looked down at the list to see the meaning, the recording would already be continuing on, and I wouldn't have a spare moment to mentally reinforce the connection. Or, if I did, I would risk not listening to the rest of that sentence or the beginning of the next.

[Cainntear]

Do you note any indication of where in the recording (timestamp or something similar) each word occurs? I wonder whether it would be disruptive if the unknown words were unevenly distributed, say three in the same sentence and then no new words for several minutes.

That's a very pertinent point, and it really goes down to unspoken information taken for granted.

In this case, he's talking about the bible, so has clear access to the written text, hence being able to do this in the first place; this deserves explicit note, because you won't be able to do this with any old random listening sample -- you need a transcription or a copy of the source text being read or recited. Also, the additional thing Khayyam has left unsaid is the bit about analysing the text in order to identify the words to put on the list.

It's a common cognitive thing to talk about the activity that you're aiming to do and ignore all the prep work required to be able to do the task. Even if only the task itself is important, you can't do it without the prep work, so the prep work is *also* important.
But not only that: the act of making the list is important too -- that's your "first rep" with the words you're looking at, and that makes it past of the learning process. Having looked up the words before the listening, you're changing for being forced to work out the word from the context (Krashen's "comprehensible input") to being able to use the context to help prompt recall of a weak word. Even if the recall doesn't happen. The *attempted* recall peeps the brain to remember it better for future use.

[Khayyam]

Do you note any indication of where in the recording (timestamp or something similar) each word occurs? I wonder whether it would be disruptive if the unknown words were unevenly distributed, say three in the same sentence and then no new words for several minutes.

That's a very pertinent point, and it really goes down to unspoken information taken for granted.

In this case, he's talking about the bible, so has clear access to the written text, hence being able to do this in the first place; this deserves explicit note, because you won't be able to do this with any old random listening sample -- you need a transcription or a copy of the source text being read or recited. Also, the additional thing Khayyam has left unsaid is the bit about analysing the text in order to identify the words to put on the list.

It's a common cognitive thing to talk about the activity that you're aiming to do and ignore all the prep work required to be able to do the task. Even if only the task itself is important, you can't do it without the prep work, so the prep work is *also* important.
But not only that: the act of making the list is important too -- that's your "first rep" with the words you're looking at, and that makes it past of the learning process. Having looked up the words before the listening, you're changing for being forced to work out the word from the context (Krashen's "comprehensible input") to being able to use the context to help prompt recall of a weak word. Even if the recall doesn't happen. The *attempted* recall peeps the brain to remember it better for future use.

Oh, yes--I neglected to mention the fact that this is only possible with a written text, and I didn't mention all the prep work that's involved--first marking all the unfamiliar words in the text, then making my list of translations of those words, then repeatedly reading the text in silence while glancing at the list as needed until I no longer need it (much) to read, then repeatedly listening to the track while reading along--sometimes in English, sometimes in Persian. Relentless repetition of the same material every which way eventually leads to my being able to easily listen to it without reading anything, which is the big goal. Listening while only referring to the list of translations is one more way to swing the repetition sledgehammer, and I think there's no such thing as swinging from too many different angles. It's more than just another way, though; it eases the transition from reading+audio to audio only. It's a stepping stone to ease the final stage of the process, essentially. It works so well that I kinda wanted to facepalm because I think of myself as such an open-minded experimenter when it comes to reading+listening, and I trained for however many hundreds of hours before I tried skinning the cat this very obvious (in hindsight) way.

I don't need timestamps, etc. because by the time I implement this, I already know the narrative so well that I'm getting a little sick of it. (Or a lot sick of it, if we're talking about the part of Leviticus where they tell you in exquisite detail how to recognize the early stages of leprosy.) You probably already figured that out from my description, but I'm erring on the side of being explicit now in the hope that I don't cause more confusion.

Well, anyway, sorry--that was a lot of context to leave out! Cainntear was correct when he talked about my focusing on the activity I want to do and leaving out the prep, but it was more than that. I've described or summarized my method as a whole so many times around here that I start to assume people know the context but of course that's a foolish assumption. Really, what I should probably do is start another log where I describe the big picture in detail in the first post so I don't need to give the background in subsequent posts.

Cainntear, you get me perfectly, and I appreciate your stepping in to help clear the air. Your point about attempted recall improving retention in the long run even when recall fails is especially good. The little stab of frustration you feel as the word slips away from you primes you to be on your A game with that word on the next pass-through.

[Severine]

I really appreciate the details. I have read other explanations of parts of your approach, but I'm not completely familiar with it and didn't want to assume that you always did things that particular way. If you did write one overarching guide to your approach, I would read it with interest (but no pressure to do so).

[Carl]

Thanks for the tip, Khayyam. For a handful of languages (FIGS, Catalan, English Greek, Russian, and Turkish), the Easy Languages podcasts give you something like this in the app, with zero prep on your part.
https://www.easy-languages.org/podcasts

Paying members get (among other things) a private podcast feed that gives them the podcast with the podcast art displaying the most challenging 10 words every minute in the recording, along with the translations to English. (This is true for Easy German, at least; I assume it's true for most or all of the others, except I wonder how it's handled in Easy English.) The 10 words are in the order they're heard in the podcast. So the display in your phone's podcast app changes every minute, as the podcast plays, with an updated list of that minute's most challenging 10 words.

It's something I think I could get a good deal of benefit from, if I listened to the podcasts when I could easily and safely read the screen. Since I mostly listen while driving, running, etc., I miss out on this functionality.

They also make that vocab list for each episode available as CSV files that can be imported into Anki, and there's an interactive transcript for each episode that you can click on to translate words or paragraphs. Again, my experience is just with Easy German.