I am also someone who needs to set goals. I too found having a checklist and ticking off each lesson or activity absolutely crucial. In my first 2 months, it helped me stay focused and motivated and get a good base in the language. However, in my 3rd month, I hit a bit of a wall and lost motivation. I think I burnt myself out with my intensive and rigid study of beginner material in the first 2 months. I think I started spending more time rewriting my checklists and devising new study plans than actually spending time with the language!!! Now that Iâm coming in my 4th month, Iâm finding I can actually start to enjoy and comprehend (just) more interesting native level material and have conversations with online tutors, so Iâve stopped the checklist for now, and am just incorporating the language into my life. I might go back to using a more rigid system at different times.
So I think the key for me is to know when it is worth sticking with the plan and knowing when to let it go and let my inspiration guide me. All the best!
That makes sense and I am glad you have regained your path to progress.
When I was feeling less than enthusiastic, I took very careful stock to decide if I was burning out and decided that other than the hour of Glossika that was definitely not the case. Glossika hasnât really burned me out, itâs just hard to start an hour of such intense work everyday, especially near the end when I am tired.
I donât really write my lists day to day, and if I did it would be on computer where only updates were necessary â though I probably spend too much time with posts and threads like this one and in offering help on other subjects to people on various forums.
Itâs in my nature to share, whether from selfish reasons or out of generosity it helps keep me âin the gameâ and motivated so Iâll probably continue. (Though I have cut down on helping a friend in a computer programming language. He was always too busy when I had time and I canât give him an hour or two every time he calls now. Still it feels wrong to do that.)
But I do have the good or bad (either at times) habit of spending a lot of time researching French resources, trying out things, looking for âmoreâ or âbetterâ without always accomplishing anything. (e.g., Hunting up more french pronunciation and phonetics rather than just repeating what I have found until perfected.)
Itâs a form of both pleasuse and procrastination for me â and it also pays off frequently due to having much better resources so the bad part of the bevavior gets re-enforced by the actual benefits.
That âthird monthâ you experienced can be very difficult as I think it is the level where we donât quite have enough words to âread and listen to interesting materialâ and yet are tired of childrenâs books and trivialities.
This is the main reason I start with the 5000 word frequency lists in a new language. I get through the first pass of 3000-5000 words in the first month and by 5000 (headwords) mature in the 3rd month I am reading fairly well (with dictionary support. and cognates.)
I agree about sticking with the plan or starting something new. My habit if it helps you is to add the new thing first if there is any time, then drop the activity it replaces only after the new one proves itself. As long as the new one is short enough to jam into the day.
Also, youâve seen the problem of staying with an activity beyond the point where it is (highly) effective â sort of coasting along on something that is a habit but no longer paying off greatly.
Your post and my experience with similar is precisely the reason for my posting what to me sounded like a less than optimistic message.
Realistically if we donât plan for the hard times weâll hit that wall when they almost inevitably appear.
It sounds and looks like (from your profile) that you are doing great.
Are you making the goals you set for yourself, over and above doing the work?
Or rather: Are you learning as you planned to learn and what is missing or better than you expected?
Itâs nice to hear other peopleâs experience (both the triumphs and the pains). Glad to hear Iâm not the only one spending more time than Iâd like to admit researching about âlanguage learningâ. But as long as weâre still studying our French as well, I think itâs ok, I think of it like a separate hobby in and of itself. Now if could just start doing this research in French, my progress would increase exponentially!
Iâm quite happy with my progress to date. I only had one real goal for the year - reach a B1 level by the end of the year (not necessarily to take the DELF exam but Iâll probably just hire a new tutor to give me a mock test and gauge my level). This goal is enough of a challenge where I need to work towards it but still be very realistic. One of my tutors has said I am currently a strong A2 in oral expression, so I am on track to reaching my goal. Being an exceptionally shy person and having trouble expressing myself in my mother tongue English, the speaking progress is the most pleasing to me. I seem to not have as much of a problem with shyness when talking to language exchange partners or tutors in French, I guess itâs due to the fact that I know the other person expects me to not be articulate or be a good conversationalist. Iâm also happy with my pronunciation even though itâs nowhere near perfect. I put in a lot of work at the beginning on pronunciation and it seems to have paid dividends.
My listening comprehension is by far my weakest point, though this seems to be the case for everyone learning French. One of my tutors has told me I need to try dictĂ©e exercises as itâs the best thing for improving both my oral comprehension and writing, so Iâm going to start incorporating them into my routine. Iâve only done a couple so I donât know if itâs working yetâŠ
Again my friend, I applaud you. These are awesome things to read, and those small milestones to grow daily into a big mountain. Keep up the hard work.
Well, who knows about the Steven and your new friend from Youtube, maybe after this, Steve may be interested in meeting him. The world works in mysterious ways.
Keep pushing every day my friend.
You have the support of us.
I will â and since this thread is not about cheer leading I will admit that my odds of completing the goals on time are pretty dim.
