My Afrikaans is finally in the home stretch. I feel like the only remaining challenge is how to address my listening practice. I’ve been listening to a few news channels and audiobooks on my way to and from university, and I feel like I understand most of it.
The only real struggle I have when I speak is my intonation (not to say I speak well or have enough vocab yet, but it’s getting there). So that leaves just listening more. Some pronunciations are surprises, but I feel like my understanding isn’t too bad. I don’t want to say I’m getting to a point where it’s ‘too’ easy, but I really am at a loss for what to listen to. Finding stuff in that sweet spot where something feels just hard enough.
Are audiobooks, news broadcasts, YouTube videos or songs the goal? What should I listen to, truly tune my ears? What is supposed to be the hardest ones to hear?
When you guys learn languages, what do you have as an end goal in your listening?
a while back there was a user here on Lingq that said at around 800 hours in French and around 700 hours of listing in German they felt like they were really really comfortable at listening.
So my goal right now is to get around 700 or so hours just as a fun goal. I’m really only listening to stuff that I find interesting. (Podcasts on Spotify)
I’m not purposely trying to find easy or hard content.
I think the hardest things to understand for me are songs!!! Gosh songs for some reason are just completely incomprehensible to me even with the lyrics in front of me. Also movies and tv shows are so hard for me, but it could be because I never really watch shows or movies.
You said that the only real challenge for you right now is listening.
How did you go about improving speaking? For me, speaking is just such a different skill compared to listening and reading comprehension and I’m not sure how to tackle it. I want to do italki lessons, but I feel like I can do a lot before I even jump on italki.
The hardest to understand will be impromptu discussions between native speakers. Prepare material is spoken usually very cleanly and without any faults (no hemming and hawing, no stopping and restarting a sentence to go in a different direction, not much blending of words, not much swallowing of syllables, speech is slow-ish, etc.). Street interview type stuff if you can find it, or unedited discussions between speakers is what you want to be looking for imo. I feel like I neglected that too much in the beginning. You’ll get all of the above and often much quicker speaking so it’s much harder to follow.
Continue on with the other items too…you’ll probably be finding a deeper vocabulary in the things you are currently listening to, so that is helpful as well.
I think it’s pretty hard to find stuff in the sweet zone. If you are finding stuff that is interesting and you can understand some of it. That’s fine. You may not get it all, but some words you’ll understand from context and what you can’t understand…just let it flow over you. Use whisper and LingQ later to dive into the vocabulary you don’t understand.
News broadcasts and TV and radio debates are usually easy to understand, the speakers are educated, speak clearly and use standard language. The programmes are designed to appeal to the entire nation and avoid regionality and slang.
Podcasts are usually one step down, a bit more casual accent wise, a bit less organised, depending on the presenter of course.
Then come casual conversations, including the more relaxed podcasts, and native (not dubbed) films. The actors in films speak pre-prepared lines, so speech is often faster than real conversations. This at least is my experience with French.
The hardest will be regional accents, and accents associated with specific groups or classes, such as youf (sic) culture and black Americans.
I’m a native English speaker and I sometimes struggle with American English, so I guess we need to set reasonable goals.
As for French, I want a near native level of comprehension, whereby I can understand standard French, Quebec French, and regional French but maybe not ch-ti.
Fortunately French doesn’t really have the variation we see in English with Northern Irish and Scots English. I have on several occasions found myself with speakers of those dialects and not understood a word when I was asked a question. But you could argue that Scots is more akin to Langue d’Oc, i.e. a distinct language.
I think speaking is highly individual and tied to mindset. I am introverted but probably the most outgoing Swede in the entire country. I’m not afraid of embarrassing situations because I try to show everyone respect and kindness. In my eyes, that’s all that can be reasonably expected of me.
Coming from a country of many immigrants, where some refuse to learn Swedish and others will fight to learn it. There is really a discrepancy in how people will interact with you. I am very aware of how some foreigners here really try their best to get speaking practice in, and even if the conversations might sometimes make literally no sense to me. Well, at least they’re trying their best, and I respect that and feel grateful for what that means.
There’s certainly nothing unique about me. Not everyone is as patient but not everyone will feel offended if you don’t speak well. What I do is download language speaking apps and make friends in that language. In the beginning when I was weak in French I often stopped speaking it altogether and shifted into English. But I was mindful of that and switched back into French with other people or on other days. It’s very hard for people to have a bilingual relationship. Most of my experiences seem to be that people settle for only one language even if they could share three languages.
Not to be too long-winded but I think you just need to go out there (virtually or physically) speak as much as you can, your brain will think more in the language and your flaws will become more apparent. You will know what you need to work on. As you learn grammar and vocab your speaking improves because you want to say more interesting things. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy but a good one this time. It worked really well in French to the point where I sometimes although shyily speak French with my professor now. For Afrikaans I just repeated what I heard when listening and spoke it to myself late at night. The language feels more like a dialect sometimes, so it’s mostly intonation and grammar that I get stuck on. Germans are really proud of their language, I think if you went on Tandem you could find a few to speak it with you until you got fluent in it. Online is better, you could send voice notes about your day. I do that a lot to maintain all of my languages. (this reply also probably shows just how verbose I am)
Personally, I’m of the opinion that speaking and listening are two different skills, and whatever you practice is what you will get better at. If you’re understanding everything but can’t speak as well as you’d like, I think you need to practice speaking more than you need to practice listening (of course, by all means use listening and reading to confirm that what you’re saying is correct).
Since I’ve started speaking Portuguese daily, my speaking skills have gone way up. I still listen daily also because my listening comprehension isn’t where I want it to be (I want to understand EVERYTHING WITHOUT TRYING!! ).
