Do you listen until you really 'hear ALL the meaning' of each sentence?

[zKing]

Sorry, this is going to be a bit rambling as I haven't really nailed this down into a coherent organized thought yet...

I've been using my new favorite software, WorkAudioBook, to listen to my full set of intermediate Cantonese dialogs.
WorkAudioBook has this wonderful feature where it will loop a phrase/sentence over and over until you hit the "N" key to go to the next phrase/sentence. I used to use Audacity to do something similar when I'd short-loop-chorus (SLC) sentences to work on my pronunciation, but WorkAudioBook makes the process noticeably less distracting as I don't need to use a mouse to highlight each phrase and it usually does a great job of selecting phrases automatically.

And now I'm using it not just for SLC, but for just listening to each of the sentences in my dialogs over and over until I can really 'hear all the meaning' of each sentence one by one as I listen through the dialog. I just came to the shocking realization that before WorkAudioBook, when I was listening to dialogs, I'd repeatedly play the whole dialog through until I got _most_ of the meaning as I heard it, but honestly for many sentences I'd really just be catching most of the key words. And due to the fact that I knew the translation of the dialog, I'd somewhat unknowingly trick myself into thinking that I (mostly) "heard and understood" the whole thing. I'd also sometimes tell myself, "this bit of native speech is fast, and listening at that speed will come later". Plus given that I DID hear full meaning for many of the easier sentences and knew what the whole dialog meant, honestly I'd just plain get bored of the dialog and move on. All of this was amplified by the fact that I could easily read and understand the content. My reading skill greatly outstrips my listening. Later down the line I'd often passively listen to a dialog that I 'knew' in my car, and I'd get lost, but I'd still make excuses to myself for why.

But now listening with WorkAudioBook, repeating sentence by sentence has changed my mind.
I think I was giving up too early on the harder sentences and not really learning the full structure/phrasing/content.
I now believe I need to loop-repeat sentences one by one until I can really, what I call "hear the meaning" as it comes into my ears.
Yes, there are some flubbed / mispronounced / truly-too-dang-fast things in the content such that it won't be always be 100%, but it should be pretty darn close. I guess this is a matter of proportion, I think I was really getting to the point of 2/3 to 3/4 understanding while listening. And to be fair, I think there may be a chicken-and-egg problem here: you may need to get good enough at listening to be able to accomplish this level of intensity?

I'm wondering if all the above is going to sound stupidly obvious to the experienced language learning crowd.
But I think when we start out, there is always that question of "Ok, I have a bit of audio with L2 text and a translation... what do I do with it?". And the answers to that question are usually quite superficial: "Keep listening until you get it, then do that again with another bit of audio."

Thoughts?

[Bex]

Excellent question.

Watching...with keen interest, I would really like to know too.

[smallwhite]

> Do you listen until you really 'hear ALL the meaning' of each sentence?

Yes, I listen once or twice until I hear every syllable and understand every word. It only takes 1 or 2 listens because I use easy i+1 material.

[NoManches]

I used to import podcasts into a program called Audacity. I could then highlight sections of the audio and play them on a loop (similar to what you described). I did this in order to transcribe the podcast. One downside that I noticed was I would focus too much on individual words and sentences, without paying attention to the whole meaning. If I were to go back and do this again I would transcribe individual sections and then listen to bigger chunks of 1-2 minutes at a time. At the end I would listen to the entire audio a few times (after I had transcribed everything).

This type of work can be extremely tedious and boring but it did help my listening quite a bit.

Even now (advanced level of Spanish; been studying for 4 years) I listen to some podcasts or audio books and think I understand all of it perfectly, only to listen a second time and pick up on things I missed. I try not to get too down on myself when this happens because even in my native language of English this happens a lot (you understand everything but miss out on small details).

So to answer your question I would say that I don't listen until I hear everything. If I am missing a lot on the first listen I'll listen one more time and pick up on more detail but that's about it. It is good to do very intensive work like you are talking about, but at the same time it can be really good to sit back and relax while listening to a podcast, without caring if you understand everything.

I don't do as much intensive work nowadays but I do from time to time listen to the same podcast or chapter of an audiobook up to two times (I very rarely listen a third time).

Like smallwhite said, picking suitable I+1 material is key and can save you a lot of time and headaches.

[aaleks]

Even now (advanced level of Spanish; been studying for 4 years) I listen to some podcasts or audio books and think I understand all of it perfectly, only to listen a second time and pick up on things I missed. I try not to get too down on myself when this happens because even in my native language of English this happens a lot (you understand everything but miss out on small details).

That happend to me too after I had been studying English for 4 years or so. I had thought that I had heard and understand everything but when I watch the same series (several seasons) the second time I found out that I had actually missed some things. Quite often those missed parts were idioms.

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My answer to the question - no, I don't. And I didn't do that as a (false) beginner either. Although I tried to do something like that with podcasts but it didn't last long. I moved on to native materials quite early, and because the audio I was listening to often was way above my level it didn't matter had I listened to that 4 or 8 times I wouldn't have heard everything anyway. So at some point I decided to listen to (watch) the same thing 4 times or so and move on.

[Iversen]

I don’t see the poínt in trying to hear all the meaning whatever that is because if it is a rambling 10 minutes long speech then I’ll have forgotten most of it at the end - so why try? I do however try to get all the words while I listen, and for weak languages the irony of this is that I can’t waste my time on figuring out what all the words mean.

[kulaputra]

I much prefer listening naturally to i+1~2 material (i.e. average 70+% comprehension), and I've observed that over time I naturally get better at picking out individual words which previously may have escaped me. I have no conclusive evidence this is more effective per unit time spent, but it's far less boring and thus over the long term it's probably more effective simply because I don't get bored and burn out.