This is a bit tongue in cheek because I don’t believe in passive language learning (effort is required!) but I have found myself listening to more and more Italian and being able to follow along without difficulty.
Previously I felt like a very focused “active listening” was required or I would find myself listening to a detuned radio, only picking up the odd words here or there. But now… after having set a goal to listen to something every day, my listening has improved where I can get about 90% and can understand the gist, with a fairly fluent read of the text.
Anyhow… I also do a weekly conversation class, but I definitely am becoming more aware of how unnatural and “translated” some of my speech is. Likewise, if given a text to translate from English to Italian, I often find my attempt is nothing like the expected outcome. In other words - can understand, but can’t form.
So I’m wondering if many have reached this point in their journey and found that their speaking starts to improve? Is it just a matter of trusting the process and hoping I will slowly improve? (I’m not in a rush, which helps).
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I don’t think I’m out of the woods yet with my production, but do you also feel, once given the correct translation that it makes instant sense to you? In that, you understand exactly why it would mean what it does in English. If so then I think we’re in the same boat.
From my perspective focused writing practice will help you the most. I found Ouino to be a Godsend because it offers a more natural approach to repeating phrases and writing.
My output in French is still clearly English, but it’s getting better and even if the French variant isn’t something my brain can do yet, I could easily tell you why I think my attempt is flawed. With that conclusion, even though I’m not where I wanna be. I could say it’s probably just trusting the process, but also to write more.
LingQ’s sentence view might be aimed for beginners, but the sentence scrambler thing (which can be changed in review in your settings) could also help you to figure out syntax more precisely.
Is there anything particular you did in Italian btw to really up your comprehension in listening?
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Yes! That’s a good way of putting it.
I can’t say this is the optimal way, but generally my method is to listen once or twice and then to read the text (and translate if necessary). Then on a subsequent listen I find things tend to fall into place a bit easier. I think the Lingq method helped because I did find myself actually wanting to know what the audio/text is because I found the material enjoyable.
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I’ve considered myself upper intermediate/lower advanced in Portuguese for a while, and was having language exchange meetings three times a week. What I noticed after a while was that, at the beginning of most meetings, I was tripping all over the place but after a half hour I was speaking much better. Then we would switch to English, so it was like I was just getting into the zone and then we would stop, LOL.
So, after making that observation I made it a goal to speak out loud for at least thirty minutes a day whether I have anyone to talk to or not. When I don’t (like today) I talk to my dogs, my mirror, my bff, myself, the air in the grocery store while pretending I’m on the phone (AirPods are great for this!)… you get the point. In addition to that thirty minutes, I try to just speak out loud at random in Portuguese anytime I would otherwise use my inner voice in English, within reason. I’ve been doing this daily/constantly for a few weeks, and I feel my production skills have WAY improved. (So has my comfort level with talking to myself in public, LOL.)
At the end of the day (and I don’t know why this is controversial) - whatever you practice, that’s what you get better at. Expecting to get better at speaking by listening is like practicing the piano and expecting to get better at playing guitar. There is overlap in the theoretical knowledge but the skills ultimately require different skill sets, period. Although listening is great for recognizing the language and learning vocabulary and structure, you still need to put your mouth and vocal cords (and whatever other body parts the language requires) through the motions to train them. And I really don’t think there’s any way around that but to do it…
Good luck 
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Interesting! Thank you for sharing. I’m curious how do you measure your improved success? Is it by comparing it to when you listen to Portuguese again or does your brain just figure it out on its own that something just feels off without much deliberate attempts at diagnosing “what” you’re doing wrong?
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I was referring to my speaking skills more than my listening skills, per the original question… in that regard, I guess I just sort of notice how fluidly I am able to speak on whatever the topic is, without grasping for vocabulary or grammar. I will note here that this isn’t 100 percent consistent–there are good days and bad days, as with any acquired skill. But I can certainly notice that over time I seem to have more good days and that the good days are better/bad days not as bad, lol.
For a really tangible way to measure progress, one thing I do is I have a language exchange partner whose schedule doesn’t mesh with mine, so we just leave each other voice mails regularly (long ones, like five minutes, and I don’t rehearse or script what I say to her.) I can listen back to older voice mails and evaluate my pronunciation and how often I am saying “um” or pausing for a long time to search for a word, lol. Compare that with more recent voice mails. Of course, this could also be done without a partner, just record one’s own voice sometimes and then listen back. I think a few months in between would be required, you wouldn’t necessarily notice a difference from day to day, and it would be variable as mentioned above. But over time there should be noticeable differences if you’re practicing regularly…
For listening skills, I do more or less the same… occasionally, I’ll listen back to an older audio that I struggled with several months ago. Usually, I’ll find that months later, that audio is much easier for me to understand. Even though it’s “old” material, it’s not like I have it memorized–so I know I’m actually understanding it better this time, not just remembering it.
Hope this helps!
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To the latter part of your question, yes, I do sometimes try to diagnose what the problem is with listening comprehension. In particular, if I have listened to an audio a few times in a row and am still not understanding it as well as I’d like to, and especially if it’s an audio I want to understand fully, I will import it into LingQ (if I haven’t already) to try to diagnose this. Questions I’ll ask myself:
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Was there a ton of key vocabulary I didn’t know? This could be the culprit for not understanding–and some vocabulary is much more important to understanding content than other vocabulary. For example: “The WHO suggests that smoking is a health ____.” You can probably guess “hazard” from context here and understand the content without knowing this word. Contrast with: “The WHO suggests that ____ is a health hazard.” You’re never going to guess what ____ is, it could be anything, and you probably need to know this vocabulary to understand this entire piece of content.
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If the answer to #1 is no, there wasn’t a ton of key vocabulary I was missing, then I’ll think more about the audio itself. Was someone speaking WAY too fast for me, or in a low/muffled voice? Was there a lot of background noise interfering with my ability to pick out the words? Was my attention just wandering? (this actually happens a LOT with content from LingQ that I didn’t choose.) At that point, if I decide I do want to understand the audio, I’ll again import to LingQ (if I didn’t already) and read along to try to understand the muffled parts–then listen again later without reading to see if I can pick out more of it.
Again, hope this helps give you some ideas…
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Yes, this is extremely satisfying. I would say “personal satisfaction” would be a good gauge of progress. Every now and then perhaps Lingq should interrupt with a survey instrument that asks you to rate your personal satisfaction with the text. It would be interesting if the results improve over time
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This is the most wholesome and unassuming way of putting this! I love it!
The only thing I would add, by way of making an analogy, is that muscle memory plays a huge role. All of our vocal apparatus are just specialized muscles. You can’t expect to play the guitar like Santana without spending the time practicing the finger movements. Same goes for speaking.
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Totally true! When I first started speaking in Portuguese, my throat hurt very quickly. This is for many reasons, but mostly because we don’t have the same “r” sound similar to the French “r” that is used liberally in Portuguese. Now I can speak for much longer without killing my throat, partly because I’ve learned to make the sound without hacking up a lung, but also because I’ve built the muscles needed. There are tons of muscles used in speaking and every language has a different usage of them.
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One difference between the musical analogy is the ability to make mistakes though.
For example, when you play violin, if you are flat (not hitting the right intonation) you are tempted to self correct and find the note.
But this then leads to training your body into making the mistake and correcting it. The correct method is to play slowly and hit the note right immediately.
I wonder if this is true for speech as well.
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