Prior to this year Frontier/Verizon FIOS had a German package. That’s where I had done most of my watching. This package is gone now, so we had to figure out where we could find programming.
Best choices right now are:
Netflix - Quite a fair amount of tv shows and movies. There is also a lot of dubbed/subtitled content in German of many of the tv shows and movies available on Netflix in general. Actual German TV shows - Kleo, Dark, Dogs of Berlin, etc.
ARD Mediathek - Free and great. There’s an app you can use to watch on android or netflix. From ipad you can cast to Roku device. Or you can get a google chromecast or equivalent (I have a new ONN brand device) that does Google TV…you can install android apps, so install ARD Mediathek app on that and you have tv on your tv! In any event, you have access to all kinds of shows even without vpn. If you want to watch live and many shows you do need a vpn (I use PIA) pointed to a German server. Lots of cool shows. We like “reality” type tv shows here - Mittendrin (shows the goings on of workes at Frankfurk Airport), Feur und Flamme (firefighters in action), Quarks (science show). There’s some other similar tv shows like that. Babylon Berlin series is great (used to be on Netflix as well). Various drama series and movies from all the regions. (WDR, SRR, BR, etc.)
Youtube - You can find many, of the content from the ARD app on youtube on various channels as well. BR, WDR, etc. have channels. I know you can find Mittendrin, for example on WDR channel in a playlist. Deutche Welle youtube channel still puts out Documentaries and other items.
You can also get the ZDF app and there are lots of tv shows for that as well.
You can try, but at the end of the day it is always split attention. Walking without distractions is probably one of the few situations where our minds can focus more on listening. But driving, skating and many other activities are definitely taxing.
I do more or less the same with the time I add to LingQ. I always try to reduce the time I add to reflect the loss of concentration due to split attention, especially if I had less energy when I was listening.
I hear you about conversational material. There is a lot of content out there, but it is not always easy to find the right one for different situations. Even worse is the gradual increase in the level of difficulty. I think we all try our best to find the right material. Probably some subjects should be challenging in order to make our minds work hard, but others should be interesting because we like them. So, at least we are feeding different parts of our brain—being, pleasure and effort, aa few of them.
No. I can focus quite well on a podcast or video. If I get bored, I change podcast.
No, I find it easier to listen while driving, with the condition that they are long straight roads e.g dual carriageways. Driving helps me focus on the general rather than details. I think it;s because I split my attention between the road and the podcast. I don’t know if this is more or less effective than listening while walking. I suspect it works in a different way. Having some background noise helps train my ears,
I don’t listen while skating, that would be dangerous.
It’s the same technique I’ve been using for Russian since the start of the year, that is, watching YouTube with dual subtitles with Language Reactor. I try and read the Russian subtitle, and when I don’t know a word, I quickly scan the English translation line. For my Russian, after 50-100 hours of beginner and comprehensible material at the end of last year, I moved onto lower intermediate material (Russian with Max) for 40-50 hours before moving onto native material. For the last three or so months, I’ve watched YouTube videos only from the interview channel вДудь (link), discussing politics and life. Now I’ve moved onto the let’s play channel MrLololoshka (Роман Фильченков) (link). I do very little repetition, as keeping with the same author and the same topic, the most frequent words commonly repeat. These videos I watch are word-dense with 8k-10k words per hour (130-160 wpm), as @ericb100 was mentioning. They are also improvised conversations, which is the vocabulary I’d like to focus on. As you and @LeifGoodwin were discussing attention, I am only doing active study, and I find watching the video of the interview or the let’s player at the same time highly focusing. I also get visual cues to anchor certain words to emotions and images.
So all in all, I consider I’m getting high quality (with high focus and visual cues), high quantity (word-dense, no faff with making definitions, etc.), challenging (native material), and highly motivating (interesting content) study. I’m focusing on conversational vocabulary acquisition, but simultaneously improving my listening and reading comprehension. And I know it works, as I notice all these things vividly improving. (I’m currently at 270 hours of recorded listening, 90%+ would be reading while listening, and 50% of it would be from native material.) I even had my first full-fledged conversation for over three hours the other day, chatting with a native Russian speaker I met. I’m very satisfied with my current approach.
