Barely progressing with listening comprehension

PeterBormann · July 16, 2023, 9:11pm

Hm, what “exactly” did you do?

That is:

What was your exact study routine (reading while listening at a fast speed)?
Did you use LingQ for that?
How often did you re-listen to that stuff (after practicing reading while listening so
that you understood the dialogues)?
For how long have you been following this study routine? (the number of hours)

“I’ve been starting to think I’m somehow uniquely challenged.”

Well, after teaching more than 10k hours, I’m pretty sure there is nothing
so unique that nobody has ever heard of it before. It may be, but that’s not
an assumption I’d start with

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t challenges, for ex. for people with attention
deficit disorders, etc.

However, it usually boils down to the wrong selections (i.e., approaches, strategies, learning
material, expectations, etc.).

tparillo · July 16, 2023, 10:29pm

I don’t keep records of my routine. Over the 3 years, I’ve varied/evolved the routine over time. Clearly, I’ve had a heavier emphasis on reading, probably because I found it easier and therefore more rewarding.

I haven’t hardly used Lingq at all for listening. In the beginning yes. Since moving to podcasts and YT, no. To me, anything beyond the core reader function on Lingq is kind of a mess.

Therefore, I haven’t done much combined reading/listening. I didn’t like it when I did (I’d rather hear myself say the words as I read). And I don’t count reading subtitles when watching something as the combination. I feel like I do better by only glancing at the subs (assuming accurate subs), seeing what I didn’t get, and then backing up to hear it again without looking.

Re: re-listening, it varies. Sometimes 20x spread over days/week. And I’ll revisit something from weeks/months ago from time to time.

I just did a listening test of a very, very fast speaker. I varied the speed from .5 to 1.0, and found that at a lower speed, sure, I catch all the words individually better. However, I tend to lose the sentence meaning. At the higher speeds, I miss some connector words, etc., but understand the whole of the sentence better. --shrug-- Maybe it’s because I also am a fast speaker, and (in my native English), I tend to only half-listen and sort of “catch up” by the end of someone’s sentence, which clearly doesn’t work in Italian!

khardy · July 17, 2023, 2:22am

I’m a bit late to this party and have read through the other responses. A few thoughts based on my own experience…

I consumed YT videos in my target language as my primary medium of evening entertainment. That gave me much more than a half-hour or even a couple of hours of exposure each day. But since it was for entertainment, not for study, it was easy.

I did this before I could understand easily. I started mostly (not exclusively) with young people doing their stunts and challenges and various mischief because it was possible to more or less follow along even without full language comprehension. I.e., it was entertaining enough to remain interesting. And keeping interest is key, regardless of the type of content you enjoy.

I eventually branched out to more “mature” content and don’t watch much of that trivial stuff any more. While it was intially mentally stimulating just to be able to somewhat understand the language, the more I understood the more banal and uninteresting it became. But by then I was able to branch out to more “mature” and “serious” material. (I think the kids have mostly moved on to TikTok or other platforms that I don’t use anyway.)

I still spend a lot of time in my target language on YT. As with the English channels I watch, I watch most of them at 1.25x or 1.5x speed, and some really slow speakers at 1.75x. I am not at all surprised by your observation that slowed-down speech is harder to understand. That is my own experience. [Edit: I dont’ speed videos up to boost comprehension, I do it so that I can watch more faster when I am able to do so and still understand.]

Some individuals are much more difficult to understand than others. Stick with the difficult ones. I now much more easily understand some of those I that I used to find more challenging. I’m not trying to give the impression that my listening comprehension is perfect – it is not. Some content remains particularly challenging, but the barriers slowly erode with continual exposure.

tl;dnr: Find things you can enjoy before you can understand them fully. Consume massively, stick with it, enjoy the journey, and good luck!

PeterBormann · July 17, 2023, 5:23am

OK, thanks!
That’s the specific info we need to be able to diagnose what’s going on.

1. Stats / language learning journal

I don’t keep records of my routine. I’ve varied/evolved theroutine over time.

