I’m presently crossing what I assume is the “intermediate plateau” for the first time, and looking for any advice / experience through this period.
I’m trying to “shift gears” in my approach and start to train more listening – earlier in the year I went to Jakarta for a couple of weeks and was humbled by how far behind my ability to converse with anyone was vs. what I could have comfortably read and responded to in writing.
Specifically: has anyone come to a landing on listening while following subtitles vs. training listening without any written support? The latter “feels” more difficult / relevant in a training sense, but I also tend to be convinced that the feeling of struggle is not actually proportional to effectiveness.
More broadly though, open to any ideas or effective techniques at this stage. For reference, in my “stage” I’m comfortably Lingq-ing my way through reading the 5th Harry Potter book, and trying to target native news as my next milestone (but presently it’s a bit too fast / feels just beyond comprehensible at the moment.
I’m in exactly the same boat. Currently finishing up the 7th HP. I suspect that we need to go back to A1/2 material and listen without the text until we’re comfortable and advance that way, but I don’t know.
Try using a VPN to change your location to France. I use ExpressVPN. There’s even an E-VPN app for the AppleTV device so I can watch US Netflix from anywhere in the world.
My secret: no subtitles. The reason: reading subtitles give me a headache. You have to be comfortable with not understanding everything though (what is almost everything in the beginning).
Yeah. Learning casual indonesian is an eye opener for me. I wasted a couple years memorizing worthless vocab. I can read, write and even speak but have a hell of time comprehending spoken.
Netflix has a ton of content as well as youtube. I guess it takes a ton of listening.
I too hate subtitles. They are annoying in any language. Even my own lol
Hmm well after a lot of listening and experimenting the last few days, I’m leaning toward it being better for me to fully embrace the subtitles, not least because I never really had issues with them in English, and it means I stay in the game much longer because I can follow and engage with the subject matter more easily.
Also I went back tried listening to a bunch of previous A1/A2 stuff like Mycroft suggested, and turns out I can listen and follow along with that pretty fluently, despite never having really practiced listening without subtitles!
Here’s a person who also recommends starting out with the English subtitles on. He’s done quite well with learning Russian, so I’m looking forward to trying this out.
Have watched the first video about WWI with English subtitles, and marked known words on Lingq. I like your suggestion that the subtitles are a way to stay in the game and keep watching.
Looked over the unknown words on the WWI video. Decided I don’t need to learn all the words useful on the Eastern Front. I’ll move on to the next video, like I’m watching regular stuff I’d watch in English. This 9% new vocabulary seems like a sweet spot for “enjoy the content (as much as one can enjoy WWI) and just keep watching.”
If I go back to A1/A2 videos, maybe I’ll try learning that vocabulary.
Will be interested to hear more about your experience, @leonkwek !
It’s surprisingly difficult in America to find films with French audio and French subs.
Interesting. I would think there would be plenty on Netflix or similar. Not sure if France is similar to Germany, but if it is you should be able to use vpn as Mycroft suggests and tap into public tv in France. I do this with German public tv.
I did a quick search…maybe it will help:
Top French TV Options with Subtitles (via VPN):
France.tv (France 2, 3, 4, 5, 1ère): Best for daily news, movies, and TV shows. Most content allows you to activate sous-titres (subtitles).
Arte: Exceptional for documentaries, independent films, and concerts. Known for high-quality audio and accurate subtitles.
TF1+: Good for mainstream entertainment, dramas, and reality TV, typically with French subtitles available.
TV5Monde+: Free, premium content from the francophone world, often with French or English subtitles, and sometimes doesn’t even require a VPN.
Molotov.tv: A streaming service aggregating over 90+ live French channels in one app. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
I think both are beneficial to be honest. Assuming they are accurate (which in many cases they aren’t). I think it’s good to be able to visualize the words being spoken with their written representation so you know what is being said. You can assess whether it is good for your level (can you even read and understand it). It trains you to think fast.
On the other hand, training without subtitles is worthwhile to make sure you really hear. Sometimes I feel like if subtitles are on I just end up reading them without really LISTENING. Or I’ll even be reading faster/or slower than they are talking. Or if the subtitles aren’t accurate, then it seems less of a worthwhile exercise to use subtitles at all (except for pleasure).
So, in short, both are worthwhile practicing. Maybe with subs first, then without. Or without, with, without. etc.
You eventually want to get to a point that you can listen to native level podcasts without any subtitles, and then do several hundred hours of that. But the trick is that the path to get there needs to be comprehensible input. It shouldn’t be a huge struggle, but a long, steady march. If you’re still coming across a lot that you don’t know while you’re reading subtitles, stick to that. Keep finding closer to native level content. Find things at different levels, the harder stuff you can read through subtitles, the easier stuff practice listening only. Do a lot of both. Listen while you are doing other things that don’t require full focus (cleaning, chores, gym, etc). Most people underestimate how many hours of work this is, for Indonesian I’d say you probably need to have in the ball park of at several million words read and near 1,000 hours of listening before you feel solid in real time conversational speed (you also need to practice that at some point).
Do both. Listen without reading subtitles, and listen while reading the subtitles in the target language. The former is harder and trains you to understand real speech, the latter trains your ear to recognise the words i.e. convert sounds into words. Without subtitles, make sure you’re just listening without translating, listen like a baby as they say.