This doesnât mean Iâm slowing down, but rather if anything looking (somewhere desparately) for more tricks or more work that can be done in the time available.
There alwasy seems to be a reason that i donât get around to speaking more and itâs likely me, but that is something that will increase in the remaining days.
To be fair, the plan was always intended to be very agressive in order to determine what was actually possible and there is no way my progress would have been so rapid without such goals.
For instance, there is no way that I would be doing an hour of Glossika (argh), 30-45 minutes of Rosetta Stone, and an absolute minimum of 100 LingQs per day along with flashcards, listening, and reading every single day.
I notice that I now have the second longest LIngQ streak among the INSANE and I am only 8 days behind the leader. 
Last night I recorded all 55 minutes of speaking with Glossika â only listened to a bit but it wasnât as bad as I feared. My idea is to keep learning how to analyze voice spectrograms but time spent doing that is time I donât spend studying French.
Part of my method for accelerated learning (and that was actually my successful business for over a decade) is that short deadlines and studying twice as much is actually much better effective than doing something twice as long.
Maybe far more, as much as a (true) order of magnitude.
Cramming works â as most good students can tell you â but it is incorrectly rejected by many learning theorists because typically it is done in spurts.
âContinuous crammingâ is highly effective when focused on the right material and methods â you not only learn more, but you learn new things that link to what you have just learned before the prior learnings are forgotten.
There are analogies from speed reading, weight lifting, and other things but I need to go ride the stupid bike and talk to Glossika still tonightâŠ
One way or another, I am going to do all that is reasonable in the next 80 days â and Iâll start making a real plan for the following 30 and 90 days so that the momentum will continue.
LingQ lost a detail post, unless it magically reappears, that I was very proud of tonight.
Glossika == Finished with lesson 104 (of 312) and completed Level 1 â about 40 hours of speaking.
LingQs == 15,000
Words known == 44,000
Finishing Rosetta Stone Level 3 unit 11; will finish level 3 this week and have 2+ months to do the last 2 Levels (8 units).
Started actively adding speaking using David Tolmanâs âechoing and shadowingâ from https://fluentlistener.com methods and material. (I joined this site for $100 because heâs doing important work.)
Added more Anki cards (reverse 5000 back to French) and BrainScape verb drills (joined there too for life).
Doing verb audio.
Continuing reading and audio books (âSapienâ & âDeuil Interditâ mostly) as well as podcasts (Au Coeur dâHistoired, FluentListener, etc) â and my wife and I continue to watch TV and movies in French (Marseille is our currnet serices. Itâs Ok, not great.)
Recording my voice most days, and starting to do spectrogram analysis as well as just listing to how (bad) I sound.
Once again, the crappy LingQ programming has really irritated me â if this thing wasnât so wonderful Iâd really hate it.
Update next day: Started Glossika Level 2, and did 4 âdaysâ (lessons) since they start (and end) with shorter lessons due to not adding the new items all at once (or at the end.)
Kicked my butt. Almost every sentence was a tough as most of the hard ones in Level 1.
By the way, for anyone trying this I wouldnât be able to do 55+ minutes straight through if I werenât riding the bible â I also wouldnât do the bike as long and probably would be doing good to make it 3 days per week, or at all by this time.
The method:
- Media player on phone with headset
- My android pad on bike reading stand (it sits there really well even though the clip is too small)
- Pad has the text in PDA or Office doc
- I stripped of all English and IPA or extraneous stuff. from the Glossika doc, so I only have just the French one.
- Each item is formatter with a hanging indent and single column narrow enough to fit at good font size on the pad.
- Margins minimized so the text almost flows straight from page to page.
- Ideally every other paragraph would have some highlight or something to help find the place.
- I ONLY read when I canât keep up â I glance at text when needed and look away as much as possible.
Note: If I keep looking it is HARDER to say without looking. It really requires just making mistakes at some point and listening carefully. (Take off the training wheels for each phrase quicklyâŠ)
Tenses are getting more complicated and so are the pronoun grammar items.
Starting Level 2 was much easier psychologically that doing most of the recent lessons.
Whoo-eeeee!
- 45,000 Known words & 16.5 K LingQs
- Finished Rosetta Stone 3rd unit of Level 3 â 1 more on this level and 2 more levels to go, working on the 4th & final Unit of Level 3 (of 5)
(11 of 20 Units complete â moving along well) - Anki 5000 and now reversing them. *
- Added BrainScape (more flashcards) to do LOTS of verb drills. **
- Glossika Level 2, Lesson 7-8 tonight, only 200 more to do (100 days at 2 per day.)
- Seriously working David Tolmanâs (of FluentFrench.com and YouTube) method of âhearingâ a language and improving pronounciation at the same time, along with voice analysis and recording my voice. ***
Weâre are watching the last episode (Season 2, Episode 8) RIGHT NOW, and it got really good so now weâll have withdrawal until we can find something else good in French to watch.
