You clarified what Steve has been inclined to explain. Yes. Since you listened to his explanation of ‘relax’ but didn’t pay attention to it, I have ignored it as well. Thank you for your reminder.
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It’s just a matter of repetitions and having an appropriate difficulty that you slowly increase. Even words that you know aren’t ingrained before hearing them thousands of times. So your brain needs more time to process even the basics that you know quite well and there is less time to process those words that you, maybe know what they mean, but need even more time to process. It’s like trying to run faster than your legs can. Don’t worry if you can’t understand all, even if it feels like you are missing something basic. Challenging your brain is also good as long as you can follow most of the audio. The progress you make can be hard to track, but as long as you are exposing yourself to enough input, your skills will increase over the long term.
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Thank you for your advice. Very novel idea for me.
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Thank you for your advice and your encouragement.
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For Spanish, I used a book and casette from Passport Books, called “How to pronounce Spanish correctly.” The book showed you how to position your mouth and tongue for each sound, and the audio gave you examples. After about a month, I went back to a Spanish speaking country, and was surprised to disover that I understood a lot more of what people were saying.
For Salish, I persisted with my Anki deck, a little bit each day, learning words and phrases with audio. Every so often, I would try listening to a long audio text with the transcript. One day, I had learned enough words in the long text that I was finally able to follow along.
For Russian, it helps to slow down the speed so that my brain can sort out all the noun endings into the proper cases. I play around with speeding up and slowing down a short Russian text, and seeing at what point the speech becomes too fast to understand.
My brother taught conversational English in Paris, and he told me you play a longer audio clip for your student in their subject area, and ask them to pick out whatever words they understood.
It takes time to re-wire your brain to hear another language. Do a little every day, fast and slow, picking out the words you understand from harder audio texts, finding something easy enough and slow enough that you can follow along on the transcript. Take advantage of the times when you are alert and wide awake, and also right before bed, times when the brain is most receptive to new input.
It took me a few years to have any listening comprehension in Salish, “the language vowels forgot”. (The Salish sound system was the prototype for Klingon). Your language will probably be easier than Salish.
Don’t give up … it can take a few months! You are still making progress. It’s like waiting for a pot of water to boil, you don’t know exactly which minute is the most important, you just keep holding the pot over the heat. You might have a sudden breakthrough, or it could be gradual, imperceptible improvement … How are you doing compared to three or six months ago?
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“the primary goal is simply to hear the sounds”
I agree. I had to learn to just listen to the audio. For a long while I would actively work to understand the text. At first that was via translation, which of course is a bad idea. Eventually I learnt to passively soak up the audio, without a concious effort to understand. That seemed to allow the content to sink deeper into my brain, allowing it to do its job of understanding the input. That’s when my French comprehension really took off.
I suspect this aspect of learning - listening like a sponge - is impossible to study in a rigorous and scientific manner. So we have to rely on the subjective experiences of others.
I do wonder if this form of listening should be adopted from the very beginning of one’s language learning. I find it unsettling in German, where I am a beginner, but I am reading a book on how we learn, and apparently discomfort while learning can be a good thing, as it indicates that we are actively dealing with new concepts and ideas. Do others think I should listen to lots of German audio even when I understand just a few words?
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Thank you for your approval of this method. In the other hand, Steve has already answered it in terms of your question. As he said, at the initial phase, you need to go through the process of repetition with mini stories so that you can master the frequency words. After that, you can listen to rich and different and enjoyment content. You can search for the key word ‘listening’ within his channel, then find the relevant videos. Hope you will succeed in your learning language.
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Thank you for your encouragement. I will stick to learning and keep my patience.
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This way of listening can be adopted from the beginning, but it is going to be conditioned by your overall level of comprehension. As a general rule I don’t do this sort of listening comprehension practice on material that I could not understand from reading the transcript. But if I had to do it all over again - and someday I will with another language - I would do more of this style of listening earlier, only necessarily on simpler texts.
That said, I don’t think pure listening comprehension work on material you couldn’t even read is very valuable, though at the beginning stages listening with a transcript fills a lot of needs: understanding the relationship between the written and spoken tokens of the language, familiarizing your ear with the phonetics of the language, building reading comprehension and vocab.
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Three words: listening while reading.
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