(As mentioned before, I consider this approach to be appropriate from the beginner level to perhaps B2+/C1. Once you get C1, this approach is no longer as effective, as it’s too easy. Also, once you get to C1, vocabulary may not necessarily by your biggest weakness, so best to do techniques to directly address your weaknesses.)
Honestly, I’m almost feeling as if I have perhaps more progress with a similar time investment than I did with Italian, a language with more cognates and which uses the Roman alphabet. (My approach for Italian was reading while listening on LingQ, lingQing words, and being more progressive in my content selective, plus ‘passive’ re-listening.) It’s hard to compare, but maybe I should see if I can find a test. If I can converse with someone for over three hours about a range of topics, I’m at least A2.
@nfera thanks for the long explanation. Follow-up questions to better understand your workflow:
You watch Youtube with Language Reactor with dual subtitles. How do you find the quality of the subtitles?
Do you stop at each sentence? And repeat some sentences? Or you just continuously watch the video bouncing with your eyes up and down? Or stopping here and there?
Do you speak at the same time when you watch the video to improve your pronunciation?
I’m trying to understand the way you are using Language Reactor compared to the way it was built for.
Do you import the transcript on LingQ and study it for building vocabulary?
Quality of the subtitles depends on the individual channel. You can find some channels with perfect subtitles, like the two channels I’ve been using. They are all manually proofed. As good as any Netflix movie.
I just watch it like a normal video. Only if I miss something important do I skip back. I just keep moving forward. I couldn’t tell you the definition of every word in the sentence, even after reading the Russian subtitle, then quickly scanning the English translation. I’m going for an understanding as a whole, like the vibe of understanding what’s said, even if my understanding comes from the English translation, then a large quantity to let my subconscious do the work. Sometimes I probably end up reading too much of the English translations, but I don’t mind, as I’m still learning.
No, never.
I import all videos into LingQ to add 1x listened and 1x read for my stats. Sometimes I go through a few pages of the transcript, adding new lingQs and moving words I am familiar with to level 2, but I don’t consider it the best use of my time. More a semi-trivial way to procrastinate. And it’s kinda boring. A few times, I’ve gone to my Vocabulary list, filtered for level 2 and 3, and marked words as Known (hence why I have 2,300 Known Words at the moment). This, too, I deem is not the best use of my time as well, but it makes me see a growing Known Word count, so it adds to my motivation. I consider my real study to be what I do with Language Reactor on YouTube. The rest is just faff. I’m pushing for quantity, quantity, quantity in my current setup of word-dense, conversational YouTube videos with dual subtitles.
With subtitles, I meant the Language Reactor sentence by sentence translation. I don’t know what engine they use to translate on the language of your choice.
I need to go back to my notes, sooner or later, to make a plan for this as well.
I am studying Italian. I notice meaningful improvement at about 250 hour increments. The major milestones were:
At ~250 hours I stopped listening to material directed at learners and moved to native content.
At ~500 hours I started working on television shows.
At ~1000 hours I felt confident understanding everything said to me in normal conversations in good listening conditions.
I’m at ~1250 hours now. Sitcoms and documentaries are perfectly fine. Interview programs and talk radio are also perfectly fine. I did a 2 hour tour of a museum today in Italian: perfectly fine.
There is still this veil of insecurity that rests on my listening comprehension, though. I would describe it as some combination of (a) needing a higher level of active attention in order to comprehend - relative to my native language - which means I can’t trust my mind to grasp everything relative to the social context if I’m not fully focused and (b) some background baseline insecurity processing social reality through my second language.
I will not stop listening systematically until I reach 2,000 hours, at which point I will do my best to assess whether residual problems with my listening comprehension are best handled by more listening to content, or whether I just need to live my life through Italian in order to finish the project.
