More accurate numbers for listening required for fluency

[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.