Do you think Audiobooks (without text) are really Effective?

Open Forum
41

I didn’t know Whispersyc was region-based – but for what it’s worth, even in the US it’s kind of “language-based” meaning really the only languages that audio whispersyc seems to be available in is English and German for some reason. The other languages, don’t seem to have it at all.

My guess is this has to do with added cost vs. demand / langugae as well as various international rights clearances etc. – I think a lot of these decisions are made as consequence of another decision that’s meant to serve international publishing interests etc.

For example: A US entity owns the rights to “Novel X” but the right to publish it in French is owned by another company and the translation of Novel-X into French is in and of itself under French copyright, and the audio recoding by a French performer is in and of itself another derivative work that is subject to its own rights protections. So to bring this all under one umbrella where you can just buy an American book in French with a French audiobook on the same website in Canada requires some jugging and bartering of rights, fees, and services.

But that’s jut my guess.

42

It’s definitely beneficial for language acquisition but not easy to quantify.

I re-listened to a chapter I downloaded last night about a group of people getting ready for a trip. Last night I heard they all had to bring some of the group gear along with their personal stuff. Today, I heard 選んで, so I picked up that extra granularity of meaning between taking and choosing/taking something.

That’s all I remember differently this time listening, but that probably doesn’t mean it’s all the benefit I received. It’s just the only thing I consciously recognized as an improvement to my understanding of the chapter.

43

Yes, exactly, it’s something like that plus blocks from countries and companies inside countries on how they want to have “their” products distributed.

It’s just a nosense showing that we don’t have a global world but just a global mess. :wink:

44

Listening to audiobooks helps with listening comprehension, pronunciation, motivation, and learning some new words or phrases in context (when you already understanding nearly everything else).

Audio is not helpful if you don’t understand what you’re listening to. Then it’s just oganized noise. You’ll need to import the text into LingQ to learn what the words mean.

45

Yeah, but these types of copyright agreements are necessary in order to facilitate the existence of an international publishing industry. And with time, they allow for a free-er flow of content with less and less inconvenience.

When I started learning languages, buying French editions of e-books on Amazon US was still pretty restricted. Years later, it started becoming easier and easier because the international groundwork was being laid out for it through various agreements.

Today it’s very easy – though not quite as easy as would like it to be, but hopefully it will get even easier as time goes on.

46

LILingquist,

I have a question if you do not mind answering it.
How come we can learn to decode and understand our native language just through listening? I do not remember reading books in my native language yet I am very fluent to discuss whatever needs to be discussed under the sun. I used to watch movies and the most important slang/informal words were repeated many times in the plot so, with enough contextual clues, my subconscious mind was able to decode the meanings of such informal words.
I just did listening and watching without using a dictionary or a LingQ system. for learning my native language why it should be different for learning a second language?

47

You can do that again if you can find a pair of erstatz parents in your target language, who will talk to you constantly in simplified language. After a couple of years you will know all the colours and the words for circle and triangle and that the dog goes whoof and so on. Than you could try to continue to simulate the development of a normal child by finding a nice kindergarten and later an elementary school but you might stick out due to the age difference. But at this part even the children start reading in school.

So in short children do not decode the language simply by listening. They have several years of extremely close relationships with parents who repeat, gesticulate, create clear situations for the child to understand with single new words and concepts being slowly introduced over the span of years. And later in the childs development literacy will bring about a giant boost in their language abilities. Also in your native language you can most likely recognize a difference between regular readers and non readers.

48

The answer to this is obvious to me, despite me not being a linguist or psychologist or anything like that. When children grow up, they learn words and later the meaning of phrases and sentences through context. A parent will say “fell” when the kid drops something, they´ll say something like “open up” when they spoon feed an infant, while opening their own mouth to get the child to mimic. You can even try learning languages in a similar way to how a toddler does it by using Rosetta Stone and opting not to show text. It will then just show you pictures and let you listen to phrases, where you have to select the correct picture, described by the phrase, right after you hear it. They then give you a signal not note whether you picked the correct one. If you keep doing this over and over, you´ll eventually learn quite a bit.

When you listen to an audiobook, on it´s own, you have nothing but talk. It is completely useless if you don´t know anything in that language. It can be very useful if you have a decent knowledge of the language already or a good knowledge of a very similar language.

