I could easily listen more hours if I lived alone. I would have almost one hour in the morning while preparing to go to work, eating breakfast, etc., and close to one hour in the evening. But I live with my parents in one-bedroom apartment, and when I wear my headphones while doing other things, they think something is wrong with me or I don’t want to speak with them. I couldn’t explain to them anything, they still think that I became too odd recently because of the internet, a technology that makes normal people mad.
So I listen mostly when I’m out. I don’t want to argue with them. By the way, I like to listen in the morning, while getting up. My emotions and impressions of audiobooks are usually stronger at that time, maybe because the brain is not yet ready to resist new language:-) Two or three weeks a year I have the opportunity to live alone, and this is amazing time for intensive learning:-)
Maybe when I master English, I’ll manage to find a job that will allow me to rent an apartment in Moscow and to live there by my own.
Seeing your goal to listening an average of 2 hours a day, I have realized that I have to listening a lot more. I wouldn´t say that I will do the 1000 hour, but I will certanly try to listening more intensively than I am doing now.
Signed up just in time for the new year’s resolution challenge. I don’t know whether I can do 1000 hours so I will shoot for 700 hours. Saludos, y suerte a todos.
Just to let you know that I have slowed down now, since I am back to work. No more 4 hour plus of listening while cross country skiing. I still managed 45 minutes of Russian and 45 minutes of Korean. I try to go through and read some of the Russian which consists of interviews from Echo Moskvi. I also was able to go through and read and LingQ a good deal of Ross Kings Continuing Korean dialogues before listening to them again. So I have not only listened a lot, I have created a lot of LingQs. This is an investment in the future when I see these highlighted on my iPad, where I can also review my LingQ cards.
And if I decide to listen to some of my favourite Portuguese podcasts, and even Il Gastronauta in Italian just to spice things up, I will count those too.
Just to let you know that this old race horse does not intend to let any young colt out-distance him in this challenge!!
In the days when LingQ had a personal tutor system I used to check my students’ listening hours before writing their monthly report. I found a large correlation between people with low listening times and people making less progress than they wanted to. I kept explaining in the reports that it’s difficult to progress without listening, listening and listening some more.
Hm, in the first year I added all the times of my external listening. But then I got lazy. I was thinking it isn’t really important. Important is that I do listening
Vera, I became lazy last year while keeping track my hours of listening. Now I’ve made an Excel sheet, and this allows me to just write down the time I spend listening, and the average of hours per day, total hours expected, … are calculated automatically.
I don’t know if it’ll help, but at least it seems a bit easier.
Another way, to keep track of listening if you have an apple device is through iTunes. It shows you how many times you have listened to an audio file and you can use this number to update your “Times Listened” for each lesson.
Hi, Vera. I absolutely agree with you that it’s just important to listen. The matter and manner of keeping track of my listening hours here on LingQ is just a fun way for me to investigate some of the time I spent in listening. I say “some of the times” because I listen to a lot of French at odd and unaccountable times: walking my dogs, grocery shopping, driving. I don’t even record these times because that would make my life so rigid and learning too pedantic.
I manually added my time once or twice, but I tossed the idea. The way I’m going to approach the 1000 Hour challenge is to let LingQ keep track of my listening hours when I’m using it, and when I do “external” listening, I will no longer note those times. I want this kind of flexibility because I feel that marrying the language is more important than deconstructing it terms of how I systematically account for every single input. I like knowing how much general “input” I’m getting, how much I’m progressing with vocabulary growth, but this knowing does not supersede the joy of daily learning and studying.
This may sound funny, but I’m in love with the French language so it’s becoming a way of life for me, not merely a rigid routine to follow to reach fluency. I’ve had to reassess my goals and expectations and approaches to learning French. I like some structure, yes, but not the kind that removes the joy and the play and the love. Overall, I’m digging the process, even loving the frustrations (those terribly annoying aspects that accompany any endeavor), and finally just loving those little surprises that come when I get more of the language in me.
So, it is important to listen, yes, not so important to keep track of listening hours, but in doing so it adds a little play and fun.
P.S. With subsequent languages, I hope to wed each one with the same kind of love and commitment.
Steve, I just listened and watched your video twice. I have experienced what you talked about, pertaining to the ineffectiveness of language pedagogy in the schools, and the harm, yes. I was nearly permanently damaged!
And you are so right on target that language learning arrives and grows from the starting place of love of the language; that to learn any language is to fall in love with it! The love of the language, not an imposed and enforced system: “…ce n’est pas une question de grammaire…”
I wonder if we can learn something about this notion of imposition and enforcement when it comes to the autodidactic approach. I mean, how much self-imposed and self-enforced structure helps; how much of it harms?
Well, I really enjoyed all that you said in your video! Thanks for making it and thanks for sharing it. I’m keeping it in my library of favorite videos.
As far as my English goes, listening nor reading is the problem, I really need to start speaking and writing more often. Also, the amount of material that I listen to in English is enourmous with all the TV shows, movies, interviews, youtube clips or orders I receive (I play a MMORPG), it will not be a challenge.
As far as tracking my listening goes, I assume I have listened to 40 minutes a day on my mp3 player and manually adjust my statistics accordingly. I think it works out about right.
If I were REALLY lazy, at the start of each year I could just award myself 365 x 40 minutes of listening. Job done!