You should have a kind of “language learning journal” as a textual memory.
It could be as simple as what I have in Dutch on my LingQ home page where I document
my Dutch learning journey from day 1 based on “reading while listening” + SRS (Anki / Memrise):
For example:
"* 7/04: ca. 38 min (Tiny Habits (Dutch)): RWL + mainly re-/listening) + 254 words read

7/05: ca. 72 min (Tiny Habits / Super Easy Dutch: RWL + re-listening): 989 words read
7/06: ca. 48 min (Een beetje Nederlands / Super Easy Dutch: RWL + re-listening): 2529 words read + 45 min SRS (Anki, Memrise)"

If you want to have a more detailed stats sheets, see Toby’s (@noxialisrex) LingQ home page:
1drv.ms/x/s!At81YNZVqaH1gZQltSijI7jSISubWA?e=OCMuU5 (it’s a OneDrive link)

The reason:
Our memory isn’t reliable. Therefore, it’s a good thing to have such stats (in addition to some
of the LingQ stats, esp. the “number of words read / written words”, “listening / speaking hours”.

Then we can detect patterns and say (after a few weeks / months) what is working and what is
not. After that, we can continue or adjust our learning / study routine.

Rinse and repeat.

2. " I’ve had a heavier emphasis on reading, "

Understable, but nowadays I consider this a “bad” practice (at least when it comes to “listening / fluency first”).

Usually it goes like this:
People read for hundreds and hundreds hours in their L2s, are happy with their progress, and, suddenly, switch to a kind of panic mode bc. their listening comprehension and speaking are subpar.

I did this myself as a teenager in French - and my first contact in France with natives was just
terrible (i.e., it was a total collapse within less than 5 min trying to talk to them).

That’s why “reading while listening” (+ re-listening multiple times) to everyday dialogues with multiple native speakers for a few hundred hours is a superior study routine compared to reading alone, listening to audiobooks or the news, etc. - at least when it comes to “listening - / fluency - first”

3. LingQ + YT / podcasts (or Netflix):

Since moving to podcasts and YT, no.

If you’re not advanced (so that listening to fast-paced native speakers comes easy to you),
it’s a good idea to use LingQ (or ReadLang).

Use it to understand the meaning of the dialogues (for ex., by reading in silence first, making LingQs, etc.).
Then practice “reading while listening” (1-2 x) with the podcasts / YT vids (with multiple native speakers) you selected and using focused attention (that’s what folks usually call “active” listening).
You can also increase the speed (first 1.0x, then 1.25x, 1.5x, until 1.7x) so that your brain can
adapt to the higher speed. I’ve practiced this with many L2s for hundreds and hundreds of hours. It works…
After that, re-listen to the podcast / YT vids again (2-3 x over the next few days while doing other chores, but where you can still focus more or less on the audio material - that’s what folks usually call “passive” listening, but there’s nothing passive about it bc. it’s just “divided attention”. We have talked about this ad nauseam on the LingQ forum…)
Rinse and repeat.

If there aren’t other issues at play here, you will make progress after ca. 100-200 h in the case of Germanic and Romance languages, which are close to your L1 English. You will need more hours for distant L2 such as Asian languages (see esp. the posts by Florian - @bamboozled).

It’s a good idea to follow this deliberate practice routine for ca. 500 h. Then most of your
comprehension problems should be a thing of the past.

4. “I just did a listening test”
Sorry, but your test has nothing to do with the deliberate practice study routine described above

PeterBormann · July 17, 2023, 5:26am

PS -
Maybe it’s a good idea to read more about “deliberate practice” as well:

Just listening repeatedly to random native speaker stuff is not “deliberate” (and focused) practice.

Good luck,
Peter

nfera · July 17, 2023, 10:40am

A few hundred hours of listening simply isn’t enough. I have ~800 listening hours in Italian and I still have challenges, especially in certain situations. You simply have to do more listening, as others have mentioned. Every 100 hours of listening you add, is a step up in your listening comprehension.

Probably the key principle to improving your listening comprehension (and the language as a whole) as an intermediate/advanced is to follow the difficulty. If something is hard for you, this is where you can get large amounts of improvement. Obviously, you don’t want it so hard that you don’t understand anything, but you want it to be challenging for you, so you have to concentrate to be able to understand it. Over time, this becomes easier and easier to understand and then you need to find something else that’s challenging.

One of the issues I’m currently having in Italian is that I can easily understand people who speak standard Italian with clear audio and speak clearly. But a group of native speakers in a noisy environment with poor sound quality, when people speak with strong regional accents and switch back and forth with ‘dialect’, it’s very challenging. In order for me to improve my listening comprehension, I need to practise more with such content. As I can’t easily search the Internet for “poor sound quality with strong regional accents interesting Italian podcasts,” my idea is to artifically create this environment. That is, listen to chit-chat podcasts (multiple native speakers speaking over top of each other) with low volume and lots of background noise (as in walking along a heavily trafficked street, in a loud cafe, or next to a construction site with low-volume podcast audio). You are forced to concentrate hard. And in language learning, concentration = gains.

