Over the past couple months I have been listening to a lot of audiobooks, and I thought I would share some thoughts on the whole experience:
- Comparison with videos: I watch a lot of dubbed videos on Netflix (most of the recent ones will be dubbed in a few languages, which is outstanding for language learning), but audiobooks just feel like a much better experience: for one they are actual books and therefore the content tends to be deeper, but also the lack of the image seems to make you focus more.
- Topics: here Steve drives the message - you’ve got to focus on what is interesting to you. I had a few audiobooks that were not of interest to me, and I just quit reading them after a while. In contrast, some authors, topics, and genres just simply grab my attention, and I will stick with them across several books
- Free listening style: this was my first approach, where I just listen to the story, while trying to get the meaning of unknown words in context. This tends to work surprisingly well, the first week looking like my language skills just literally moved to the next level. I honestly didn’t expect this to be the case, but I guess it makes sense since context is probably the way we learn most words for our native languages.
- Listening + reading afterwards: here I will still listen first, but then later will read the e-book imported to lingq to get the exact meaning of words that I didn’t know. This is enjoyable at a couple levels: (a) your vocabulary definitely improves, while (b) your understanding of the text increases since you can now pay attention to aspects you didn’t catch before both because of the vocabulary boost and also because going through the story a second time you have far more context
- Speaking: for a variety of work-related reasons, over the past few weeks I have almost stopped speaking some of the languages, and it is interesting that despite the increase in my vocabulary with the listening and reading, my speaking ability has gone a bit rusty. My conclusion here is likely obvious: listening, reading, and speaking are just different skills. Certainly overlapping and in synergy, but different. So, if you want to be able to speak, you’ve gotta speak a lot. The reason is likely that when you speak you are exercising a different part of your brain, but you also place an emphasis on a different set of words compared to your favorite authors.
- Grammar: I won’t lie, I really like grammar rules. Perhaps because my fist language is derived from Latin, I just simply feel at home with grammar, to the point where I enjoy reading books about grammar. Awkward, I know, but I often find myself reading books about grammar and linguists, also listening to audiobooks on different aspects of language after I read a fiction or non-fiction book in that same language.
- Writing: I was curious about what audiobooks would do to my writing, but this is a much more complicated topic. For one, I do think that while listening helps, if you want to improve writing you’ve gotta write, a lot, and have plenty of feedback. This is a much longer story, but the amazing online translators (google, bing, baidu, etc) have completely changed writing in a foreign language to a point of no return, t to the point of leaving our language proficiency tests completely obsolete. But I guess that should be left for a different post.
- Learning: since my goal is not primarily to learn a language, but instead to be able to learn something from the perspective of people who speak a certain language, my approach to languages is a bit different from most of the community. Rather than focusing on a single language and then moving on once I feel like I have a decent command, I tend to keep coming back to the languages I know. So, if I am interested in a certain topic and it is available in a language I’m already fluent in, I simply grab the book and start reading it, regardless of whatever language I might be trying to improve at that point in time. I guess this turns me into a far slower learner of new languages, but to me it really comes down to the reason for learning a language: absorbing different perspectives.
Anyway, I just thought I would share some experiences, but also pose some questions:
- How do you tackle audiobooks? Different sequences? Different approaches to vocabulary learning?
- How do you progress with audiobooks? Do you start with graded readers? Do you use teenager books as an intermediate step?
- Do you keep coming back to the same book to focus on the language or do you keep moving to other books to keep the topics fresh?
- How do you integrate listening, reading, speaking, and writing? Where does grammar fit in you current workflow?