French: I started watching
Buffy contre les vampires somewhere around a solid B1. When I started, I could:
- Read a transcript of the dialog, though I had to stop and decode and occasionally look stuff up.
- Get the rough gist of maybe 40% of the dialog in an episode. This was typical: I understood maybe 40% to 60% of RFI Français Facile, and a bit less of regular radio news. Movies were hopeless.
- Read a real book in French, though somewhat awkwardly and slowly, missing a fair bit of detail. I'd probably read between 500 and 1000 pages of actual French at this point.
I used transcripts intensively for the first episodes, watching them a couple of time each. I also watched episodes 3 and 4 twice, I think, without subtitles. The I just started watching straight through without subtitles. By the end of season 1 (~12 episodes at ~42 minutes each), I could understand maybe 70% of the dialog. The latter seasons had about 20 episodes apiece, and by the end of season 3, I could understand comfortable over 90% of the dialog. By the end of season 5, I was in the high 90s.
Afterwards, I watched about 3 seasons of
Angel, the sequel to
Buffy. At first it was slightly tricky, but once again, I improved rapidly.
Then I watched several kid's series:
Ulysse 31 (a couple of short seasons), and
Avatar (3 seasons of 20 episodes, ~21 minutes each). With each new series, my comprehension started out weak, but after a couple of seasons, I was watching comfortably with comprehension well above 90%. By the end of
Avatar, there were occasional easier episodes where I missed maybe one or two lines of dialog in the whole episode.
All the time, I was also reading intensively. I'd probably read at least 2,500 pages by the time I finished the TV series mentioned above, and could read quite comfortably. But after watching those three series, and maybe 1 or 2 others, I did about 15 hours of channel surfing of actual French TV, without following any series in particular. At the end of that period, I could channel surf French TV and easily find something to watch: Maybe 50% of the shows on French TV were pleasantly comprehensible with no "warm up." This is also about the time that I finally started to understand what people in Montreal were saying to me, despite never having done any real work on the accent.
The only intensive listening or reading I did during this time was using Anki, and it was mostly sentence comprehension cards—around 1,500 sentences or short highlights taken from books I was reading.
Spanish: For Spanish, I wanted to try to recreate
Judith Meyer's Subs2SRS project, where she started Japanese from zero and could understand "the majority" of a Japanese TV series which interested her after 30 hours of work.
You can see
my Subs2SRS experiment in my log. I started Spanish from zero, although I had a substantial discount thanks to English and French, and did about 30 hours of Subs2SRS sound cards and related activities. I basically learned the dialog of the four early episodes of
Avatar, and then I started watching the series. Here are my reactions as I went along:
emk wrote:Episode 5 (studied with subs2srs): 80+% comprehension.
Episode 6 (reviewed without subs2srs): Variable, but good overall.
Episodes 7 & 8: Less than 50% comprehension, but I could follow the plot pretty well! Definitely fun.
Episodes 9 & 10: Definitely harder than 7 and 8. Rough going overall.
Episode 11: Not as good as 7&8, but definitely better than 9 and 10.
Episode 12: Wow, this was great! I followed almost all the story, and I understood some sections solidly.
By the end of 60 episodes, I was pretty comfortable watching
Avatar. I doubt that my comprehension
ever went over 60%, even for the easiest episodes. And in each case, I was vaguely familiar with the plot, because I'd already watched the series in French. But I was watching it and it was fun.
So then I continued with
Korra. At first, I remember it being very rough. But after 3 or 4 seasons, I could once again follow the plot and understand about half of the actual dialog. And these were new episodes I'd never seen before! All in all, I was enjoying watching TV within 100 hours of starting Spanish.
I'm pretty certain that if I wanted to make real progress, I'd need to laboriously wade through a real book or two to fill in the less common vocabulary. My ability to understand 40% of what was going on in
Korra was based on familiarity with the vocabulary of the show, and the fact that—as s_allard likes to point out—the most common 300 words do a lot of work. So basically listening is my most advanced Spanish skill by far; my boss used to laugh at the fact that I had to read Spanish aloud to understand it. But to get my comprehension much higher, I'd need a lot more vocab.
So, yeah, Judith Meyer studied Japanese (with no background in any related language, though I gather she knew the kanji thanks to Chinese), and I studied Spanish (with a big French+English discount). And yet, she got roughly the same results in 30 hours that I got in 100 hours. I think we have to admit that Judith Meyer is a
way better language learner than I am. On the other, I was really happy with my progress in 100 hours!
(And it seems to have stuck. I've barely touched Spanish in a year or two now, but if I start rewatching those earlier episodes I studied with Subs2SRS and Anki, the comprehension comes back really quickly.)