My second method is exposing myself more to the many regional languages/dialects of Italy. It’s not always easy to find such content, but there are several movies and YouTube channels, which I’ve encountered. My theory is that if I expose myself to the dialect, then when they speak accented standard Italian, I’ll better understand them, as I’ll be familiar with the sounds of that region. Depending on the content, I may or may not watch it with Italian subtitles on at the same time.

As @PeterBormann advocates, reading while listening is very effective (especially with increased audio speed, as this increases the difficulty). There will come a point though, where reading becomes a crutch and your listening comprehension isn’t improving as fast as it was before. This is when it becomes too easy. At this point, you should remove the subtitles / transcript and listen to novel podcasts without the transcript. Then when that becomes easy, find ways to increase the difficulty, like studying in a noisy cafe with quiet audio instead of in the silent area of the library.

A final point that I’d like to mention is to select audios with high-density talking. I’ve watched a lot of movies and TV series in Italian, but it’s just much slower in improving your listening comprehension and language abilities than listening to podcasts or talk shows, etc. It works out that the standard movie / TV show has about half the amount of words read per hour than that of a podcast. As a random example, which turns out to be coincidentally perfect, La scuola cattolica has ~7,500 words in the transcript for a 106 minute movie compared to a speech by Alessandro Barbero entitled Usare la Storia per prevedere la futura? has 8,600 words in rhe 61 minutes talk. I.e. 4,250 words/hour compared to 8,500 words/hour. Obviously, more words per hour = faster gains. That’s why increasing the audio playback speed works great.

If you’re looking for interesting content, here’s a list of my favourite content in Italian:

https://www.lingq.com/en/learn/it/web/community/post/4997559

tparillo · July 17, 2023, 2:24pm

@nfera,
Thanks for the detailed contribution. I’m with you on dense listening – I rarely invest any time in movies/tv, etc. for the reason you note. Re: your suggested content, was there a list or link or??

@PeterBormanm,
I’m familiar with deliberate practice. You’ve given me some ideas for moving forward (and adjusting my expectations).

One question, when you suggest using Lingq for listening…maybe I’m missing something? Why use it when it’s so much easier/cleaner to avoid Lingq’s cluttered UI when I can go direct to YT or podcasts?

GMelillo · July 17, 2023, 2:27pm

Just checked out your updated list of content. Awesome as usual. Thank you. I’m really interested in your dialect resources. Right now I’m studying an Italian soap opera - Vivere. Very dense language. It’s a soap opera, so… but the linguistic aspect is what I’m looking for. Maybe after processing a hundred hours or so of that I will try some dialect stuff. I was just in Italy and I had the exact problem you described (re: environment, regional pronunciation) in ordinary conversation…

@tparillo There is an issue with linking out from forums to the main Lingq website. Try this:

Ahttps://www.lingq.com/en/learn/it/web/community/post/4997559

Take off the “A” on the front.

GMelillo · July 17, 2023, 2:35pm

@tparillo Here’s my specific practice routine for improving my listening comprehension:

(0) Listen without no subs and no text. This is probably unnecessary, so I only do it about 30% of the time, sort of like a progress check. It always amazes me how much my listening comprehension improves when I then have the text in front of me

(1) Listen with the text in front of me. Lingq everything I want to focus on. If there is a sentence that I cannot parse in my ear word-for-word, even with the text in front of me, back up and re-listen to that sentence over and over again. If there is a sentence that I am hearing but not understanding, pause and speak the sentence in a meaningful way multiple times.

(2) Listen with the text in front of me, but do not stop. Try to sub-vocalize along through the whole text. If there is a particular difficult sentence, I will stop and back up and try a few times, but my stopping and starting is probably 10-20% of step (1).

(3) Listen again without the text in front of me. If I notice a meaningful improvement in my word-for-word parsing, put this audio file in the less-intense-listening review pile and move on to more text.

I have a high tolerance for difficulty, so I look for initial audio that presents major challenges, like on that first listen I get the jist only 50% of the time and parse word-for-word at something like 20%.

hellion · July 17, 2023, 3:42pm

100% agree with this. Most people grossly underestimate just how much listening is required. I’m sure we’ve all been guilty of that, before realising (by slow/non-existent progress) that what we were doing just wasn’t enough. The way OP explained their listening hours made it sound like they thought it was sufficient - it wasn’t, not even close.

