ryanheise wrote:I've been working on a way to track my listening progress. I came up with this scorecard which I fill in while doing a listening session to record how many lapses of concentration I had, or in other words, how many times I had to listen to a segment again:
This is for a session dated 27/09/2019 in which I listened to a portion of 消滅 from 02:40 to 03:37 (57 seconds). The first row of numbers break down how many times I had to repeat any segment of audio, where I used AudioWorkBook to cut the audio up into segments of between 0.5-3 seconds in length. There were 7 segments that required a repeat hearing. Of those 7, there were 2 that required a second hearing. Of those, there was 1 that required a 3rd hearing, and that one also required a 4th hearing. Breaking it down this way strikes a balance between the amount of useful data I can extract out of a listening session, and how much data is actually practical to write down without being too disruptive. (Although I'd welcome any other ideas on what I should be tracking!)
It was 4 months ago when I began this experiment and took the first measurement (yes, it's still going!). Today I decided to go back and take the same measurement on the exact same segment of audio, and the results show a staggering improvement:
Note that I hadn't listened to this particular audio in the intervening time so as to simulate the conditions of the first measurement. I've also been doing the same attention stretching exercises every day for the past 4 months, working my way through different podcasts, although midway through I ended up writing my own program to use instead of WorkAudioBook, since it made it easier to build into it the desired behaviour for my exercises.
I think I'll sign off this experiment as a success. I haven't been able to measure improvement in my language exchanges yet since my language exchange partners have been either busy or on vacation (and I was a bit lazy in finding more exchange partners), but I certainly feel like my listening attention span has improved, and look forward to getting back to language exchange. If not, I'll start planning a new experiment that can be done independently of language exchange.