I have decided to set myself a goal of 300 hours of listening and to once I have achieved this goal to see if my current method of forever trying to improve listening comprehension has worked.
Currently I am listening to the audio within the Lingq library for 1.5 hours then I have recently started watching some of my favourite anime that I have already seen in English. I am now watching it in Spanish without subtitles! for 1.5 hours so a total of 3 hours a day - 21 hours a week x 84 hours a month so it should take me about 6 weeks to reach my 300 hours goal currently have nearly 170 hours of listening.
I plan on trying to contact someone once I have reached that goal to see how much I can understand.
I feel like once I reach this goal I will still need to double it for me to have what is considered “good comprehension”
Wonderful idea! Do keep us posted about the results. It’s very useful to know how useful such a system would be for someone with your current level of vocabulary.
In my opinion it’ll work very well. My own take on the “comprehensible input” theory is that you must “convince your own brain” that paying attention to the seemingly meaningless stream of foreign speech:
a) Makes sense (because you can understand parts and piece together the story)
b) Is useful/enjoyable
I would advise you to concentrate on following the story through a combination of:
Remembering it (because you already watched it in English)
Clues from the images
Picking up parts of the dialogue, first just isolated words, later sentences, then “exchanges”: small bits of conversation such as question-reply; exclamation-reaction, etc.
You’ll be understanding more and more sooner than you think.
Coincidentally, I’m doing something similar myself. I’ll be visiting Germany soon so I want to brush up on my German and try to overcome the interference from Russian that I’ve been suffering in the past times. At the same time, I want to keep on learning Russian. So, my main routine now is to try and listen to interesting material in both languages as much as I can. A lot of that material is anime, because I like it and it’s a very good material for listening : it uses a lot of useful vocabulary (about actions, escaping, avoiding, running, jumping, …; emotions; weapons; familiar expressions such as cool, great, it sucks, …). It’s pronounced fast enough to count as real, native-level speech but also clearly enough so as not to be overly complicated, …
My word count and experience with the languages is a bit higher than yours at this stage, so I do watch shows that I haven’t seen before. I sometimes watch them in German, sometimes in Russian (not the same ones). I feel that being exposed to both languages “back to back” helps me progress in both and keep them separated in my mind at the same time.
i like that idea a lot! i’m in ecuador again. i am understanding a lot more than last year, but i’m still foggy often. when i am shopping or at a restaurant it seems ok. but i get lost in social conversation, and especially when my girlfriend is chatting with her family, i am really lost.
Good luck! Sounds like a great plan. Where do you watch animes with Spanish audio? I could only find anime with Spanish subs but audio is in Japanese or other languages.
+jmgoldschmidt Understanding a group of people talking to one another is way more difficult than understanding a person who speaks directly to you for a lot of reasons (they don’t react to your expression when you get lost, they use expressions that the others are familiar with you, they use inside humor, …) So don’t worry too much about that particular issue.
Congratulations on your progress!!!
Thank you very much for the encouraging reply, I feel like the only way for me to find out if this is an effective way of me improving my comprehension is by doing it! I am surprised as sometimes as to how much I can understand but I still need way way more hours!
If you type into google “anime español doblado” you can find lists of dubbed anime I have a personal list myself and found all the anime I have watched before, IE Death note, One punch man, Dragon ball z
Thanks! I have also checked Netflix and found a ton of tv shows and anime in Spanish. I was really surprised but the majority of Netflix originals have Spanish audio track and subs.
Yeah, how is your challenge going? It looks like you’ve been pretty consistent, so good for you! I’m curious if you’ve noticed any improvement at certain number of hours. I noticed things started to click a lot more at about the 200-250 hour mark.
It is most definitely tough trying to meet 3 hours a day of listening to Spanish every waking moment in which I am not at work I have in my mind “I need to listen to Spanish” so for example when I am not at work or with friends I am trying to meet my daily goal of 3 hours of Spanish so when - Driving, walking to the shop, making lunch, making dinner - it is quite annoying because if I do want to watch something on TV for example I feel guilty because I should be listening to something in Spanish it has kind of taken over my life!
Thanks for the positive feedback! its going well but it is a daily grind with language learning. It is kind of hard to say as to how much my listening has improved ill give you an example.
I was watching this YouTube video of this very attractive French girl who lives in Columbia on YouTube about things that she liked about living in Columbia - I could understand more or less 85% of what she said and this was a 14-15 min video.
I was again watching another YouTube video yesterday of a guy from Mexico that was getting his car interior redone for his BMW I watched the whole 11-12 min Video and probably understood about 15% at most.
but that second video is a very specific topic that uses a lot of words that are of course not used in day to day use.
so I feel like I just need to keep going and keep learning new words and exposing myself to Spanish.
I was watching a TV series called first dates in English and managed to find it in Spanish so I will be watching that and giving that a try
