More accurate numbers for listening required for fluency

[BabyRuth]

People talk a lot about listening hours, which has become my main priority because its what I neglected the most on the way, it is clearly the key skill with language learning. However, a 600-1000 hour target for listening hours to fluency does not distinguish:

• focused exercises, listening to the same short segment repeatedly, like intro dialogues and ones that go toward intermediate, with real speech/not neccesarily scripted but still contained and not too heavy on mangling and slang
• going over a difficult, fully native audio passage (perhaps only a few seconds) repeatedly, perhaps with shadowing when even slowing down and with many reps its hard
• listening while reading
• passive/extensive listening, e.g. podcasts at or just above your level

I am effectively fluent in one on one conversations, even about increasingly more real life/nuanced topics, but it falls off a cliff in the real life anarchy of a group or often even a movie. I have probably 300 or so hours of conversation practice, 150+ hours of focused exercises , and another probably 150+ or so hours of listening while reading, maybe another 50 of passive…im no beginner, but i still really just dont feel that close to being able to get 95% of everything at real life speed with confidence. can people with more experience comment on this?

[nfera]

Hello @BabyRuth,

You’re right that the single metric of listening hours doesn’t take into account how exactly you were listening, whether it be passive listening to novel content, passive re-listening to what you’ve already studied, listening while reading, etc. Each of these differ in effectiveness, all to varying extents depending on the exact details of your implmentation.

For instance, @chytran considers passive re-listening to content he already studied is only worth a quarter of the effectiveness of his implementation of active listening.

Does Listening Improve Gradually or Through Sudden Breakthroughs?

I do both with a 1 hour active + 7 hours passive as a pair Imagine a water wheel in which it will spin strongly when you active listen and as you wait until the next time you active listen, the wheel will slow down gradually until it stops again, and you repeat the process. Ironically passive listening won’t start/barely dent the water wheel, only active listening The Passive Listening is there to keep the wheel spinning but it won’t be as rapid or fast as the speed from active listening. Ans…

Whether active listening is 4x or 2x or 10x as powerful depends on a lot of factors. The point being is that the differences in efficiency of listening techniques can vary a lot,

Another factor to keep in mind is what you are actually listening to. Watching a movie, for instance, averages about 4,500 to 5,500 words per hour compared to a podcast which is often 9,000 wph. This is a 2x difference in amount of listening content. For listening practice, you should preference linguistically dense content (i.e. lots of speaking).

How exactly you do your listening practice matters.

@BabyRuth

im no beginner, but i still really just dont feel that close to being able to get 95% of everything at real life speed with confidence.

The long-story-short version is you have to chase difficulty. You get good at what you practise. If you want to get good at multi-speaker, improvised, informal conversations in noisy environments, you have to practise listening to them. No amount of listening to clearly-spoken, single-speaker, pedagogical content will truly prepare you for them.

You want to have to concentrate hard to understand what they are saying. You want to strain your brain. You want to exert mental effort (i.e. increase cognitive load). This forces your brain to work hard and by doing this your brain will adapt. (Note: if you’re not used to this, start with short sessions, cause after you come out of your concentrated session, you may be quite mentally exhausted. It’s generally best to do these sessions at the time of day when you have the most mental energy, as it can be quite draining.)

Active listening of hard content is the answer.

P.S. Also lots of time is important. I’m 1,200 listening hours into Italian (the single number of all the types of listening comprehension I’ve done, as you mentioned) and I still struggle at times in poor sound quality environments and with accents I’m unfamiliar with.

[BabyRuth]

thanks, thats helpful. i dont know, i feel like if i dont listen to at least the short really hard stuff a few times im losing most of the point, if i dont get the chance to drill the kinds of things im not picking up in real time

[PeterBormann]

@nfera

you have to chase difficulty

That’s spot-on - and what’s more, you only get good at what you train for.

Besides, accents, slang and specialized lingo can always “kill” you - even as a native speaker. For example, in early 2024, I had to sit through a 1.5-hour video recording with native Swiss speakers discussing a business situation. It was just a “painful” experience for me because sometimes I had to re-listen to what they were saying 3-5 times. It took me more than 2 h to go through the recording and I only understood 80-90 percent!

It’s even worse when someone doesn’t have the necessary knowledge or terminology in certain areas…

In short, there is no surprise here. That’s just the nature of the language and communication beasts

[Obsttorte]

It always hurts me how people tend to throw numbers and metrics on things in such an unprecise manner. As the OP correctly points out “hours of listening” isn’t a term differentiated enough. So how should this be a metric? The best you can get out of this is the rough dimension of the task at hand, so be it 100s or 1000s or 10000s of hours, but that’s about it. I even find the term fluent somewhat vague and therefore questionable.

And as @PeterBormann correctly notes, all of the issues described by the OP, more precisely

@BabyRuth

I am effectively fluent in one on one conversations, even about increasingly more real life/nuanced topics, but it falls off a cliff in the real life anarchy of a group or often even a movie.

I would consider myself fluent in my mother tongue , but I come across those situation often enough. (Although I have to admit that this seems to be person-dependent. Some people have less of an issue with those things.)

[LeifGoodwin]

I’ve done something like 1,000 hours of listening in French, mostly native content, and I’m starting to understand films and more casual, rapid speech. Documentaries and TV news reports are usually easy. You need a lot of listening experience.

I agree with the suggestion that you must go beyond your comfort level, even if you only understand some of the words. I’ve no idea what proportion of listening should be ‘uncomfortable’, I doubt studies have been done, but you could try 25%. It’s a good idea to mix up content anyway.

I also found listening while reading very useful to train my brain to turn the noise into words. These days I find the transcripts less reliable than my own listening comprehension as YouTube captions (automatic speech recognition ?) are not very accurate with casual speech.

I sometimes struggle understanding American speech.

Oh and another recommendation. Get yourself some good headphones, they make a huge difference. Speakers on phones and tablets are not good. I am 61, and consequently I have some loss of hearing in the higher frequencies. So I adjusted the EQ on the headphones to boost high frequencies, and reduce low frequencies, basically the frequency graph is a sloping line. I suspect you are young, and won’t have that problem. But you would still benefit from good headphones. Be aware that many have very irregular frequency responses.

[nfera]

@BabyRuth

i feel like if i dont listen to at least the short really hard stuff a few times im losing most of the point

Re-listening is a powerful technique and you should use it as you see fit. As long as you are “pushing your comfort zone” (“chasing difficulty,” as I call it, cause as you get more advanced, you need to actively search for hard stuff), your practising over time will see results. If you want to understand group conversations, you have to practise them, even if you don’t understand everything.