- Started reversing my Anki deck and suspending any cards that are easy â need to augment my speaking (production) vocabulary. Reading and recognition is fine. Mostly Iâve been depending on reading, listening, Rosetta Stone, and Glossika to do this without really working on it.
** The verb patterns simply worked.
I had already worked out a âsummaryâ verb patterns for French conjugation while skimming over conjugation in lieu of studying grammar. Turns out that I really did âget itâ based on that and general feel absobed from reading, Rosetta Stone, and Glossika.
I didnât know every element of every tense but with each one it took only a quick pass or 2 to firmly know the patterns.
Iâll post it if I can finish organizing it, I only did about 80% of the work to write it down, and it is a bit idiosyncratic to my way of thinking. If someone wants to review it directly then message me and weâll exchange texts to help me âclarifyâ it before a public posting.
Need to obtain most of the irregular verb stems (past participle, etc.) to finish this. By this time I know the majority but having a deck to quickly polish this will help. Might be in BrainScape as I am skipping all around their tons of decks (only real reason I paid for a lifetime membership. Anki is as good or better as a tool, but BrainScape is competitive and it has loads and loads of French decks that are high quality and extensive.)
*** David Tolman methods are working to âhearâ French â it involves working an natural speech audio using a transcript and translation and repetive listening and out loud pronunciation of every item â thereâs too much to explain so it sounds âto obviousâ said this way.
(âFrench Pronouncing Dictionaryâ channel on YouTube & FluentFrench.com)
To be clear: I am convinced it works, but donât yet have proof enough to be absolutely certain.
This work is really important to finishing my goals which are in serious jeapordy at this point. Likely I want (quite) make the goals above by the planned date of July 1 (6 months). Hopefully I will be pretty close and can finish up in 1-3 extra months.
However, I havenât given up and I am digging deeper to find a way to succeed, without adding to much time to my study. Focusing more and finding better methods to add.
Iâve known since learning to read Spanish in 3 months almost a decade ago, that âforcingâ vocabulary and using that to force reading was easy. Ok, at least straightforward, doable and not too painful.
However, forcing speaking was not something I expected but that seems possible as well at this point though I need to do more (speaking AND forcing of it.)
The problem has been âhearingâ French. I make progress but so far it hasnât been possible to âforce rapid progressâ like with reading. Improvement is excruciatingly slow but steady only by working very diligently at it.
Glossika helps but itâs not teaching me to hear âuncareful speakersâ. Itâs main purpose is to produce speaking ability.
Robert Tolmanâs method is offering me serious hope that this can be fixed.
So I am still working for a July 1 success and itâs clear to me without that goal my progress would be nowhere near where it is now.
75 days remaining.
Good Stuff ! Keep up the great work !
I have similar issues with my listening comprehension, but I believe that even though doing more active listening and different exercises helps a lot , there is simply no getting around the time in days, weeks and years that it takes for our brains to get used to the sounds of a new language, i.e. it is just not possible to âcramâ for listening comprehension. It takes time.
I was wondering if youâve tried any dictation exercises for it, and if so, if you found it useful. Iâve started doing dictation daily for the past week or so, and Iâve seen an improvement in my oral comprehension already. It is tiresome but Iâm convinced it helps so Iâll continue with it. Iâm assuming the Robert Tolman Method youâve mentioned uses a similar principle or is there more to it?
Good Stuff ! Keep up the great work !
Thank you for the kind words of encouragement. Every little bit really does help.
I have similar issues with my listening comprehension, âŠ
This is a universal for anyone trying to learn to actually understand ordinary speech of arbitray speakers.
There is much discussion of the problem, but very few people that directly addresses the techniques to address the problem.
âŠbut I believe that even though doing more active listening and different exercises helps a lot , there is simply no getting around the time in days, weeks and years that it takes for our brains to get used to the sounds of a new language, i.e. it is just not possible to âcramâ for listening comprehension. It takes time.
⊠here we disagree in general, while is of course takes some amount of time there is no reason to believe that time itself does anything.
This is repeatedly shown to be true in every area of learning, and including mental and physical development.
Probably methods lead to rapid results and ineffective methods are seldom if ever sufficient merely by doing them longer and waiting.
There is also a principle in rapid learning that you must reach a certainly level of input and work to see any improvement.
This is something I think of as âcritical massâ â learning is non-linear especially in the extremes.
Learning faster actually helps you to learn faster as there is little time to forget what you have learned yesterday before reinforcing and extending it tomorrow.
Iâve seen the evidence, including academic and anecdotal, but Iâve also experienced the effects of accelerated learning and even invented some explicit techniques fors throug learning various things â including physical skills which typically are those that require âtimeâ to allow muscles or neural nets in the brain to grow.
This time is however short by the standards I am considering. 6 weeks to a few months for large changes and noticable improvements on a weekly or biweekly basis, frequently in hours or days.
In fact, we almost never learn slowly â typically we may spend a long time âgetting readyâ to learn a new thing but the learning is usually over in momeents.