49

Audiobook in a foreign language is very much comprehensible if you get a translation in your native language/your best language. Just looking at the translation text alone will make the audio comprehensible. Do not even read it just following along- all of a sudden foreign sounds/words start making sense. Thoughts > words.

50

asad100101,

This answer by ramonek is probably better than I could have come up. For brevity and not to repeat too much of it, I can summarize here and refer back to ramonek’s post for detail. In short:

  1. Native babies and children are 100% surrounded by, and foused on their learning with parents, schools, family completely devoted to these efforts.

  2. Kids read A LOT of progressively harder material in school in their native language.

  3. It takes these children 5,6,7 and more years, ie their entire lives, to get to a little kid’s level of learning, which isn’t so great.

  4. You said you “do not remember reading books in my native language yet I am very fluent to discuss whatever needs to be discussed under the sun.” No offense, but either your memory or your fluency isn’t as good as you think. Most people read a lot over the course of their lives in school, on the internet, books, etc. If they don’t, it shows.

51

Long time. I do not even remember what I ate last night :wink:

52

Kids learning their first language versus educated adult language hobbyists learning an L2 are an apples and oranges comparison.

Kids aren’t in a language lab 24/7, even though it’s often quoted that they are. They’re picking up the language because they have people interacting with them in simplified language they can understand. My pediatrician told me the average (not advanced) young child uses sentences equivalent to their age, i.e. a one-year old utters single words, a two-year old mostly two word sentences, a three-year old three word sentences…And of course, the goal is to stretch that…adding to the two-year-old’s sentences to make 3, 4, or even 5 word sentences to get them to progress even faster. Soon, they’re also picking up on the random noise around them, but it won’t happen without the sympathetic communicator who got the ball rolling up front.

As for L2 learners., I’ve heard anecdotal claims that 30% plus listening comprehensibility is the minimum for immersion without wasting your time. The trouble is, it’s very unscientific because a lot of language hobbyists are perfectionists. My guess would be that there are many folks who are understanding 50 or 60% of what they’re listening to and calling that 30% because it feels unsatisfying to them. Calling something 30% will vary greatly depending on the subject (the person), so it’s unreliable. The experienced language learner needs to go by feel.

Listening to noise isn’t very helpful. Listening (L2) Reading (L1) makes the language comprehensible.

And, no, an adult doesn’t have to go through baby steps and take years to re-learn shapes, colors, and go through kindergarten., etc.

I know absolutely no Korean. Take a newborn born to Korean parents and take away all my responsibilities except to learn Korean. Pick your time period… 4 years, 5, 6, 7, 8 years. I would destroy that child in vocabulary size and creativity in using Korean. Even if I had the worst possible luck and the child ended up being a national prodigy ready to enroll in college at age 12, I’d still be destroying his skill in the wonder years before that. It just isn’t a fair comparison. I’d be having adult conversations about politics and philosophy already at the 6 or 8 month point, albeit making a fair number of mistakes, but I’d be amazing after a few years, again, with no other responsibilities like raising my own kids, working, paying bills, shopping for food, maintaining the house and cars.

Give me a place to live and food and no responsibilities, and I’m dominating any language on the same timeline as any native newborn.

53

Atleast someone is trying to make sense. Infact adults have a competitive advantage in the sense that their cognitive ability has already developed and can understand much more complex topics at 6-8 month point. I was in the USA visiting my nephew. He is 13 years old. His mother tongue is English. I was reading his writing. What he produced was not earth shattering at all but if you give the same 13 years to an adult and on top of this a place to live, food and no responsibilities. Their output will be far superior.
I have been listening intensively everyday hours and hours like a child does - I have built a strong sound system in German in my head that my subconscious is already doing “sound check” automatically. I am in my thirties.It goes to show that adults approach the language wrongly through grammar studying and reading extensively without prior to building a good sound system. First, listen 2000-3000 hours of listening actively and check whether your subsconscious mind has the ability to decode noise and convert it into words… In 13 months, I have already done 1600 hours of active listening. Im understanding a lot now and noise is sounding like clear cut indvidual words. My goal is to reach 3000 hours of listening by the end of this year and see what happens. Yesterday the nurse talked to me in full fledged German for 5 minutes. Not once I said wie bitte./I beg your pardon. My subconscious mind doing this “sound check” assures me that we never lose the ability of hearing the sound of our TL correctly. It is just that we do a lot of conscious study to never activate our subconscious ability.
I may be wrong or right with my assumption/assessment but I am having very different sort of experiences with heavy listening approach.