We’ve all been there, it just takes experience before you really get an idea of what’s required. I’d say a good rule is that however many hours of listening you think you need (to reach a high level of listening ability), you can probably multiply it by 10, and even then you might need more.

jt23 · July 17, 2023, 10:07pm

@tparillo:

Bormann has some good tips here and there, but otherwise IMO he has delusions of authority.

There are plenty of teachers with 10k hours of teaching experience who are crap.

Take what you like and leave the rest.

tparillo · July 18, 2023, 1:19am

nfera,

Now I see the link to the resources. I expected to know about most of them but…no! Only the stuff on NFLX, etc. Thanks for that.

My favorite read so far has been the Moccia trio of near-cult novels, starting with Tre Metri Sopra il Cielo.

Among my favorite YT stuff, in addition Podcast Italiano, is the series of book summaries (at high speed) Un po’ di piu.

nfera · July 18, 2023, 10:33am

@tparillo

After watching the movie Tre Metri Sopra il Cielo, I gotta say that it did not motivate me one bit to want to read the book. I’m sure the book is much better than the movie though.

I loved Podcast Italiano as a beginner and lower intermediate. I didn’t mention it in my list as it’s already on LingQ. Just like I didn’t mention the podcast Salvatore racconta, as I already shared it on LingQ (with permission from the author). But maybe you’re right that I should add them.

With regard to Un po’ di più, I just shared the two YouTube videos they have with Italian subtitles for other users. If you have other YouTube channels with subtitles, which you like and would recommend to others, you should consider volunteering as a Librarian and sharing them with other users. (YouTube videos should be shared as external lessons for copyright reasons.) We could do with some more Italian Librarians.

P.S. As you would be aware, you probably want to start transitioning away from educational/pedagogical content, such as Podcast Italiano.

The order of listening comprehension difficulty goes something like this:

Beginner educational content
Intermediate educational content
A tutor speaking to you (clearly and slowly with a limited vocabulary)
Audiobooks / advanced educational content
Having a chat with one person, who speaks clear standard Italian to you (they unconsciously slow down their speech for you because you said “huh?” so many times)
Single speaker speaking into a microphone, speaking clear standard Italian, improvised or semi-improvised (eg. single speaker YouTube channels, like Dario Bressanini, etc.) / standard Italian interview podcasts with only one host and the interviewee
TV series
Movies (harder than TV series, because you get used to characters’ voices and the way they speak throughout the series)
Chatting with one person who has a strong accent because their mother tongue is dialect (again, they will speak slower to you, because you’ve asked them to repeat themselves so many times)
Old movies (as sound was recorded different back in the day, so it’s less clear)
Chit-chat podcasts / unscripted podcasts with multiple speakers, who often speak over top of each other, like the Cachemire Podcast
Being in a group of Italians whose mother tongues are standard Italian (it’s harder because they aren’t speaking in microphones, so the sound volume changes, when people move their head away from you)
Being in a group of Italians whose mother tongues are dialect, but they are from different regions, so they speak accented standard Italian
Being in a group of Italians in a loud pub with music playing in the background
TV series in dialect (some dialects are easier to understand than others. I.e. Veneziano is very comprehensible, Romano is mostly comprehensible with a little bit of practice, while Napoletano is pretty much incomprehensible)
Movies in dialect (dialect dependent)
Being with a group of people who are speaking in dialect (dialect dependent)

You want, over time, to keep moving up in order of difficulty of listening comprehension (you can skip TV series and movies, if you want). Also, most Italians understand some dialects, but not all. For instance, the vast majority of Italians would watch Mare Fuori (half in Napoletano) with Italian subtitles on, but would probably watch Strappare lungo i bordi (in a strong Roman accent / in Romano) without subtitles.

PeterBormann · July 18, 2023, 7:45pm

Perhaps it’s not necessary for you because you already read a lot of “contemporary” novels
which contain enough collocations, slang, and idioms.

I, on the other hand, need some sort of “retention system” (like ReadLang or LingQ) so I can collect this colloquial vocabulary from podcasts, YT videos, and Netflix series. Then I want to use a Reader-to-Anki function so I can do L1->L2 exercises in Anki or writing exercises with chatbots à la ChatGPT & Co.

