garyb wrote:As usual for this forum there's too much emphasis on the numbers and little mention of quality as well as quantity. 300 hours of listening doesn't mean a whole lot in itself when there are factors like how comprehensible the materials were, how much attention was being paid (there's a whole continuum between extremely focused active listening and useless background listening), whether subtitles were present, etc. But no, people just want to know how many hours and how many words to reach a certain magic point.
I can't agree more. The real issue isn't the number of hours; it's the effectiveness of the process. Here's how I would approach this whole question of preparing for the DALF C1 comprehension test.
First of all, I find out what exactly is required in terms of the speaking style and typical content. Here is a website with some examples of recordings used for this test:
http://www.delfdalf.fr/exemples-sujets-dalf-c1.htmlNot surprisingly, we find out that the kind of French used is typically radio or television journalism reporting. It's not fictional television series or movie dialogs. So we now know what to prepare for.
With the vast wealth of material available on the Internet, I would make about 10 varied recordings of approximately 5-8 minutes each of material similar to the sample tests. Then make detailed transcripts of these recordings. Many of these recordings from Youtube probably have subtitles.
If possible, I would study the transcripts with a tutor to make sure I understand the contents, the vocabuary and the grammatical constructions.
Then as part of my regular practice routine, I listen to a couple recordings a few times with and then eventually without the transcripts. After a few -l et's say 10 - repetitions, I find I sort of know the recordings by heart. That's the whole point. After a while the material becomes totally transparent.
Then from time to time I listen to new material. There will of course be some new vocabulary but I see that I can understand nearly everything.
What's the theory behind all this? It's all based on the very well-known idea that in any language a very tiny number of distinct linguistic units constitute a large number of all the units in a sample. This is even more true within a given genre of speaking or writing such as television reporting. So a few samples are all that it takes to get a broad idea of the language generally used.
I suggested about 10 recordings of 5 - 8 minutes. These numbers are not cast in stone. One could do 15 or 20 recordings but the idea is to get a wide variety of subjects and voices.
The other option of course would be to have people just directly check your transcription with the video.
Good luck with it!