We may forget over time if we donât review it, but the actual learning is almost instaneously unless it requires physical changes â like growing new muscles but even those are short term effects by comparison with the time most people take to improve.
The trick is to find the âdeep practiceâ that optimizes the time you spend.
Even if that turns out to be slower than we hope it will provide results that are an order of magnitude over âtypical methodsâ in every case Iâve seen.
I was wondering if youâve tried any dictation exercises for it, and if so, if you found it useful. Iâve started doing dictation daily for the past week or so, and Iâve seen an improvement in my oral comprehension already. It is tiresome but Iâm convinced it helps so Iâll continue with it.
Iâve only done a very little bit, and generally was avoiding it as something related to learning to write correctly â which I care very little about â but that small exposure (Anne Le Grandâs course on Udemy) caused me to rethink if this might be a better tool than expected.
Sometimes the best methods are incredibly easy to take up but also incredibly annoying or tiresome to perform.
Weight lifting by repetivite useless movement, speed reading by exercises that are by intention impossible and tedious, and jump starting language learning by simply memorizing 5000 words are all clear examples of this.
They work, but they arenât but they arenât pleasant in and of themselves unless one âlearns to love themâ for the effects. (Game mechanics come into play here.)
So you have convinced me to add this in systematically for at least a few weeks and then evaluate.
Iâm assuming the Robert Tolman Method youâve mentioned uses a similar principle or is there more to it?
I think it is a similar principle â teach yourself to hear the small things, and you can learn to hear in the large.
Hear teach yourself means to perform exercises that force your brain to do primarily these things:
- Create new neural networks (the actual connections and growth of âbrain muscleâ)
- Notice the critical distinctions
- Train your brain and âearsâ to hear those distinctions more efficiently and more automatically (perhaps by conscious practice but with the goal of unconscious and automatic response.)
- Optimize the time spent. Focus on the things and items that provide the most return.
- Eliminate as much tediousness as possible.
Optimizing the time spent is one of the big ideas in âDeep Learningâ. One can spend 10,000 hours becoming a master or one can spend 1,000 hours of Deep Practice and do the same in far less calendar time.
Talent is largely a myth. Mozart and Michael Jackson both put in the time, but Mozart did it as a very early age and Jackson did it only after failing to make his high school varsity basketball team.
Dicteeâs may work, the primary concern Iâll likely have over time is how to focus them on the âright thingâ.
I am pretty sure Davidâs methods of listening do this, or at worst give me the tools to do it myself.
Over the last 24 hours I had an interesting experience working with this â and also with my wife who has lost much of her hearing.
Weâre trying to use these methods, and learning French in general, to trick her brain into re-learning how to âhearâ even English. There is information still available and her hearing aids help, but part of what they do is âfrequency shiftingâ and other modifications to the sounds, not just âvolume boostingâ.
Sounds she used to hear at one frequency or in one manner maybe be present in âdifferent places or formsâ. Her brain needs to be forced, or tricked into âlearningâ to here the information that is now encoded using a different encryption key.
Itâs seems to work, and coaching her on âhowâ to do it gave me clues I might never have noticed about âhowâ to perform this practice (which I have shared with David who finds them interesting at least.)
So what happened? I had a short passage, just 4 1/2 words. âComment câest venuâ which I âknewâ the speaker supposedly said but where the last word or two were completely untelligible or at least unavailable to my ears.
I listened to it repeatedly for some minutes and attempted to hear it Wed night. It was so obvously impossible at the time and I was also so hoping that a couple of weeks practice might work that I explained it carefully to my wife and made it very explicit in my memory so that if a week or so from now it âchangesâ the difference will be noticable and my memory wonât be in doubt.
Last night, I went through it again, and also started to use the spectrogram analysis (which is beyond what David does.)
But there was a âproblemâ before I could find the sound on the spectrogram and determine if it corresponded to the âmissing phonemesâ they become evident
I heard them. Itâs that simple.
With what amounted to just a bit more practice and less than 24 hours of time. I heard the sound.
At first, I thought maybe it was simply my knowledge of what was there, but I kept playing with the spectragram and audio trace and it wouldnât go away anymore. I was faint but present.
About that time I notice that where it appeared the âenergyâ trace of the audio was about 1% of the sound volume of the surrounding sounds. It was simple attenuated and so compressed into the following phoneme as to be almost indistinguishable to my untrained ears and brainâŠ
It also turned out that there was a clearly present additional sound on the end of the word (unvoiced fricative, probably SH) that was present but not part of the word as written or normally spoken.
The speaker had simply stopped his vowel sloppily and air continued to pass out of his mouth making that hiss which was actually much louder than the âmissingâ phoneme.
Though it was in a different place (happened later) it through off the rhythm expected and made it difficult to synchronize the rhythem or the beat of the phonemes expected with what the ear was hearing.
Once heard, it couldnât be âunheardâ.
