Pausing Audio To Understand?

[Hellion]

Hi

New to the forum, but I´ve been learning Spanish for some time now. I´m just starting to listen to the audio book of the first Harry Potter book (never read it in English). I´ve been trying to listen to the audio before reading the Spanish, as I also have the E-book. It´s just a little too fast with a few too many unknown words to listen right through, and letting it flow.

If I do that, I can get bits of it, and can kind of follow the gist for periods, but I´m totally lost a lot of the time when there are a number of unknown words, or words I just don´t hear correctly, I find it tough to pick up the thread again and I kind of give up on it. So to follow along as best as possible I´ve started to pause the audio after every sentence or so to let my brain figure out what was said, I´m also constantly skipping back 10 seconds to re-listen, often a number of times with the same sentence in an effort to work it out.

I can often ¨get it¨ doing this, so it´s not like I´m trying to understand something I have no chance of understanding, it´s mostly the speed and a few complicated structures, or a mix of both speed and complexity. I remember doing this when I first started listening to beginner material, which I can now understand quite well without pausing, but I was wondering if this is somehow hindering my ability to understand the language spoken at natural speed. Would I be better off just listening without pausing? Even though I zone out once I lose the thread of what´s happening?

FWIW, I can understand it quite comfortably when reading it, apart from some unknown verbs and obviously the wizard vocab etc. I think I could follow the story well enough without looking up a lot of the unknown words.

Is this a intensive listening vs extensive listening question? I think it´s kind of pointless to try to listen through once I´ve lost the thread of what´s happening if I´m not really engaged anymore. Thoughts?

[Sayonaroo]

I agree that repeating the audio of the whole chapter or book is not helpful. I'm learning French right now by listening to the petite prince with the audio and english translation and what I found really helpful was looping 20-30 second audio bits (re-listen to the 20-30 second bit 10 times or however many times then move on, etc etc). I use kmplayer to do this by pressing F5 to set point A and F6 to set point B and F8 to turn the looping on and off. I guess this is considered intensive studying??

I don't think passive listening would hurt if you have chunks of silence that you want to fill up with Spanish. I think amount of hours listened to a language does make a difference but other stuff make a bigger impact.

[Jbean]

I found it more productive to read the text first, then listen without the text. That way my brain knew what it was going to hear and could then make sense of the jumble. It effectively trained my brain to hear. I spent years reading French easily but unable to understand anything more than a short sentence. After a few chapters of, yes, Harry Potter à l'école des sorciers, I could suddenly understand French. Instead of being one or two loooong words per sentence, it started resolving itself into separate, comprehensible words. Reading while listening didn't help me and listening without reading first didn't help me, but knowing what I was about to hear did the trick.

I do find that I can only sustain the effort of listening to an audiobook for short periods and usually listen for no more than fifteen minutes at a time. I no longer read the text before listening. I usually only pause, if I want to write down a word to look up later.

[DianaRay]

I remember doing this when I first started listening to beginner material, which I can now understand quite well without pausing, but I was wondering if this is somehow hindering my ability to understand the language spoken at natural speed. Would I be better off just listening without pausing? Even though I zone out once I lose the thread of what´s happening?

It is normal, everyone has this problem. You know, it isn't so easy to understand spoken English as well

I found the best way for me to understand spoken foreign language. First, I listen to the short part of audio several times with closed eyes. I listen to it as many times as I need to undestand everything I can (when you listen to the same text several times, every single time you understand more and more).

When I realise that I can understand no more single word I take the text and read it, if I see some interesting and useful words or expressions, I write them down in my notebook. After that I listen to the audio again and can understand everything. The more you will practise it, the more you will understand from the first listening.

For the first time it's better to take simple books with rather slow audio. But then you can take more difficult texts with native speed audio.

[Hellion]

Reading while listening didn't help me and listening without reading first didn't help me, but knowing what I was about to hear did the trick.

Yes, i know what you´re saying, I find just trying to understand something that is too far out of reach of your understanding isn´t going to pay off. In that case I´d read beforehand to give me a chance at understanding, and yes, it helps hugely. I do feel a little like I´m cheating when I do that though, haha. I know that´s silly as we´re learners and we´re only trying to improve. If I think the audio is within my capability to comprehend, and the thing that´s hindering my comprehension is the speed, I´ll start pausing it after each sentence to give my brain a chance to piece it together before the next sentence arrives. Once I think I can understand no more, I´ll play it right through (a few minutes of audio) and then I read the text, both to understand the bits I couldn´t understand, and to check my understanding was ok.

One thing I´m not sure about is when I attempt to listen through a chapter, or maybe a few chapters, in one go, I´m not sure if I´m just remembering the plot since I´ve studied both the audio and the text, or whether I´m actually understanding it as it moves along. I find that I zone out a tiny bit and there are single sentences or words that grab my attention and I begin to piece together the plot again from memory, rather than just following along as it´s playing. Although I can follow along for short periods before either the speed catches up with me or I just zone out a bit for whatever reason.

[Hellion]

I remember doing this when I first started listening to beginner material, which I can now understand quite well without pausing, but I was wondering if this is somehow hindering my ability to understand the language spoken at natural speed. Would I be better off just listening without pausing? Even though I zone out once I lose the thread of what´s happening?

It is normal, everyone has this problem. You know, it isn't so easy to understand spoken English as well

I found the best way for me to understand spoken foreign language. First, I listen to the short part of audio several times with closed eyes. I listen to it as many times as I need to undestand everything I can (when you listen to the same text several times, every single time you understand more and more).

When I realise that I can understand no more single word I take the text and read it, if I see some interesting and useful words or expressions, I write them down in my notebook. After that I listen to the audio again and can understand everything. The more you will practise it, the more you will understand from the first listening.

For the first time it's better to take simple books with rather slow audio. But then you can take more difficult texts with native speed audio.

Haha, it made me laugh when you mentioned you close your eyes, I do that too, it seems like the slightest visual distraction in my line of sight totally throws my concentration lol. Sounds like you do something similar to me, I also listen again and again to the same small chunks of audio, it´s good to know I´m not doing something totally wrong anyway. Your English is great btw.

[Jbean]

No, I don't think that pausing audio to understand will harm your understanding. With practice you pick up speed. Audiobooks with a single, carefully enunciated speaker and radio news programs with the same will also be easier to understand at first.

[Kraut]

I find the A-B repeat function of the VLC-Player most useful. After activating it, it will
appear in a second taskbar. Next to some other useful functions: a snapshot button (I use it to get snapshots of subtitled films) and a record button: when you press it, the player records the extract you are watching or listening to.

https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=136909

[Kraut]

Zoomplayer allows you to have a text right in its screen to accompany the audio.
It doesn't accept PDFs, so you have to use Window's snipping tool to create a JPG. You can also put the translation next to it.
It may look like this:
http://www.bilder-upload.eu/show.php?fi ... 699483.jpg