My question is for people that do a lot of listening BUT without reading or knowing the text.
When I say NEW words or vocabulary, what I want to stretch here is not words that we know already, or that are associated with our own language or languages that we know already.
I’m talking about new words that we have NO CLUE about.
When I listen to audiobooks - especially the ones that have lots of descriptions, adjectives, nouns, etc. - I’m wondering if it’s possible to remember all those new words, that I’m not sure about the spelling, never seen them, and don’t have any translation available.
Is it realistically possible of learning a vast quantity of new vocabulary this way?
I don’t do large amounts of listening to content, which I have not actively studied with access to a translation/dictionary, as a means to grow my vocabulary. I think it is possible to grow your vocabulary this way, but it’s a slow way to do it. If you have no clue about the meaning of the word, I just don’t see how you can learn the meaning of the word. Effectively, you are waiting for the words, which you have some clue about guessing their definition based on context. It’s similar to extensive reading.
Sometimes. I listen to a lot of french podcasts through PodcastAddict on a 1.3x speed, these podcasts are made by natives or francophones for natives. That is to say they use actual spoken french. As all the episodes are somewhat long (more than 40 minutes)there is quite a lot of repetition of the same words/phrases (might even be the holy grail of 20 repetitions). This repetition helps to understand the meaning of said words.
But I would suggest to look up words that you deem essential to understanding the content. That way you’ll make more progress in less time, but with more effort.
The problem with listening for learning is that there isn’t really a way to make incomprehensible content comprehensible. You can do it with text, which is what we use Lingq for, but the spoken word is more elusive and ephemeral. So it is not a useful method for encountering new vocabulary. The ideal way is to listen while you are reading along. But for this, the number of unknown words should be rather sparse, otherwise you would have to constantly pause the audio, which ruins the flow and the whole experience.
No. I spend an hour a day listening without reading, and in general I cannot pick up unknown words which have no obvious phonetic connection to a known word. If they share a root with a verb, or a noun that I know, then maybe. Sometimes context does make it obvious. such as Le brevet de pilote or even Les escrocs voulaient faire un casse where I can guess that un casse is a bank job, or a heist. Listening without a text teaches me how known words are used, and hence deepens my unconscious understanding.
Comprehensible input probably has merit, but my guess is that in the absence of a text it is a very slow way to acquire words.
Thank you guys for all your answers which I agree with, but there are also people who advocate for massive pure listening input, in the same way, or similar, to massive reading input. Just wondering.
The problem is that when I listen to the audiobook I don’t have any text or situation where I can stop etc. For example, I now listen to something 1 hour before going to sleep. I can only concentrate on listening without any other distractions.
Not so easy to figure out how to remember the “word” and catch it afterwards (if I can get the spelling right).
If I upload the whole audio to LingQ, I have to go through the whole text. In this case, I’m not sure if I should reread everything or just check all the words I don’t know. Or even if I should buy the real ebook or just whisper the audio.
I agree with you that when there are a lot of repetitions. It’s a blessing!
I was just wondering how much we could really get out of just listening. It would save a lot of time
I’m probably what one would call an “advocate of massive reading input” (at least, one would come to this conclusion seeing my stats for français). Looking up words when you’re already reading online is so much faster than looking up words while reading a physical book with a physical dictionary on hands. I categorize reading as a more involved activity, thus when you read it’s almost silly not to look up words that are pertinent to understanding. Whereas listening is more of a passive activity in my book, ie I do listening activities when I cannot read. So by default I cannot look up words, because I’m physically engaged in some other activity while my mental focus follows the flow of the podcast/…
Of course, you can make listening more of a engaging activity, but that’s a different story.
When I was learning (yes, learning, the concept of acquiring the language was just starting to make waves on English-speaking YT) my first foreign language, listening was being considered an exercise, when a student tries to recognize words that he knows + get a gist of the meaning, that’s all. Now learners expect to learn new words through listening, and one can certainly learn vocabulary that way, but it still requires tons of repetition (these 20 times in context), just like in reading. I can’t stress enough how helpful it is to consume longform content because of it’s emphasis on one topic. Listening for an hour to a discussion of 2-3 people on one topic, where everyone gives their opinion on each point is a blessing. You can only say so much about anything before starting to repeat yourslef, thus listening to such conversations makes acquiring vocabulary easy.
An alternative would be watching the same content creator across a lot of videos, since their active vocabulary doesn’t change that much across all the videos, you’d eventually assimilate all of it. Same goes for reading a long book, or a series of novels from the same author.
The key to learning new vocabulary be it through reading or listening/active or passive engagement into content is repetition.
I agree for sure, but I was just wondering about the listening part only. To understand if it’s a myth or not. I do a lot of reading all the time, plus Youtube too much, and passive listening. But not so much active listening only. For example, 1 hour before going to bed I don’t do any other activity so I can focus only on the language until I wear off
Another example, as far as I remember, Pimsleur was audio only course and I suppose it still is. Yes, they repeat a lot I suppose, I’ve never tried them. I believe there were a couple of other methods based on audio only.
There was another user here, xxdb (or something like that), that was doing a lot of listening, but he was also drilling a lot of cards, I guess. He had a lot of experience on those experiments.