(I have seen and heard another example of this 'rhythm camaflage", but not as clearly magical.)
As a side note, I once took some training in aerial photo reconnaisance while in the Army. It was similar: We learned to âseeâ things that the average person couldnât see or couldnât comprehend and decode. Most of this was not through long practice but by being shown the direct methods of which clues experts had learned to look for.
This remind me that âcolor blindnessâ is known by the military to be an ASSET in photo reconnaisance and camaflage detection.
Perhaps more interesting is that hypnosis can induce temporarily induce the effects of color blindness in people with normal vision and thereby give access to the advantage.
One wonders if there is an evolutionary reason for about 1 in 7 men being color blind and about the same number being left handedâŠ
Some who can see the enemy before others is an advantage in war even if he has other disadvantages.
Someone who has his weapon on the âoutsideâ when on the left side is also an advantage. (Soldiers have to be trained to get some of them to hold their rifles to the left when one the move.)
You certainly know your stuff I hope you have a great week of French learning !
Actually, I think I mostly agree with you on this point - a certain level of intensity and having effective methods are necessary to make clear and rapid progress (a few minutes a day over time is like doing nothing). Though there are only so many hours in a day, and I had just thought you were being very hard on yourself for not being âfluentâ at listening after only learning for a few months, but it seems you are aware of this and that you find having ambitious goals motivating. Your progress is absolutely insane! I am the opposite with this - I tend to want to set lofty goals, but psychologically it doesnât work for me. I end up overwhelmed and if I fail to reach the goal, I am discouraged and just give up entirely. Whereas, Iâve learned that if I set up a series of âsmall winsâ that I can easily achieve, the feeling of winning motivates me and I end up outperforming these easier goals and also stay sticking with it. To each his own.
Dicteeâs may be doubling up on the work youâre doing with Tolmanâs method (which seems to be the same basic idea but more focused, specialized and convenient), but nonetheless, itâs still worth a shot giving it a go to see how you like it.
Yes, we almost totally agree after all, it seems â we were just focused on different aspects.
I absolutely agree with the âsmall goalsâ idea. This is precisely the method I teach for building quality software without large delays.
So if you notice, my original plan had a 3 month, 4.5 month, and 6 month goal breaking it into 3 parts. However people might call those 3 goals âloftyâ (3 versions of fluency).
[EDITED]
Hearing fluently is definitely a miss as of 2 days ago but I had long still technically possible since I made a mistake on dates and there is almost a month remaining, but Iâv moved this to being harder than speaking. Surprised me but good adjustment.
This is one of my main focuses. If I could get this fluent then learning vocabulary and more natural speech would be so much easier, perhaps even self-sustaining which is a major goal.
[END EDIT]
Also, realisticly I might not make this one even in 6 months â unless there is a significant breakthrough and/or steady progress kicks in very soon.
Speaking can arguably be called a VERY limited pass already â I have had several 45 minute conversations where I did most of the talking and stayed in Spanish without undue effort but itâs not something I am ready to declare anywhere near a real success.
There is still a chance for this one if I do enough speaking and donât burn all the time learning to listen. FYI, I donât care about my tutor âtalking to me in Frenchâ since that isnât going to help me as efficiently as a variety of recorded material so that time is spent with me answering his questions and trying to tell stories etc.
In addition to these milestones, I have a series of goals for every day â and largely use âstreaksâ and other âgame mechanicsâ like those on LingQ or ones I invent.
The mid-term goals kept me working on the daily and weekly ones.
However, I had the first one, reading fluently, almost in the bag before I started or so I thought â it seemed to be certain it was doable because I had done it in Spanish previously.
There were a few things I didnât count on though and itâs arguable whether I made that benchmark or not. No issue, though because it is getting done even if a bit late.
-
Limit of about 3 hours per day â when I did Spanish I didnât have a day job so I read more. Forgot about that. It wasnât possible to just power up and adding more time â everything I added had to fit the time or something else had to be dropped.
-
Studying for speaking & hearing â with Spanish it was an explicit decision to skip speaking (at that time) and listening was only a ânice to haveâ.
-
My wife wasnât studying Spanish so we werenât doing all our TV time listening to Spanish so this took time â hopefully it has helped enough to justify the time but it was fun and has kept me up to date about my (lack of) ability in listening even as improvements kept coming.
-
French is harder than Spanish â shocked me to realize that. Reading Spanish with enough vocabulary is almost trivial. French is so figurative and idiomatic that itâs far more likely to know all the words but have only a vague idea what the meaning of the sentence might be.
No excuses and I arguably did make 3 months to speaking at the level I set (rather low) and I can finish it off at will to beyond college level.
On adding Dictee â I was thinking maybe 15 minutes a day. Might be able to sneak that in for a couple of weeks to evaluate.
Weâll see.
I also made a couple of errors:
- 10 days off Glossika, life intervened to initially interrupt it but there was not a good reason for a 10 day hyatus.