In short, in my “media pipeline” I need this retention step:
“Beginner dialogues” (Mini Stories, Assimil, whatever) →
Intermediate dialogues (with multiple speakers) →
non fiction texts (e.g., the Harari trilogy or other stuff I’m interested in) →
podcasts / YT vids / Netflix series

After deleting my LingQ language slots for English, Spanish, and Portuguese last year, I’m currently testing this “fluency first” approach (refilling these same language slots) to see if I can achieve a B2-C1 level in the most efficient way (with a combination of reading and listening / ultra-reading and listening + Anki + chatbots + self-talk): ca. 2.5 million words read, ca. 500 h listening + active recall / writing and speaking activities.

In addition, I’ve been collecting more than 1000 intermediate dialogues in English and several hundred similar dialogues in Spanish for ca. 10 months and I want to translate them into other L2s…

The next step is to have a collocations training software for various Germanic and Romance languages, which already contains several tens of thousands of contemporary collocations / idioms.

And when do I switch to fiction?
After reaching the 2.5 million word threshold (for Germanic / Romance languages), I intend to read first popular contemporary novels ( crime novels, mystery novels, thrillers, etc.) and then more sophisticated texts (complex contemporary or pre-1950 prose, science, poetry, etc.).

(Note: That’s basically the challenge for Portuguese and Dutch right now bc. I can already do that in English, French, or Spanish).

From this point on, there’s no finish line in sight, i.e.; it never stops bc. native speakers never stop either

tparillo · July 19, 2023, 8:20pm

Agreed, TMSC is a terrible movie (the follow up, Ho Volga di Te is only slightly better). The Netflix show “based on it” is hilariously disconnected. And yes, the book is much much better, obviously very colloquial and has a more extensive vocab than I’d expect (lots of synonyms). I pulled something like 500 phrases/sentences from the trio of books via Lingq to Anki…“che, vi ci vogliano gli inviti scritti?”

In your progression of listening difficulty, I’d like to add 14b) eavesdropping in public places.

And yes, I’m aware of the need to get away from pedagogical content. I lean on it when I don’t have the energy for something harder. And when I do have the energy, I listen to things like G Meloni clips or something about science from Nova Lectio, etc., or at least an interview on one of the learning sites.

As far as librarian, I don’t even know what that means in the Lingq context!

nfera · July 20, 2023, 7:31am

You just share the great content you found, pretty much.

For more details:

https://www.lingq.com/en/learn/it/web/community/contribute

Antoine_20 · July 20, 2023, 1:48pm

Listening and reading at the same time is probably one of the best strategies one can use. It is important that one listens and reads a particular piece over and over. Doing this, we become familiar with the sound of the different ways words can be said when next to different words in a sentence or how the sound of a particular word can change in different circumstances. We have to let our ears “get used to” the sounds. This process cannot be achieved overnight!

Coffeechikk · July 20, 2023, 3:08pm

I’m the same. I know each word but strung together I can’t figure it out. So now I’ve switched to reading in sentence mode. Then I Lingq whole phrases since I need to learn those.

Damian7777777 · July 20, 2023, 8:51pm

This is something I have been doing for my listening the last couple of months. After I realised that I did not want to increase my time staring at a screen. I was using it on a C1 graded reader audiobook that I could initially only read and understand if I used lingq.

It has definitely raised my listening level. I used it for the first half of the book and I can now understand the second half just by listening.

It uses Olly Richards theory that you don’t need to know all the words to listen or read because your brain will make sense of it through repetition.

I am rolling it out to a c2 graded reader, a real Spanish audiobook (La Sombre Del Viento) and also the lingq podcast for conversational Spanish.

Method is as follows:

(You need the text in a form that you can import into lingq)
Step 1: listen to the chapter 4 times. - I am looking for my brain to start to ask questions (eg someone shouts. Why did that happen? What caused it, what happened next, etc)
Step 2: convert the text into a word doc and copy and paste the chapter into Chatgpt.
Step 3: Ask ChatGPT to read the chapter and produce an extended summary of the chapter in both English and target language.
Step 4: Read the summary in Target language and listen to the chapter several times.
Step 5: Read the English summary and listen to the chapter several times.
Step 6: Read and listen simultaneously 1-2 times.
Step 7: Read it 1-2 times depending on how well you get it.
Step 8: Read it on lingq-then immediately read it off of lingq.
Step 9: Read and listen or just listen. Then move to next chapter.

tparillo · July 20, 2023, 11:20pm

Wow, Damian, that is a ton of work! Is your challenge more from hearing the words or do you hear them well and struggle to get what the sentence means (I have the latter problem…I can identify the words pretty well, could write most of them down, but they’re just sounds to me, devoid of meaning sometimes).