I basically think like all of you on this topic, but this is also a “reading-based” forum.
The only audio courses I’ve touched are beginner ones. I went through some of a Michel Thomas one (the first and second ones) and I touched a tiny bit of Pimsleur. They alternate between the target language and English. This is how you learn the definitions of the unknown words.
A valid idea to ponder. I just can’t see how you can learn completely new words you can’t guess from context from a conceptual point of view. You are effectively waiting for the time, when you can guess the word from context. You can increase your chance of knowing the context by studying material you know well, such as the topic or story, for example. But if you can’t even guess the word, where do you expect to get the meaning from?
As you mentioned, you can try and remember the word (eg. easier if you hear it often and repeat it out loud) and look it up later. Alternatively, you could have a pen and paper handy and write it down to look up later. But even in extensive reading the strategy is to only look up words which have occured multiple times or are extremely necessary for understanding.
The only ways I can think of getting the definition of the word are:
guessing from context
looking the word up in a dictionary (or reading a translation of the sentence)
asking someone
Only listening to content you’ve actively studied means you will never encounter completely new words in audio form though. Eg. Read the book and only after that listen to the audiobook.
You’re right. I was wondering, in this quote above that I’ve taken from you, isn’t this what the purist of comprehensible input would do by reading only? Without looking up words and miraculously absorb grammar rules and the meaning of words through context?
And going back to listening, human being have learnt to communicate forever, before the Sumerians, without any written text. Which probably inspires the people that advocate the learning of a language with a language parents, and simple communication back and forward, with pictures and descriptions. But in this case, they have the visual, the gestures, the facial expressions, and so on, to help them understand and learn the language.
Pure listening is without any visualization or clue. It’s kinda hard!
But the same thing goes for reading without looking up any word. Maybe the latter can be a bit slower because we can choose our own pace, and by listening someone else, we can’t.
Perhaps you’d be interested in reading this, if you haven’t already. It’s not completely related, but about the input purist point of view. It’s an unpublished paper of a self-experiment.
That is very interesting. I have a high level of comprehension in French, and for me the most striking aspect of French is its closeness to English. Thus when I hear a podcast, I often guess unknown words because they have a cognate in English. Sometimes the word is identical but with a french pronunciation. I believe the same would be true in Spanish, and Italian too. And of course word order is very similar. Thus this experiment might depend very strongly on the lexical similarity of the speaker’s language and the L2. In other words, the results might be totally differently if the L2 was Arabic, Yoruba or Mandarin.
Thanks, I’ve downloaded it and try to read it in the next days.
yeah, that’s why I was focusing on the ones that we don’t really have any reference. Any similarity could be good, but the same could be said for reading. Is that really learning though? Yes, it is as a general knowledge, of course, but the real challenge is learning the unknown.
I would second this. When learning Spanish I made the experience that I could basically derive every third word I came across either from German, English or both languages. And due to the familiar grammar it is easy to guess the relationship between the words of a sentence, aiding when trying to guess the meaning of unknown words.
This doesn’t work at all in Korean or Japanese. Besides some english loanwords you can’t guess at all, because there is no familiarity to european languages neither vocabulary or grammar wise. A native Chinese speaker would probably experience the exact opposite. With Korean’s vocabylary beeing 70% of chinese origin or Japanese with a similar percentage and their usage of chinese characters it would probably be much easier to guess the meaning of unknown words then in any european language.
An additional aspect is the cultural dimension. European cultures are relatively similar, so the way we express certain aspects, or which aspects are represented in our languages at all is similar, too.
In the end the CI approach requires some fundament to work on. You cannot derive the meaning of a word if you don’t have anything to derive from. And in languages closer to the ones you already know this point will be reached sooner then in languages more stranger. But even than, the question would remain whether this approach is efficient, if restricted to.
I have two different experiences. English is a foreign language for me, but I can understand quite a lot and when hearing or looking videos I learn sometimes new words by guessing them. This works well, even with complicated topics where I don´t know the special words. The problem with it: A word appears and you will probably see it not again for a long time.
My Spanish is below average, with this I struggle with easy words as well. Only hearing does not help me a lot with new words, but I hear known words in context of different topics and get more used to them, even if I don´t understand everything. Acquiring new words is still rare. I looked some Netflix series in Spanish without translation and I fought a lot. On the other hand I get more used to the language like pronounciation, speed and how they speak.
What works best for me after the 60 ministories is to download YT vdeos with topics I´m interested in, which are 8 - 10 mins with a ton of new words. I hear them and read them in the same time, Go through the words and get used to them. This is the best way I make progress. I assume, I will get, when I will be better in Spanish to the state like in English to understand more and more and with this I will get the ability to guess more words. But it is a total different story to get these words active. I think, the majority will be passive, if you see/hear them again, you can guess/understand them, but nothing more.
Yep, I agree that cognates played a major role in this self-experiment. However, they also play a major role in language learning in general (probably the number one reason why certain languages take longer to learn than others, in my opinion). I have no idea how someone would perform with such an experiment, but for a completely unrelated language. The level he got to in Spanish was rather surprising though. He did later mention somewhere that he doesn’t recommend what he did as a language learning method. He merely did it as a self-experiment.