- Idling too long on my Anki 5000 French to English deck. Inertia and my vocabulary is Ok and LingQ is helping with that.
- Not serious enough about doing Rosetta Stone every day in the first 1-2 months. I probably could be close to finished now.
- Waiting too long to start LingQ â partly due to the terrible âfree trialâ but if I know then what is obvious now a month earlier would have been reasonble.
- Slow start on Glossika â not really an error since there was no way to know and I was trying various audio programs looking for something that really worked.
- Slow to pay for BrainScape (part of #2) and I was just being cheap until sure it was worth the money. ($130 lifetime.)
- Didnât know how hard âhearingâ would become to keep advancing â again, not really an error.
Only by having clear goals could my studying be kept on track this long and it will pay off even if my âgoalsâ are late coming.
In my experience, having a goal to âdo X by date Yâ pretty much guarantees most people wonât finish all of X if date Y is more than a month or so in the future.
At best it is a 50/50 chance if it is a realistic but agressive goal with no padding.
When we shoot for a barely reaching moon, we might only make orbit but we will be staged for the next leg of the journey.
And I havenât given up on making it â pessimistic but that just means keep to the plan unless it can be improved.
Also, it might while I am proud of my progress it not a conceit and though the misses are recognized I am not ashamed of them either.
Simply evaluating the facts of the past, to figure out the path to the future.
Wow herbm how did you get so many hours of listening in such a short amount of time
TV, movies â we listen to almost solely French language TV.
I listen to other things, especially an audiobook every night at bedtime.
Frequently I just play podcasts or other things while workig.
I donât count TV time when figuring how much âstudyingâ I do, but I do put it in every few days for the âlisteningâ value.
So after about 110 days at almost 4 hours per day (which includes a couple of hours of studying with audio) itâs come to about 400+ hours.
New optimism the last 2 days, and in fact I am highly excited by having invented a new technique to both hear spoken language better immediately and to train oneself to improve understanding when listening over time (quick Internet searches the specific technique and my previous searches for any type of actual technique have come up dry).
If this proves to be true, it will be analogous to what LingQ facilitates with reading and what massive âcomprehensible inputâ a la Steve Krashen does through reading.
Better yet it will be easier than reading since it requires nothing but audio that you could in theory understand (part of) if you had a clue what the sounds meant. (That is you know much of the vocabulary but canât âhearâ at speed.)
Send me a personal note (herbmartin at that google mail place) if you can wait. Iâll post in a few days when I have worked out the key points so it wonât mess people up by trying it wrong.
I not only think there is now a good chance for fluent listening by July 1 but the original date of mid-May is now not out of the question.
This method works to hear more now â they question is if it will be âself-sustainingâ to that we can learn how to do it better primarily through simply practicing it through using it to hear.
Those of you who have been kind enough to follow my study will be the first to know (along with David Tolman. Although David didnât give me the method, he gave me all of the preliminaries that led me to consider this idea and to try it.)
Basically it is âsubvocalizing while listeningâ. I know, thatâs too darn easy, and the explanations will follow but that all anyone really need to know to work it out if one is determined enough to simply do it and keep doing it.
As of tday 2020-04-20 =- Monday
- LingQ Known Words 46,000+ and LingQs 17,000+
- Glossika Level 2, finished Lesson 17 (edited)
- Rosetta Stone â almost finished with last Unit of Level 3, so this will leave 2 more Levels to go after sometime this week.
- Spoke for a solid 45 minutes again to my tutor and Iâm upping the frequency to 2-3 times per week (which probably means 1-2 in reality).
- Figured out a good way to implement a similar idea for Speaking (as for Reading and Listening) but havenât put it into practice much less tested it yet. (Sometime this week.)
- New Anki and BrainScape decks are working pretty well, though I am not maxing out the reviews (yet) like is my habit when starting out. Only doing about 200 reviews per day. Need to get this back to about 300-400 but that takes a LOT of time and attention.
- Listening is working, but what David teaches and my new invention. Excited.
I am trying to hold the time âstudyingâ per day to less than 3 hours, though I might up it a bit to get things sorted out for a while.
Remember, it was clear that when it looked dim that I wouldnât give up, and would fight tooth and nail to figure out a way to beat the clockâŠdonât bet against me though it is still far from certain.
Fantastic! Great that this new technique has gotten you back on track to achieving your goal. If you post more on your method, Iâd definitely be keen to read and learn more and give it go myself too
Itâs becoming more and more certain â and effective, in just 72 hours of fairly light practice. Though I did step it up a bit starting last night.
First the caveats and warnings:
- Itâs not totally magic (no âpoofâ here) â immediate improvement is possible but it will take hours of listening and actively employing the method to obtain breakthough results and those hours may take days or weeks to accumulate.
- It does require work. Imagine reading your first text on LingQ in a foreign language and the effort it took to read that and the following texts are you increased the reading difficulty level.
- You need audio content beyond your comfort level but where you would know many, most, or perhaps almost all the words if you saw them written and had time to puzzle out the meaning.