54

I’ve never said “Wie bitte” while visiting Germany either. But I’ve said "Was?, “Noch einmal”, and “Nicht so schnell, langsamer”.

In all seriousness, I think the clarity (from the experts) is lacking on what constitutes comprehensible input.

I met a lady who took French for several years in school, and like most western students, she didn’t actually learn to speak the language fluently at the time. She mostly learned a bunch of vocabulary & grammar and did whatever she needed to do to get A’s every year.

She told me she now believes in listening to incomprehensible input because she said she got fluent from listening to French while “not understanding anything”.

First, there’s no way she wasn’t understanding anything given her studious background and attention to detail. But, also, she technically was telling the truth because it’s a glass half full/ glass half empty kind of thing,. One person might call it a victory comprehending 75-80% during listening, but someone else might call it incomprehensible input. And in some ways the pessimist is correct because they ARE listening to incomprehensible input 20-25% of the time.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have people who have heard that incomprehensible input works, and they actually are listening to incomprehensible input and wasting their time.

Here’s an example:

  1. Someone listens to Jack and the Beanstalk in Japanese and hears the words “Jack”, “Giant”, “beanstalk”, and “magic bean”. Almost nothing else makes sense. This is a waste of time.

  2. Someone else hears that the old cow is traded for magic beans, the beanstalk grows, and Jack makes several trips to steal a bag of gold, a golden egg laying hen, and a golden harp. They can hear that general framework while listening but they have zero granularity beyond that summary. During the minute-and-a-half golden harp sequence, they say to themselves, this sounds like the part where he wants to take the harp, but they don’t know what’s going on beyond that. This listening is still no good in my book.

  3. Another person picks up all that PLUS the harp knows how to play itself, the giant goes to sleep, Jack tries to grab the harp while the giant is sleeping but is surprised that the harp knows how to shout out and wake up its owner. But, several of the adjectives are hazy and missed and other pieces of sentences (or even complete sentences) aren’t clear and are missed. This is where you want to be in terms of listening to i+1 comprehensible input. Or, somewhere between #2 and #3, but closer to #3.

55

Same here. I actually remember reading a great deal in school even on my own time, but I don’t remember actually learning to read ever. I only remember the very first day in first grade. I remember plenty of things that happened before I even started learning.

56

I find them to be roughly comparable in enjoyment, really. Books allow me to sit down and carve out time to do something that is just reading, and I get to play out the narrative in my head. Characters get their own special voices and it’s quite pleasurable.
Audiobooks, especially ones done by a very skilled reader, are marvelous in their own way. They can still be completely immersive, and a good narrator will build different voices for each character to ensure that they’re distinct. Examples for me are Sherlock Holmes (Stephen Frye narrating), the Expanse series (Jefferson Mays is a goddamned treasure), Altered Carbon (Todd McLaren), and The Unincorporated Man (also Todd McLaren).
The other main advantage to audiobooks for me is the exact opposite of why I enjoy reading books - I can listen to one while doing fairly manual tasks (like the dishes, laundry, cooking, or repairing appliances) and still get immersed in the tale. Plus, driving. I can listen pretty attentively to an audiobook while in the car without losing focus on the road itself. I have “read” more books through audiobooks than I have by sitting down to read for about the past year. I still have a massive collection of books and love reading them, but I often don’t have a lot of time to allocate to it.

57

I believe that it is very effective, but only if you know a majority/are learning a majority of the words. When you are learning new words you might forget them quickly, but if the words are re-introduced you remember them quickly. The more often those words are re-introduced to your brain the quicker you will retain them long term. Audio books will allow you to go through many more words than a tv show would. For example, there are no awkward pauses, blank stares, no dead space between scenes. Another point is that you will experience many more words, mainly descriptive words, through audio books. I’m not saying I think you can learn solely on audio books, but it will defiantly help as long as you know a large portion of the content. Just pick your level and go with that.

58

I think it depends on how well can we do without text. Also, some people prefer listening over reading. In addition, it can be the content. If it is interesting or engaging, then it is possible to do it without text or can do with text. I think it depends on where we are, in terms of fluency as well as preference and content.

59

We didn’t learn to decode and understand our native language just through listening. We observed concepts visually and by means of other senses. Then we formed the concepts in our heads. Then we picked up on contextual clues and associated the sounds to those concepts in our heads.

