How Would I Improve My Listening Skills to C2+?

[nfera]

@davideroccato

@davideroccato

I few things that randomly resonate for now:

• increasing speed to control pace
• US target accents first
• repetitions
• summarization (+ eventually AI feedback)
• mastering a subject (+ Coursera targeted course)
• variation of oral diet
• Kids material tests
• poor-quality audio, background noise training

Personally, I think some of these don’t have much to do with listening comprehension. What @PeterBormann and @haskejl were talking about was academic specialisation. If I wanted to understand what was spoken by the vast majority of native speakers, I wouldn’t focus on academic specialisation (again, depends on your goal). As interesting as taking university courses can be and as useful summarising its material can be for writing practice, it seems to aim for a different goal than merely increasing your listening comprehension, assuming you are already at a high level. If you can understand the content easily already, this isn’t doing too much to increase your listening comprehension. Academic courses are usually single-speaker, clear, use reasonably formal language. In my opinion, this will do little for improving your listening comprehension. This is just like you saying you listened to a hundred audiobooks and saw very little improvement in your listening comprehension. You have to find challenging, difficult content. You have to go out of your way to find it.

You mention your focus is more U.S. related. The question is, Do you mean you want to focus on U.S. accents or you want to focus on being able to have similar listening comprehension skills as someone from the U.S.? Because Americans still understand English accents from Ireland, Australia, and India too. If you easily understand common U.S. accents, move onto other accents. Becoming familiar with other accents will improve your listening comprehension of U.S. content too.

@Cantagorous

What I’d say is, after taking the courses you’re interested in, don’t fret so much about listening, sure, listen to podcasts and talk shows that usually have preferably more than one guest, but focus on reading difficult fiction and non-fiction, writing, and speaking.

I respectfully disagree. Native speakers understand a large range of accents, because they sat back for years and such content just fell in their laps. I agree with you that challenging audio material may not be easy to find in our content bubbles, but in large languages like English, it’s there. Local radio shows are on the Internet these days. Also, certain news programmes interview local farmers, bricklayers, etc., who likely have other accents (as accents in English are region and class based). You may have to go out of your way to find such content. Or at least VPN in to the Australian, New Zealand, Irish media channels, etc., if they have an geolocation block.

@davideroccato

An overwhelming feeling to untangle everything, and create a plan for an entire year (which is something my mind is not good to do, and need a different strategy). But that’s on me and I will figure out step by step.

@davideroccato

Now I will have to create a sort of program.
I need some help to understand where do I start, where do I position myself, which ideas I would trust the most, and how I will develop them in the long-term.

I don’t think there’s much to be overwhelmed about. The most important part is that the listening content is challenging. You may have to spend a bit of time finding challenging material, but it’s out there. Just like choosing reading material on LingQ with >5% New Words, “seek out challenging audio material” is a maxim, which will push your abilities no matter what level you are at. In my view, the method is simple. Just listen, ideally with background noise on increased audio speed. For a programme, you just need to find ~250 hours worth of challenging material for the year, ideally with multiple-speakers and a variety of accents.

P.S. Do NOT use subtitles or a transcript while listening. They become crutches on which one leans their weak listening comprehension on.

[davideroccato]

@nfera

The most important part is that the listening content is challenging.

With LingQ is a bit easier to understand the difficult of the material we are reading. We have blue and yellow words to guide us.
What would be, in your opinion, the metric to understand the listening challenging material. We just have our feeling of too much, not enough and so on.

Background noise is indeed a struggle, especially music. Would you consider songs at the same level as background noise to train our ears to better recognise the language frequencies?

[nfera]

@davideroccato

What would be, in your opinion, the metric to understand the listening challenging material. We just have our feeling of too much, not enough and so on.

Go off feelings. You know if something is challenging and you need to concentrate harder to understand it compared to something that is piss easy to understand. No need to complicate it.

@davideroccato

Would you consider songs at the same level as background noise to train our ears to better recognise the language frequencies?

If people like to, they can do as they please, but it’s not my cup of tea. Personally, I’d choose podcasts and radio shows of people actually talking. I want to understanding people speaking, not singing. (Also note that when people sing they often change their accents to a more standard one.)

EDIT: As an example, compare Adele’s pronunciation in one of her songs with her pronunciation in an interview.

73* Questions With Adele | Vogue

Adele - Rolling in the Deep (Official Music Video)

[kraemder]

There’s been some interesting responses here but I think I’d simply increase my vocabulary. If you already understand spoken English extremely well except when the topic gets more advanced then it’s probably just a lack of vocabulary. I notice that as I get better at a language and listening, I also get pretty good at filtering out words that I don’t know or don’t seem important. But increasing your vocabulary should train your brain to pay attention to those words.

[Anxxos]

An interesting place to test your listening skills with all sorts of sound clips of very variable quality is Cloze-Listening on clozemaster.com.

It is usefully linked to a space-repetition algorithm for disciplined practice.

You might find it helpful.

[davideroccato]

@kraemder

I’d simply increase my vocabulary

Thanks. This is already part of my daily routine as stated somewhere before, as I use LingQ already.

@Anxxos

An interesting place to test your listening skills with all sorts of sound clips of very variable quality is Cloze-Listening on clozemaster.com.

Thanks. I have just tried it and it’s quite cool actually. As I have never trained for this skill, I never tried it in the past with Clozemaster. I have just done a round of 10 with text input and it was great. There is also the transcribe feature that I can try tomorrow.
This is a nice idea to mix inside a weekly time block rotation.

[haskejl]

@davideroccato I was out of town for a few days, but you could start with something like one of the following.

ENGLISH49-101Huss-Lederman01.pdf

Syl_London_ENGL-UA9112L01_Landau.pdf

It turns out that finding a good syllabus is difficult. But, you could approach it by searching something like “[subject] undergraduate syllabus.” In the US, 100-400 level courses are undergraduate level. I specifically mentioned English, debate, or philosophy because they’ll likely contain some notoriously complicated material.

I also just remembered that MIT has published some lecture series on Youtube; you might also consider these.

MIT OpenCourseWare

You can also try looking at Yale or other universities to see what they have for free that interests you.

YaleCourses

[davideroccato]

@haskejl thank you very much for the examples, the first syllabus is super interesting. I will take everything in consideration to build my programm. Thanks.