How much listening time are you shooting for each week? What's ideal?

[GMelillo]

I am studying Italian. I notice meaningful improvement at about 250 hour increments. The major milestones were:

1. At ~250 hours I stopped listening to material directed at learners and moved to native content.

2. At ~500 hours I started working on television shows.

3. 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.

[ericb100]

@davideroccato

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 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.

[davideroccato]

@GMelillo

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.

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.

@ericb100

I think it says it is “user” entered translations (whatever that means) and then if you pay for it you can get “machine” translations.

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.

[GMelillo]

@davideroccato

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 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.

[davideroccato]

@GMelillo

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.

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.

[GMelillo]

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.

[asifhameed]

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.

[LeifGoodwin]

@davideroccato

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.

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.

@davideroccato

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.

I’d be interested in a brief summary of the new method.

[davideroccato]

@LeifGoodwin

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?

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.

[nfera]

@davideroccato

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.

@ericb100

I think it says it is “user” entered translations (whatever that means) and then if you pay for it you can get “machine” translations.

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.

@GMelillo

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’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).

@GMelillo

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.

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?

[GMelillo]

@nfera

(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).

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.

[vernmartin]

I average three hours a day with Russian. Most of that is listening, because it exposes me to much more language per minute than my slow reading. I listen when I drive, walk, jog, do dishes and other chores. Level of difficulty varies, but I aim to be able to follow the context generally so that it can be comprehensible input and I can gain new words and idioms, and I do. I find after two years of study including one year at three hours a day my comprehension has greatly improved.

So long as I’m making forward progress I’m satisfied. I won’t quit, so success is guaranteed as progress is constant. I vary my input a lot so as to maintain interest. A bored mind isn’t learning. A brain hungering to understand is engaged and learning. I can say it’s working.

One caveat: most of this is not done in Lingq and not captured in Lingq stats. Lingq is mostly my reading tool. Youtube and Apple podcasts are my usual listening tools without any transcripts or subtitles and mostly just the audio. The brain leans best when forced to go it alone. I love that I can create transcripts with Lingq when I have time to read.

[davideroccato]

@GMelillo

The problem isn’t the words, or the processing of phonemes, or grammar.

Trust me, you fix this quite fast by direct interactions in the way we talked before. Because our brain is going to catch so much more data that we are not consciously aware of, and put everything together. I have done this with 3 languages! The only thing I don’t know if it is possible to emulate this at home. I don’t think so, because we learn by “energetic” exchange as well. There is a lot of data going on during a real multisensorial interaction.

[nfera]

@GMelillo

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”.

@GMelillo

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.

I, too, would be confused by the first version, but not the second version. Like the second version is a fleshed-out explanation almost, so there is little room for misunderstanding, whereas the first version is like the ‘short version’. They give you the short phrase, based on the expectation they don’t need to use the full phrase or explain it in detail, because you understand what they mean anyways. I’ve never been offered orange juice ice cubes with a Fanta before, so I would have no conception that that was what they were trying to say, so in the first version I would think I was missing something too. The most common Italian life experiences which result in these assumptions resulting in the shortening of phrases, no explanations, etc. will be quickly remedied, as @davideroccato mentioned, when you are in country. You only had to have that experience once with “giacchio all’arianca” and I’m sure you’ll remember it for a very long time. The less frequent ones, however, will take years to accumulate, but by that time, you’ll already have almost absorbed Italian culture.

@GMelillo

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.

I do not have this issue though, where my brain kinda goes into a temporary overloaded state of confusion, as you are trying to compute what was meant. I would be only confused about their content and respond, “Giacchio all’arancia? Ma cos’e?”

[davideroccato]

@nfera

I would be only confused about their content and respond, “Giacchio all’arancia? Ma cos’e?”

Never heard of it until now because I haven’t been drinking Fanta for a long time, and I’ve never come across it.

I would have the same reaction, and I would just add, “all’arancia?”
Maybe I would add, “all’arancia? Il ghiaccio?”

In both cases, the tone goes up, with a sound of question and surprise. I would probably add an expression of surprise as well. That would be enough to keep the conversation flowing.

We’d probably both smile/laugh; I’d add that I’m old, and he/she would add that there are all sorts of crazy things nowadays.

This is the kind of fluency you get when you feel comfortable with the language.

I think it is also a question of personality, but languages change our personalities as well. That would be another discussion.

[GMelillo]

@nfera

I do not have this issue though, where my brain kinda goes into a temporary overloaded state of confusion, as you are trying to compute what was meant. I would be only confused about their content and respond, “Giacchio all’arancia? Ma cos’e?”

In my case, I had to wait a beat while my brain settled on an interpretation, a beat that was probably imperceptible to him, and after half a second or so it clicked and I said, “No, grazie,” and that was that. We continued to speak Italian and everything went fine.

All of this is happening very quickly and subtly, but it contributes to the feeling of “strangeness” in the language. If I’m not 100% sure what someone is trying to say to me in English, I’m still 100% sure that I do not have a listening comprehension problem. (And let’s be clear here: the “I” isn’t the conscious I of the ego, or the experiencing “I”, but just the background machinery of consciousness). But if I’m not 100% sure what someone is trying to say to me in Italian, there are two possibilities: (a) ordinary human communication blip/my ignorance, (b) listening comprehension fail.

In general, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much Italians are staying with me in Italian. Last time I was here, it was obvious that my Italian was not strong enough to make it easier for Italians to communicate with me in their native language. The “path of least resistance” was almost always English. This time the majority of the time that path is Italian - they’d rather stay in Italian than switch to English to make it easier to communicate with me. That feels like a pretty nice hump to be over.

[GMelillo]

@davideroccato

I think it is also a question of personality, but languages change our personalities as well. That would be another discussion.

This is absolutely true, and another one of the cool “strangenesses” that learning languages provides. The only other language I’ve lived through at all was German, and at some point I became aware that the sum total of human experience that I had run through the German-center was sufficiently unique, as was the library of social-responses that I had integrated into my behavior patterns by means of the German language, that I had a sort of German personality center that was different from the English one. Again, this is very subtle and I can imagine a person not necessarily reflecting on it, but it was definitely real for me.

[Othalian]

I do:

1. 30 min Easy German podcasts every night prior to going to sleep - I re-listen to the old podcasts if I have heard them all.
2. Preparing meals/ washing dishes - German radio 90 min total each time, three times a day.
3. 2+ hours of German language learning online every day.
4. German Satellite TV (I live in the UK) - programs that take my fancy as and when.
5. Smartphone German grammar app - as and when the urge takes me but approx 4 or 5 times a day for 5(ish) minutes each time.