It is perfectly possible to do this without reading AT ALL with modern technology.

I am in the process of doing just that. I have accumulated 4000 words of french by brute forcing the mp3 in anki and then matching to the equivalent english word.
I’m essentially matching the french word sound to the already existing concept in my head that the english word tag is tagged on.

For example “pot” to me specifically means a round metal saucepan type pot with a handle sticking out. That’s my concept. I have “pot” tagged to it in english and now I have pot pronounced ‘po’ tagged to it in french.

After having brute forced the 4,000 words against my pre-existing 4,000 concepts I then watched youtube videos. I can comprehend about 80% and stretches of 100% depending on who is speaking and how complex the topic.

LingQ, however is freaking awesome because of one specific thing IMO: it automates one difficult part of going from intermediate to advanced: going beyond single words to double word concepts or phrase based concepts which there’s no way you could get from single words in isolation. You have to get them from brute force natural language input. Then painfully go back through the recording and look up each word (somehow). This is where reading helps. It’s easier to click on a written “word” than it is to try to remember the sound, speak it, call a french person and ask “what does this word mean xxxx”.

Once I’m done French I plan to do russian. My goal is to avoid reading and writing and just use lingq as a fast way to locate words I don’t know and the english meaning even if I can’t read the script.

All of this is my opinion. I am no expert. I speak English natively and did Spanish by the same method.

60

Couple of points here to unpack.
What do we mean by “useful”?

For comprehension practice and/or vocabulary acquisition?
Or just to get a sense of the sounds.

I’m no expert though I have successfully taught myself Spanish to an advanced level of fluency and I’m likely around middle intermediate in French.

I have watched a ton of youtube videos recently by polyglots trying to see if I can grab insight in how to QUICKLY go from intermediate to advanced.

One of the polyglots swears by something called “shadowing”. There is scientific research to show it “helps”.
Shadowing is just simply listening to the foreign language spoken and attempting to copy it without understanding it. Allegedly this assists in comprehension down the line as well as pronunciation.

I agree with others in this thread that if you don’t already have sufficient vocabulary just trying to listen in and of itself might be very difficult to do with questionable benefit other than maybe getting a sense of the sounds, rhythm and cadence but again I have no personal experience to back it up. I haven’t run the test myself by listening to either spanish or french for an extended period BEFORE I WAS READY.

What I do do is check in from time to time before I am ready to try to see how much I can understand. Usually I find it painful.

What I have found in both cases is for me there is a breakthrough level of vocabulary. It’s around 2,000-3,000 words of brute force memorized vocabulary lets me understand some of basic spoken material. By 4,000 words I can get more than half sometimes nearly all and I can make a guess what the missing words mean.

My experience was first with French. I tried brute forcing the words in French written in a product similar to anki (supermemo). Although I successfully memorized those words (several years ago) I failed completely to be able to understand any spoken French even after several thousand words.

My second experience was with Spanish. I did the same technique but I was able to understand some spoken Spanish after it. My hypothesis is that Spanish is written very similarly to how it sounds so I had an almost-accurate sound representation in my memory of the spoken Spanish. My ability to understand some spoken Spanish after brute forcing the vocab list encouraged me so I continued with just listening to Spanish music, spanish radio and watched a ton of telenovelas. After roughly a year I found myself essentially fluent in Spanish. That was more than ten years ago.

I tried again with French about two years later using the same technique and failed again.

This time around I used google translate for each of the words in my vocab list which took about three months, recorded them and converted them into individual MP3s. Then instead of using written French I used the spoken french MP3 words. This time it worked. I found myself able to understand some of the French spoken input. With this encouragement I started watching a bunch of French youtubers. Then I was looking on youtube for polyglots to see if I could figure out how to get to advanced from intermediate without having to just watch a year worth of television and I found Steve Kaufman.

I believe Steve is mostly right. He is wrong IMO in one area: brute force SRS is very helpful to accumulate enough vocabulary to GET STARTED but in and of itself it won’t make you able to speak the language.

I believe that lingQ in particular has solved the “administrative” problem of locating additional vocabulary/unknown phrases out of a stream of text and this will speed up by some percentage the process of moving from intermediate to advanced.

This, however, is only my hypothesis. It might be that I am getting some large chunk of benefit from already being fluent in Spanish. I’ll test the hypothesis later in the year when I start Russian.