French listening and oral production

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Carmody
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Re: French listening and oral production

Postby Carmody » Tue May 10, 2022 6:26 pm

I am so glad this thread has been posted since I have so much to learn from it.

Casting all shame aside, I must confess I am having a huge problem progressing from A2 level French oral input to B1. I listen lots but B1 comprehension continues to be out of reach for me. The current sources I use are:

Alice Ayel--speeded up
https://www.youtube.com/c/aliceayel/videos

inner French
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=inner+french

French mornings with Elisa
https://www.youtube.com/c/FrenchmorningswithElisa/videos

Home Language
https://www.youtube.com/c/HomeLanguage/videos

Passe moi les jumelles
https://www.youtube.com/c/Passemoilesjumelles/videos
I listen to this almost nightly, but my comprehension remains at a 2/10.

Since I have been listening to these sources for so long and yet without qualitative improvement, I fear there is no hope for me. Please tell me that isn't so..........
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Re: French listening and oral production

Postby rdearman » Tue May 10, 2022 10:22 pm

Carmody wrote:I am so glad this thread has been posted since I have so much to learn from it.

Casting all shame aside, I must confess I am having a huge problem progressing from A2 level French oral input to B1. I listen lots but B1 comprehension continues to be out of reach for me. The current sources I use are:
...

Since I have been listening to these sources for so long and yet without qualitative improvement, I fear there is no hope for me. Please tell me that isn't so..........

Wow, I listened to a couple of those, and they speak really slowly, especially that Alice Ayel. I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination. But what I do know is that if you want to be able to do something, you have to practice that thing. If you want to learn to listen to natives at native speed, then you need to listen to natives at native speed. Or faster.

Take everything I say with a truck load of salt. But I watch these on YouTube.

Le Pays préféré des Français : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6zQhf ... 9PCbHdTdYA

C'est pas sorcier : https://www.youtube.com/c/Cestpassorcierofficiel

I like documentaries, and I like science, so I just watch these. One is primarily directed at children, the "C'est pas sorcier" so it doesn't have a massively difficult vocabulary, but they speak at native speeds since the target audience is native children, not foreign students. The other is just a tour around France given by natives. It is pretty cool if you need ideas about where to visit in France.

I don't "get" everything they say, but I follow along and understand the majority of what they are talking about. I might watch it a couple of times if I really want to understand it all better. Normally a couple of repeats is all it takes to understand.

One of the videos I repeated a couple of times was about Gorges du Verdon - Alpes de Haute-Provence because it looked amazing!

Anyway, my theory is you're not going to learn to ride the bike until you take off the training wheels. :)
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Amandine
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Re: French listening and oral production

Postby Amandine » Tue May 10, 2022 10:25 pm

Of course there is hope! Are you listening alone or pairing that with really studying the transcript and getting a good match in your brain between the sounds and the words (this is not technical linguistic jargon I realise but its how I think about it)? The big difficulty is the disconnect between the two, they will say something super simple but you just don't recognise it so I find it really important to have a lot of practice hearing the words and seeing them at the same time. Have you looked at Easy French on YouTube? They have perfectly accurate subs in French and English and is really good for exposure to the way they actually speak.

Since you read so much, have you listened to the audiobook while reading along? I have an Audible French account for that, but I think you can get a lot of them on the American version now too. There are also various free ones on YouTube and of the classics.
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Re: French listening and oral production

Postby Van » Wed May 11, 2022 1:19 am

Carmody wrote:Casting all shame aside, I must confess I am having a huge problem progressing from A2 level French oral input to B1. I listen lots but B1 comprehension continues to be out of reach for me. The current sources I use are:

Hi Carmody, I'm only about a B1 level as well. I agree with rdearman - I noticed that 4 of your 5 sources are for learners with too slow and articulated speech and the other is too difficult, so I think you need to be listening to lots of stuff that bridges that gap - easier stuff but natural and for natives. When I first started, I personally used Generation Sitcoms on youtube because I saw it mentioned on this forum a few times, and it did the job e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BswBi01Z3So&list=PLfbMw6XUazMGmoEQ2MsWCwgzpD3YYPXiB

Also have you tried dictation? A teacher recommended me to transcribe audios to improve my listening comprehension and I found it hard work but it really paid off. Maybe you could try it with the Easy French youtube videos that Amandine recommended since they have accurate subs.
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Re: French listening and oral production

Postby lusan » Wed May 11, 2022 1:23 am

Carmody wrote:I am so glad this thread has been posted since I have so much to learn from it.

Casting all shame aside, I must confess I am having a huge problem progressing from A2 level French oral input to B1. I listen lots but B1 comprehension continues to be out of reach for me. The current sources I use are:

Alice Ayel--speeded up
https://www.youtube.com/c/aliceayel/videos

inner French
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=inner+french

....................


I concluded that listening at slow speed or simplified language did not help but hurt me. These ones you mentioned could give the impression that one gets it but when we face the real thing then... OOPs, je ne comprends pas! Help! I remember how easy I found Inner French as well as French Facile.... then France 24 and FranceInfo were my real targets, and there were at normal speed or faster. How to get there?.. Dubbed serials without subtitles plus a small dose of FranceInfo nouvelle! It worked.

Of course, it will be hard at the beginning but slowly the decoding mechanism automatically takes over and it happens: we understand and the language opens up to us.
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Re: French listening and oral production

Postby zenmonkey » Wed May 11, 2022 7:55 am

Carmody wrote:Passe moi les jumelles
https://www.youtube.com/c/Passemoilesjumelles/videos
I listen to this almost nightly, but my comprehension remains at a 2/10.

Since I have been listening to these sources for so long and yet without qualitative improvement, I fear there is no hope for me. Please tell me that isn't so..........