- It would probably work for easy childrenâs stories read by adults with clear voices and a small vocabulary, or even for venacular and noisy dialog for those with an advanced vocabulary and existing skills on ordinary speech but I havenât tested any of that yet.
- The method is a bit tedious â you have to remember to deploy it and remember to keep reactivating it as you brain is distracted or bored (by listening to something vaguely comprehensible.) â This is the weight lifting of âhearing speechâ with one wonderful exception, it helps you hear better even while you are practicing it while weight lifting makes you weaker during and following practice.
- Itâs so simple that most people will not even think it is a âmethodâ and will dismiss it.
Here is is:
Subvocalizing or Silent Shadowing of everything you hear a speaker say
(without reference to printed transcripts).
- Listen to material you can physically hear clearly (loud enough, lack of backgroung noise or music) where know much of the vocabulary if it were written or were spoken clearly and distinctly in isolation.
- Note how much you can or cannot understand for a few moments.
- Start subvocalizing each word you hear as the speaker continues.
- If you miss a word, just pick up whatever the speaker is saying at that moment.
- Accept ambiguity â this is practice to hear and not necessarily hearing so accept that you will not understand everything and that many things will be vague or perhaps ambiguous.
- Avoid the temptation to translate when you suddenly realize you can understand words that were even hearable a moment ago.
- Do NOT stop to translate dates or anything like that â just stay with pronounciation EVERYTHING you can hear â but in your own head.
- Donât speak out loud â thatâs another drill for another purpose.
- Mumbling is Ok if you need the feed back to keep you vocalizing but likely âsilent speechâ is more effective and efficient long term.
- You do NEED to hear YOUR words in your head so vocalize slightly or mumble when you feel you arenât hearing.
- If hearing is difficult, then vocalize ANY sound â not what you think the speaker is saying but what you think you hear no matter how off that seems.
- When the speaker switches to a different person, expect to lose the âhearingâ so immediately re-double your effort to silently shadow the new speaker.
- Note that you will have some speakers who are more difficult to hear even with the same material (for me this is children, women with high voices, region accents, mumblers, those who speak exceptionally fast or become excited), so when voices change or get difficult just concentrate on saying what you hear within your on head.
- Listen repetively to the same material, or to repetive material like the 24 hour news which repeats the same stories and concept multiple times per hour and only adds new material incrementallyâŠ
- Avoid subtitles and donât look at them if present, especially in your own language. Subtitles are not evil, especially in the target language, but they are NOT suitable for this exercise. Also avoid reading most crawlers or graphics at the bottom the news screens IF it isnât helping you understand without losing the shadow.
- Stick with it â 5 minutes (on the clock) is a long time to stick with it if you arenât understanding you are subvocalizing constantly so if nothign happens find easier material.
- When you get excited to hear words and ideas and start marveling that that go right back to just internally tracking and shadowing what you near.
- Repeat as often as you are able - and anytime you realize you arenât hearing something you wish to hear.
Keep a written record of how much you think you hear and understand. If this works for you like it does for me you are going to rapidly be uncertain that you couldnât already hear that well.
I am sitting here with the French news (France 24) on in the background maybe no active attempt to hear what just yesterday was almost impossible to track, and itâs starting to become difficult for me NOT to hear and understand what is being said.
This is especially true of the news anchor (who happens to be a women most of the time on France 24) â every time she says something my hearing âsnaps backâ in to her questions for various guests.
If I just start actively shadowing every current speakers most of it comes into âfocusâ.
One of the coolest WEIRD things is that many times I suddenly realize the word being shadows is somethig entirely known to me but with a pronunciation totally unpredictable and unhearable for me otherwise.
This also includes things that are âout of contextâ (for me at least).
I am pretty sure what is going on.
- Massive comprehensible input (only itâs speech now)
- Occupying our speech centers so we canât think in our own language (very important at first)
- Keeping us focused on something we donât initially understand and canât yet fully understand â getting bored and thinkig about other things or even what you are hearing is going to interrupt the flow.
- It keeps us either LOOKING at the SPEAKER or not looking at other things (perhaps when listening to an audio book.)
- Improving our hearing and understanding even 5% or 10% is incredibly motivating. Make sure you stick with it long enough to this to happen.
- Itâs a feedback loop, the more you hear and understand the more you CAN hear and understand because the context increases.
- Activating Mirror Neurons in our vocal production system which are known to help in understanding the words, facial expressions, and actions of other people. (Mirror neurons one of the main ways we decypher facial expressions.)
Summary (all of the above is to answer questions you will have as I did while working it out):
- Subvocalize inside your head by shadowing every sound of every speaker you are hearing whether you understand the word or syllable or not.
- Just keep subvocalizing
- Accept ambiguity and just wait while subvocalizing â you are training this as much as you are training hearing and understanding.
- Have fun and enjoy hearing and understanding more of what you subvocalize.
