Wanted to get a feel for how people are actually doing their listening and reading at the same time whether that’s following the text while audio plays, alternating between the two, or something else entirely.
Right now I am importing a lot of podcasts in French and then read the lesson first, then listen to the audio passively, and then finally watch the podcast while reading the captions.
A few things I’m curious about:
-– Do you read along in real time with the audio, or do you let the audio run and dip into the text when you get lost?
— Do you do a silent read-through first, then listen? Or audio first, then read?
— Do you feel like doing both at once actually helps comprehension, or do you think it creates a crutch?
— Does your approach change depending on your level in the language?
I’m currently working through a novel in French and finding that for longer, denser sentences, I need the text to keep up. But for dialogue-heavy sections, audio-only feels fine.
Would love to hear what’s working for people, especially anyone who’s pushed through to B2/C1 and beyond.
Does the balance shift as you get more advanced?
How is everyone improving their listening comprehension?
For my main target language, I am weak in reading, so I try to make myself read ahead of the audio to force myself to practice reading without listening.
But I allow myself to often fall back to listening and reading simultaneously, but try to force myself to still do the reading.
For any other language I just do them simultaneously.
I’ve tried many times, but I can’t make this work in LingQ; I force myself for a few minutes, but it never flows.
I blame LingQ’s poor karaoke mode for that failure because with my podcast reader app - Snipd - it works fine: I have just spent 20 minutes listening+reading a chapter of “La isla misteriosa”, as a free podcast (https://audiolecturas.es/ ).
I worked listening comprehension and verbal pronunciation pretty hard at the beginning. I wanted a good sense of both, lest I fall into bad habits. So, a lot of listen/repeat/shadow.
For the past year I have mostly focused on reading comprehension. Now and then I listen to the French audio, if I’m curious to check how the elisions and liaisons are handled.
To my pleasant surprise I find that my listening comprehension has improved considerably just with reading input.