I was realizing in the last couple of days that my first person speaking is almost fluent, but when I am in a dialog where I’m using a lot of other verb conjugations, I’m less comfortable and sometimes accidentally throw a first person conjugation where another should be. This makes a ton of sense when I consider that most of my speaking practice is talking to myself (out loud) about what I’m doing that day or at that moment. So, again, what I practice is what I’ve gotten better at.
To solve this, I decided yesterday that I’m going to deliberately start inventing conversations where I’m talking to someone else in second or third person, or a group of people, so that I can really drill the other conjugations. I plan to pick one pronoun per week to zoom in on in my daily “conversations”.
I agree with this. I usually understand the Portuguese news now and I listen to a lot of podcasts where I understand the narrator but then they interview native speakers who say all kinds of weird stuff and I get lost I’ll add that native films are also harder because 1) They’re speaking over background noise, often mumbling and using tons of slang (and written characters usually have character quirks written into their language) and 2) the subtitles are usually quite far from what the person actually said, so reading the subtitles and listening requires a level of multitasking that I don’t think I have, LOL.
In a recent Steve Kaufmann video (forgotten which) about the importance of reading he claimed that reading, since it involves subvocalizing, also strengthens listening comprehension.
That’s an interesting claim. I have no idea how true it may be or what Kaufmann’s claim was based upon, but intuitively it seems possible.
FWIW my listening comprehension has improved greatly in the last couple months, though I’ve mostly been focused on reading, not listening.
I’m no authority. I’ve been at French for 20 months, about four hours / day, and listening has come slowly. It’s only been in the last two months that I’ve stopped worrying that I would ever be able to hear French.
I do have some hearing loss (tinnitus) but I don’t think that’s the problem. French strikes me as somewhat more slippery than Spanish and Russian which I’ve also studied.
Basically, I think listening comes when it comes. It’s largely an unconscious process which you can only speed up with exposure, not conscious intention. I did a lot of listen/repeat/shadow on the materials I’ve read. I think pronouncing what you hear helps, especially since you’re interested in proper pronunciation.
If what I’m saying is true, listening to what you enjoy so you keep on listening is the ticket.
At some point you’ll want to challenge yourself with more challenging material – like movies in your target language. I’m not there yet.
I can vouch for that. I rarely find anything to listen to in Afrikaans, it’s 90% reading, but still now that I’ve picked it up it feels so natural through reading. Most words which I’ve never heard spoken before, I immediately pick up on. Which can only come from me reading.
Kinda weird, but I watched a similar video from Kaufmann mentioning how our vocal tracts move as we read, and I have been touching my adam’s apple on and off whilst reading, and yes, I do feel them move, just as if I were to mutter the language. I think this is why, even though I know what R is supposed to sound like in French, in my head I still produce it wrong. Which was so bizarre until Steve talked about it.
I know exactly what you mean, there is something about French. I hear something similar with certain speakers of American and English. And of course it varies across speakers of French.
I’m sure I have read that a lot of the time we are predicting what we will hear, thus we don’t understand the sentence per se. Rather, we fill in the gaps and match it to what we might expect to hear based on the fragments that we hear and past experience. That is why we can sometimes hear something quite different from the actual sentence. If this is true, it means that we need a lot of experience to develop our predictive skills.
That is why I spend a lot of time listening while reading a transcript. I have no idea if my method is optimal, but I see progress so it can’t be that bad.
Studies have shown that the best ice skaters practice moves that are beyond their ability, rather than staying in their comfort zone. Some other studies have shown that students perception of progress in language learning is often at odds with actual progress, Thus students who do harder tasks where they feel they are not progressing are actually making more progress than those who do safer exercises. These studies suggest that discomfort and frustration are perhaps good indicators, within reason of course. Perhaps the secret is to be at the boundary of ones competence, with a little discomfort.
My pattern to go full-bore into the hard stuff and lie to myself that I’m making great progress.
I was about two months into French when I decided to read the first Harry Potter book intensively. It took me six months. I looked up every word I didn’t know. I worked through every grammar construction I didn’t understand. I did listen/repeat/shadow on almost all of it.
It was quite a slog. I’m not sure if it was the most efficient use of my time. Maybe I would have better off taking the graded readers approach, though that would have bored me.
I’ve read 12 novels in French. It now takes me a little over two weeks to finish a Simenon “Inspector Maigret” book. (Recommended BTW.)
As I say, I don’t know if I’m doing this the right way, but this is the way I’ve done it and however slowly, it’s working.
Stuff efficiency, if you enjoy it, and it works, that’s all that counts.
That’s a good idea. I read and liked some Maigret over 30 years ago. I should get one and see if I enjoy it. I bought three novels in a French book shop in London almost a year ago, I’ve not read any of them, I think they were too literary and arty farty.
This is the Truth, and the Way, and the… sooner one stops rationalizing away the observable fact that the pathway to the good is through suffering, the better.
Hahhaa, when I’ve been feeling my worst at French, that’s when I’ve seen the best spurts in improvement. I have felt delusional about the R in Livre for months and just recently had it confirmed to me that French uses several different R’s as they’re represented in the IPA.
The amount of times I’ve been on the verge of barfing just trying to work my tongue and air flow down to my throat to get that ever elusive R. Eventually it will pay off.
You must certainly been past this book by now in difficulty level, but, la petite fille de monsieur Linh (very sweet book) took me months, and I honestly struggled so much with it in the beginning that I had to drop it, now I can read it in less than a week.
Same goes for le grand cahier which is what really propelled me in my French. I will say this. I have never struggled like that again in any language again. My Russian came faster to me after I had first learned the ropes of French.
À propos efficiency, I think that’s a learned trade in language learning, you either self doubt yourself too much or get too bogged down on where you should be. Practice gives experience, and perspective to show what the most efficient practice for you is.
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