I think it says it is “user” entered translations (whatever that means) and then if you pay for it you can get “machine” translations.
not nfera, but here’s my experience:
I’ve used it to watch movies and shows on Netflix. I personally go sentence by sentence with it set to stop after each sentence. Otherwise I’ve used it similarly to nfera. I move along pretty quickly with this mode. Mostly only stopping if I want to deep dive into the sentence or a word in the sentence. Sometimes the default translations are a little suspect or don’t quite catch a nuance but overall pretty good. I’ve never paid so don’t know the quality of the “machine” translations.
It’s nice to see you again. That’s a great goal, btw.
I feel that I could listen to everything for thousands of hours, but would I really improve? My mind would just skip things here and there and create an overall summary. It’s a lot different if I had to understand something and later write a detailed essay about it. The level of attention and comprehension required would bring to light all the holes in my mind that I thought weren’t there.
I’m changing my method now because I want to achieve deeper overall comprehension. It’s a lot of work, but it will be worth it in the long run.
Thanks for checking! Probably they use an old free Google translator.
I only use Language Reactor if I want to work on speaking. I only use it on YouTube, though.
I think that for me, as far as the Italian language as a system of information transmission goes, I’m pretty much there. All of the passive activities that are technologically mediated are more or less “mastered,” in the sense that I’m hardly hearing words or constructions in those media that I cannot parse with my auditory cortex and pass to my language processing centers and derive meaning. 1000 hours was pretty much enough to get that job done.
The problem is that when you are “in the field,” so to speak, you are not just processing linguistic information, you are processing a whole social scenario, and in those scenarios native speakers rely on their grasp of context to carry a lot of meaning. So I still get caught out in unfamiliar situations because I don’t have enough direct experience of how Italians communicate in the real world.
It might be that if I keep piling on the technologically mediated listening, I might get so good that the drop off in performance from being in “real” and not “ideal” conditions wouldn’t be that noticeable, but I also suspect that I’m already far enough along that if I immersed in Italian life I would close the gap pretty quickly without needing to listen to 3 hours of television and radio every day.
For me, faster learning of nuances, fluency, conversational skills, and similar things comes from direct and active interaction with native people in their environment. Or at least, I would learn faster and with more empathetic understanding.
With LingQ and similar tools, I can increase vocabulary, detail, technicality of the language, and so on. But interacting with attention, curiosity, and enthusiasm for the language is unbeatable, IMHO.
Especially with languages like Italian, where body movements, gestures, facial expressions, and even voice tonalities are really important to better understand pauses, nuances, sarcasm, irony, and the like.
Sure, with a lot of vocabulary and knowledge of the language, you can speed up the process a lot in full immersion, and save a lot of money by reducing the time spent abroad. But I think the real final step is in the country itself, with several people talking at the same time, family meals, parties with loud music, bar discussions, football discussions, buying groceries in the open market, and such.
Exactly. I suspect that I’m at that point, but it’s obviously hard to test that empirically. So I’m going to finish my long term reading/listening goals and then decide whether to put Italian in maintenance mode until I can really temper the language with direct use. Over this next year I’m going to be thinking about how to work even more efficiently, but in the end I think I’m ready for that next step.
Maybe pottery is a good analogy. The clay has been formed at this point and it really just needs to get in the kiln. I can keep perfecting the wet clay, adding a little decoration here and there, but I will not fundamentally have a pot until we fire this thing.
I recently started Spanish, about 2 to 3 mini stories a day at story 31 now. A few Spanish dramas on netflix as well. I will try say the same in Spanish, lets see how it goes
Yo estudia Español dos o tres historias dias, ahorra en histora trese uno. Ve Aguñas Español episodes en Netflix.
Can’t you just pay close attention to make sure you get the full meaning, or as much as you can allowing for the words you don’t know? In other words, pretend you will be questioned afterwards.
When I listen to UK radio, I understand everything, but I’m not really paying attention, so I can’t recall much. It’s a form of shallow listening.
