MorkTheFiddle wrote:coldrainwater wrote:Retrospectively, I had been on what amounted to an all out assault on Spanish listening, which was successful and for the record, I likely listened a few months more than needed, dipping mildly into a bucket of diminishing returns. I didn't think of it that way in the moment, but looking back and looking at the hours....
I write this question in case I forget it after catching up on your log, where you probably mention your Spanish "assault"? How many hours did your assault last? I ask because I'm doing an assault on French right now, and plan in a few months to begin an assault on Spanish. Anyways, good luck to you and all the others attempting this 365 challenge. And now on to your log.
Good question. Looking back at my log and some prior forum posts, the assault period had a pretty clear start month of June 2018. End date when I realized I had overshot the mark a bit was March 2019. In that ten month timeframe, I estimate about 130 hours of listening per month, so
1300 hours in total. Much of that listening time was passive listening and extensive by nature.
I saw a couple of sub-patterns that might be worth the mention while I am thinking about them. They might give you or others ideas. The transition I made in June 2018 went from a mix of mostly literature reading (advanced), some audiobook hours (listen only or read/listen, also advanced content), and 1-2 hours of podcasts per day
to dropping the literature reading and replacing it with almost all audiobook hours, plus a continued 1-2 hours per day of podcasts. At that point, going through audiobooks was quick, one every few days perhaps. Once that became pretty easy, I dropped the audiobooks and sought more challenge from podcasts, seeking some of the toughest I could find with varied content (some of my favorites are described in the Spanish podcast thread). At the time I am not sure I knew what you would call it, but since very early on in my Spanish listening, I liked to listen to 50 or so hour chunks of a given audio resource (podcast). That seemed to be the right amount of time for me to get used to the idolects of the few people that happened to be presenting. In addition to podcasts involving humor and podcasts from different countries, I listened to quite a bit of peninsular Spanish. I really liked the subject matter and it was easier for me to find challenging audio content via Peninsular dialects (I pretty much went on weekly raids of iVoox). It is a moot point now since I am not currently a big TV watcher, but I did take the time to compare TV dialogue to my podcasts, and the podcasts were almost always more challenging, so I stayed with them. In November of 2018, I was able to field test the results with monolingual travel to Mexico City and again with a trip to Cataluña (Barcelona) in December 2018. Several groups of natives independently evaluated my listening as advanced in Mexico. I saw and still see plenty of weakness to improve upon should I want to push listening further, but I would have to have put it at C1 or thereabout in the moment.
For completeness and as an addendum, I have kept it in my mind that I started a longer-term listening habit in March 2017, a few months after joining this forum and realizing the mistake I had made in neglecting listening for the first nine months or so of my journey. It is hard for me to give accurate data, but I suspect I listened to an average of maybe 2 hours per day from March 2017 to the end of February 2019, maybe
1450 hours in total (with the potential for a lot of variance and even more nuance in that figure). Incidentally, I believe that explains why I persisted into 2019 with such heavy listening hours even though I recognized that the skill was already sufficient for my language needs. Completing that two year stetch was motivating for me. Part of it was momentum and force of habit as well.
All in all, I wish you the best of luck in your assault on French as well. I don't look so far into the future, but French could be my next language after German. I will be following your progress. The listening aspect of French is one of the most intriguing aspects of the language in my limited experience/opinion. As post-data, I also have a few ideas on how I can make my log and other posts a bit more useful (to myself and hopefully others too). Rather long-winded answers like this one are fun and good offer a good reflection, but they do take a long time to read and would be fairly skipped by many.