Subvocalize
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing. Occassionally, when Iâm reading along to an audiobook, I will close my eyes and focus really hard just on the audio, and I notice that the way my brain naturally tries to comprehend whatâs being said is to subvocalise everything it hears, and sometimes itâll also bring up the written form of words into my minds eye. But I only do it for very brief times like one sentence because it is quite exhausting. So your method makes complete sense and I shouldnât have a problem with the actual technique as I do it instinctively when I focus intently. Itâll just be a matter of doing a lot more of it.
I had done a ton of âconcentratingâ and a ton of âzenâ no-mind just let it flow but once I started explicitly subvocalizing to âlock onâ the audio change very quickly.
Do it as long as you arenât locked in - I canât see it doing any harm when I am understanding but the moment the thread of hearing or understanding disappears I make it very explicit.
Likely it will automate as our understanding and capabilities expand.
My wife has significant deafness and also less vocabulary then I do at this point but she locked in on it quite a bit right away for easier material, and almost immediately noticed that once you can do it, then it is hard not to do it.
We all have this issue when sitting near a radio or a TV that someone else is listening to or watching. We hear it whether we want to or not.
Generally, we can occupy ourselves by excerting some concentration or if we find our other material (e.g., reading a book) compelling.
One of the best effects is when the speaker on TV or audio changes. This give me a way to lock into the new voice.
Itâs moving my hearing from "a lot of wordsâ and âsome understandingâ to âalmost all wordsâ and quite a bit of understanding for things like the news and podcasts or YouTube intended for native Francophones.
It is more difficult for me to use on fragmented speech typical of movies or TV dialog especially with background noise or music.
Ultimately, it is âjust a toolâ though as simple as it is, the value likely rivals that of LingQ or reading in general since it gives us a way to take a decent vocabulary and PUSH IT into being able to gain comprehensible input.
Even if it turns out to be largely unnecessary in a few weeks or months, itâs going to be part of my âpracticeâ (weight lifting for the brain) for at least 15 minutes or so per day unless something better comes along.
And remember, ambiguity is Ok â we do this naturally in our native language which is highly redundant but being comfortable with ambiguity when we arenât certain of what we are hearing in general take a bit more determination.
90% of the time if you have enough vocabulary then the ambiguity seems to resolve in time for the sense to be made before the following speech and the next idea appears.
We can hold about 10 seconds of âaudioâ in our short term memory but 10 seconds is a LOT OF WORDS, usually a couple of sentences, maybe 20+ words.
Let me know how you do and especially any issues or problems you find.
Thanks for your reply. Youâve convinced me that this technique is the way to go, a lot of upfront effort but itâll get easier and less and less necessary.
Iâm going to try to just make the effort to add this method into my existing listening routine, i.e.
- passive listening (TV, podcasts, etc), interspersed with some focused âsubvocalisingâ listening.
- listening while reading, interspersed with focused âsubvocalisingâ just listening.
- dictees - i.e. listening to short audio clips several times.
Iâll be attacking the same problem from multiple angles, and Iâm sure that one or a combination of these things will give me results eventually.
Prove it for yourself. I am convinced but there havenât been any scientific tests (yet).
Nice thing about passive listening, you can âcheck inâ by using subvocal shadowing whenver you like and drop it to focus attention elsewhere.
I have been doing a lot of active and passive listening but only getting very gradual results.
Once this method was deployed my experienc is that both are improving rapidly (daily if not hourly) but it is very hard to do any truly accurate measurements on oneâs own understanding.
I strongly suggest you make notes on a fairly regular basis which includes how you feel about understanding each of your favorite source materials.
That was part of the purpose of this thread for me-
If I write it down and 2 days later things are different thatâs pretty strong personal (not scientific) evidence for me.
It happens â not coincidentally â that I am also a trained hypnotist and it wouldnât matter to me personally if the effect were due to some strange self-hypnosis effect as long as the effect of understanding itself was real over time.
It would matter if it required that skill set in addition to what it seems is needed: Simply a decent vocabulary the material involved and a reasonable level of hearing for the difficult of the speakers, accents, and conditions of the speech.
You are pretty advanced but if proven weâll be sharing it with people who are more beginners and weâll need to make sure they are at least partially prepared for âcomprehensible inputâ â emphasis on comprensible, as it must be within reach for the technique to evoke that comprehension.
There is no real knowing yet of âhow farâ the method can span, but it seems to be wide enough to be exciting and probably has some reasonable limit.
No one is going to suddenly learn to hear Chinese fluently without first having some vocabulary and feel for the spoken words, probably also some practice saying the words.
Thatâs where I believe the âfeedback loopâ from âmirror neuronâ circuits are boosting the audio signal:
If we say the words reasonably close to the speakers sounds, our output circuits will loop back into confirming our input.
In a sense weâll âhear ourselves saying what the speaker intendedâ.
Weâll find out how far this will take us over the next few weeks and months, but days or even hours seem to be making a difference for meâŠ