It isn’t so, you will get there.

I just listened to two of these. This is lovely content. But it’s also poetic, has a lot of accented speakers and covers a few esoteric things. I love it. But I’m still going to suggest you pause listening to this if you are only getting 20%. Save it for 3-4 months down the road. Listen to material that is a better fit. Come back to this later.
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Le Baron
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Re: French listening and oral production

Postby Le Baron » Wed May 11, 2022 8:52 am

Carmody wrote:Since I have been listening to these sources for so long and yet without qualitative improvement, I fear there is no hope for me. Please tell me that isn't so..........

Everyone above has already offered sterling advice. Consider an approach somewhere between rdearman and zenmonkey above. Sticking to the notion of 'comprehensible input' still means something you're likely to unravel and understand, but neither too difficult as to be impenetrable or too easy that you end up stuck on it. Nevertheless you need to decide what you can understand. Don't hold yourself back waiting for 100% total comprehension, move forward when you are able to get the majority of it. Time and exposure delivers the goods, not going over single instances with a magnifying glass.

In any listening I really go at it (with Spanish currently). Listening during as much of the day as possible. I save new content, casual listening I likely won't come back to, for the early evening. Other material is loaded onto my mp3 player to which I listen daily whilst busy. After a couple of weeks of listening/re-listening these start to come clear as it becomes more familiar. I also consult the transcripts of some of these between listens and it's amazing how much light this sheds on the repeat listening.
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Re: French listening and oral production

Postby DaveAgain » Wed May 11, 2022 3:16 pm

Carmody wrote:I am so glad this thread has been posted since I have so much to learn from it.

Casting all shame aside, I must confess I am having a huge problem progressing from A2 level French oral input to B1. I listen lots but B1 comprehension continues to be out of reach for me. The current sources I use are:


Since I have been listening to these sources for so long and yet without qualitative improvement, I fear there is no hope for me. Please tell me that isn't so..........
I think radio programmes tend to be easier to understand than TV, they're obliged to speak clearly. France Culture have a radio drama of La Gloire de mon père you could try, I think you've already read the book. Or perhaps a documentary about Simone Veil, again I think you've already read her autobiograpy.
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Re: French listening and oral production

Postby BeaP » Wed May 11, 2022 4:51 pm

Carmody wrote:Since I have been listening to these sources for so long and yet without qualitative improvement, I fear there is no hope for me. Please tell me that isn't so..........

I'm not an avid French learner, but I'll share my Spanish experience with you if it's OK. My strongest skill is listening, I do mock C2 tests with 0-3 mistakes. We can almost call this outrageous, listening is usually the most difficult part for examinees as it's very hard to train in an exam-focused way.

I've always skipped the listening exercises of coursebooks and watched an extreme amount of TV series and youtube videos made for native speakers. Mostly with Spanish subtitles, sometimes without them. My theory at the moment is: coursebook listening exercises and videos for learners develop speaking (if you listen to them multiple times). Listening can only be developed with native materials, and a lot of them. For me it's an adaptation process, not a learning process. Most of it is unconscious, because you don't hear everything clearly but your brain fills in the gaps. It's connected to rhythm, the musical nature of speech, which also gets a bit lost in slowed down recordings. I don't know the science behind it, but for me the practical takeaway is always more important.

You can choose shorter videos first and listen to them several times. You'll see that you'll understand a lot more during the second, third listening. (As a side note: the same goes for reading. If you don't understand a paragraph, try rereading it once or twice.)

I also noticed that because of skipping the listening exercises in coursebooks my speaking skill is worse than it should be at this point (after so many years of learning). I speak with relatively good intonation, rhythm and pronunciation, but my active vocabulary is very limited. I often search for basic words, and I use only very few things automatically. In my opinion speaking can be developed with dialogues made for learners, listening to them and imitation. So it's a good idea to watch the videos you've linked, but they'll only develop your speaking skills even if you use them properly.

Books like this might also help, but again in my opinion they'll improve your speaking more than your listening.
https://issuu.com/marketingcle/docs/feuilletage_comp_tences_compr_hension_orale_b1
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Re: French listening and oral production

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Wed May 11, 2022 8:12 pm

This would be a good sticky thread. Members have packed it with some good advice.
My two cents. I started off upping my French and my Spanish with reading literature and listening to accompanying audio. French first; then Spanish.
Much free audio exists for French literature from the 19th century, and some for the earlier 20th century. Too many years have passed for me to remember everything I read and listened to, but one of the novels was Albert Camus's l'Étranger. There is a reading by the author .
There are other readings of the noivel and other works by Camus on Youtube.
Another audiobook was Alain-Fournier's Le grand Meaulnes.
There is also, Le journal d'une femme de chambre by Octave Mirbeau.
If one looks, one can find translations into French of the Big Cats like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Austen.

In TV, another series from Generation Sitcoms is (Hélène et les Garçons), with 280 30-minute episodes, plenty to keep one busy, and not counting several spin-offs. The first episode of Hélène et les Garçons, which was itself a spinoff, was in 1991. The latest spin-off is Les mysteres de l''amour, still running in hour episodes. Hélène et les Garçons has the look and feel of the American series Friends, and in fact Hélène et les Garçons is said to have inspired Friends. All the episodes of Hélène et les Garçons are on Youtube, I think. The dialogue still goes too fast for me, though I forced myself to watch the first 70 episodes or so, as well as episodes from the spin-offs. And I just watched the first couple of minutes of the first episode: still don't understand it. :( Note that the splash page shown here is not from the first year of the series.

Finally let's mention Luke's journal, where he documents reading Cien Años de Solitude and other works by the Columbian writer Gabriel García-Márquez, illustrating the value of a work you really like that can bear repeated readings and listenings, which lead to better understanding.
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