As for comprehensible input, or graded input to use a more appropriate term, I found with French that there’s no one size fits all. I didn’t go through a phase of not understanding, and then understanding, that’s not how it works. I listened to a lot of material well above my level, as the learner stuff bored me to tears. I went through a range of stages. At first I understood some words, and got the gist of the subject, but I missed important details. There was a long stage where even though I could understand sentences, the congitive load was so high, that the focus was more on decoding the next one rather than retaining previous sentences. Today I can listen to a piece of audio, understand almost everything, and create a mental overview of the subject with the key details. I still have to focus intently on the audio in order to understand it, it’s not like my L1, English, and I assume it will take years to become easy.
Thanks all for the considered replies – clearly the message is that practicing without subtitles is also useful.
At any rate, after more experimenting I think I’ve found the ideal recipe, at least for where I’m at for now:
listen through the first time w/ subtitles
study through with LingQ to understand fully (and record all the lingqs)
listen again without subtitles
Seems very obvious in hindsight, but either way there’s an awesome dopamine hit where I can feel my brain handling the audio fluently, when say just 6 hours ago it was a struggle.
Chugging through this process on a ~10-20 min clip each day seems to be hitting the right “steady march” pace for me now.
Found some interesting ideas on using subtitles in this FAQ about learning Japanese.
If you focus on reading the subtitles in the target language you might learn quicker, because you’re getting reading practice. However, if you want to develop your accent and listening comprehension, you’ll want to watch with subtitles off. You might find some videos are better for reading practice, and others for liatening.
My advice is to use the language with native speakers - speaking and conversing on different topics. Use the tutors here, on italki, or on several other platforms that are available.
If you get a chance to return to Indonesia, take an immersion course there. Comprehensible Input is great, but you also need practice speaking and listening. The more you practice speaking, the better you will be able to understand the conversations.
I use italki for my Spanish language learning and have for several years now. Currently, I have one lesson a week, but while taking college Spanish courses, I augmented my course work with 2-4 lessons per week with native speakers. My comprehension, speaking, and pronunciation, all improved greatly practicing with native speakers.
I also completed a 3-week immersion course in Cusco, Peru; a year later a 3-1/2 week immersion course in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and spread out over a few years - several weeks of solo travel in different Spanish-speaking countries. Nothing is easy about language learning…
Well interestingly, what set me up to change approach (focus on listening) is that did in fact sign up for a intensive course while I was there (4hrs / day every week day for 2 weeks) and all in all I found it extremely inefficient, especially considering how expensive it was.
Part of the issue was that clearly my tutor had instruction to strictly follow a set curriculum – will assume if you’re on this site I don’t have to make the case that ‘traditional’ classroom language programs are a big fat waste of time. My experience was even worse because this school had a policy of not providing any electronic material directly!
My tutor would not explain the rationale (again I assume under strict instruction), though perhaps because they were worried about having their material stolen? Anyway it meant, after paying 2.5x the annual cost of LingQ for a 2-week course, I found myself being asked to dictate notes listing all the question words, into my chicken scratch handwriting.
On the second day I stopped my tutor and explained to him that I thought it was ineffective and didn’t want to waste time like this – he resisted at first (probably very aggressive and confrontational to assert like that in Indonesian culture) but eventually caved and confirmed that yes in fact he didn’t learn English through anything like the program they offered!
So we changed the program but we had to keep it ‘secret’ from the school (this one btw: https://www.learnindonesian.education/). Spent much more time with me listening and practicing speaking.
But like for any human, sitting and catering to someone else’s needs intensely for 4 hours straight is difficult, and especially boring when your conversation partner only has a very narrow range of expression and wants to repeat things over and over. He got bored and fell back to trying to get me to take notes or listen to exercises and fill out worksheets (i.e. paying tutoring rates to do lingq exercises) to chew through time.
So a long rant: but I can pretty clearly recommend that a structured intensive course in-country is NOT a good way to progress the intermediate plateau. Obviously having the right tutor could reverse all this, but through a structured program you lose the option to drop them immediately if they are not helping.
I attended evening classes and found them very good. I studied a language at school, hated it, didn’t work much, but ended up with a lot of useful words and verb conjugations. There are countless such courses that are effective, as used by the French Foreign Legion and US diplomats for example. However, they require the student to do plenty of self ‘study’ including consuming lots of input. You did two weeks, five days a week, four hours a day, that’s only 40 hours i.e. nothing. When assessing courses, you have to look at classroom hours and out of class study hours. Some people like classes, some don’t.
However, it sounds like your very short course was not worth the money.
When I studied at the university one of our professors told us that we are expected to use the same amount of time we spend at a lecture both for preparing for the lecture as well as reworking it afterwards. So 3 hours of additional work per 1.5 hour lecture.
To be honest, I never invested that much time. But I wasn’t a top tier student either.
A language course is similar, I guess. You can’t expect to learn a language just by sitting in a classroom. Similar to the lectures mentioned above the classes only provide the framework and some guidance. But the main work still has to be done by the students, me thinks.
I would not expect a language course to be taught in the same way as physics or maths. The evening language classes I attended were more like guided learning sessions, with a range of work exercises.
As an aside, I think university teaching is abysmal. All we did was sit in a room and take notes, often imperfectly so. Nothing was learnt in the lecture theatre, simply because it was too complex and impossible to absorb and understand so much. It would have been far better to tell the students what they needed to learn, and give them course notes or refer to text books, then they could start figuring it out immediately. University lecturers were often very bad teachers.