With French radio, I try to make sure I understand everything with the exception of unknown words, so I might rewind if I miss a word, or there’s a new construct that is interesting. Rarely I struggle due to someone speaking too fast or mumbling, so I change content. Sometimes I rewind so I can hear the dialogue again simply because it is interesting. It’s a deeper listening. It is tiring as I have to focus far more in French due to my non native level.
I’m sure that when we consume content in our native language, very often the intake is shallow, and we recall very little later on, maybe a key point or two, or a phrase.
I’d be interested in a brief summary of the new method.
It needs to be very active, focused and deliberate practice. For the way my brain is built, interacting with others would be faster and easier. With the experience I have today, I would probably match the best of the two worlds. But I have other priorities and things to fix at the moment.
I’ll definitely try to build something new that works for me in the next months. More in the world of deliberate practice (at home), otherwise there is not so much progress, or the progress is too slow.
You can use the English human subtitles, but they aren’t ideal, as sometimes they don’t give a literal translation of the L2 subtitle or they may have a different time sync. Machine translation is much better. From my guess, they have several scenarios, which are treated differently (or I experience a beneficial bug). On Netflix, for machine translation, you need to login. On older YouTube videos, you often need to login too to access them. But for newer YouTube videos (like the ones I watch), they allow me with no account to have access to machine translation. My guess is that for newer videos, where YouTube has a subtitle option as ‘auto-translate’, they use this. This would be Google Translate, as YouTube is owned by Google. For the machine translations, where ‘auto-translate’ is not available, I have no idea what Language Reactor uses. ChatGPT is very cheap or maybe they use another translation service.
I’m at ~1,150 hours for my Italian, so similar to yours. These hours include all the various techniques I’ve used relating to listening: extensive reading while listening to Netflix, extensive reading while listening to Netflix in various dialects, semi-intensive reading while listening on LingQ (so dictionary look-ups available), passive re-listening, the listening portion of conversations, etc. I’m still a very far way off from being great in terms of my listening comprehension. I’d add to your list, my challenges of: (c) memory being significantly worse; (d) having to focus more when encountering, and not always understanding, unfamiliar Italian accents, of which there are many due to standard Italian being a second language for many Italians; (e) less understanding in poor listening conditions than my mother tongue (mainly as my lower ability to predict the unheard words in the sentence).
From my experience, I haven’t had too many serious misunderstandings due to cultural and/or social context differences. Probably some, but not super many. Can you give some examples?
I’m definitely experiencing (d) and (e), though outside of that numbers thing we talked about before (c) doesn’t seem to be too bad in normal conversation for me right now.
Here’s an example of what I mean by problems created by context: the other day, I ask for a Fanta, and the barman asks me if I want orange ice cubes in it, and I lost the thread of the conversation for a second because I wasn’t sure where exactly my momentary confusion was situated: in my hearing, or in my grasping of what he was intending to say with the words “ghiaccio all’arancia”. The problem isn’t so much the culture per se, as the fact that the slightest misunderstanding, or lack of certainty, in the encounter, causes the whole experience to get out of focus, auditorily speaking, as my brain shifts resources to making contextual-situated meaning out of the linguistic data. The problem isn’t the words, or the processing of phonemes, or grammar.
If he had said, “Vorresti che io aggiunga cubetti del ghiaccio fatti dal succo d’arancia?” or something like that, the linguistic data would be intrinsically complete, and I wouldn’t need to fill in the gaps by situating the underdetermined linguistic data in its social context.
Does that make sense? It’s not so much cultural confusion per se, as the fact that in face-to-face communication, people shift some of the semantic load from the linguistic constructions themselves to the real world (culture, i.e. stable patterns of behavior, interpersonal expectations, etc, is just one aspect of the real world that could be bearing the semantic load, as it did in this case - but I’m sure I could invent, or dig up, an example where some other aspect of the world is doing the load bearing), whereas in pure text, or pure radio, the language itself has to do the entire communicative job. Even in television and film, which simulates real world conditions better, the fact that the understanding-subject (in other words: me) exists completely outside of the experiential context being evaluated, changes the semantic calculus in some way. There’s a subtle but definite difference between third-person and first-person linguistic processing.
