What is your goal/target with listening practice?

[nfera]

@Dominic_Olofsson-Tuisku

When you guys learn languages, what do you have as an end goal in your listening?

The goal posts keep moving. First it was to have a very basic understanding; then to be able to understand to a level where I could have a have a conversation with someone; then it was to be able to understand TV series and movies; and now it’s to be able to understand the wide range of Italian accents with ease in pretty much all situations (this also includes the various dialects, which Italians also understand, such as Romano). It other words, scope creep.

In terms of difficulty, I wrote this list a while back:

@nfera

Barely progressing with listening comprehension - #31 by nfera

The order of listening comprehension difficulty goes something like this:

1. Beginner educational content
2. Intermediate educational content
3. A tutor speaking to you (clearly and slowly with a limited vocabulary)
4. Audiobooks / advanced educational content
5. Having a chat with one person, who speaks clear standard Italian to you (they unconsciously slow down their speech for you because you said “huh?” so many times)
6. Single speaker speaking into a microphone, speaking clear standard Italian, improvised or semi-improvised (eg. single speaker YouTube channels, like Dario Bressanini, etc.) / standard Italian interview podcasts with only one host and the interviewee
7. TV series
8. Movies (harder than TV series, because you get used to characters’ voices and the way they speak throughout the series)
9. Chatting with one person who has a strong accent because their mother tongue is dialect (again, they will speak slower to you, because you’ve asked them to repeat themselves so many times)
10. Old movies (as sound was recorded different back in the day, so it’s less clear)
11. Chit-chat podcasts / unscripted podcasts with multiple speakers, who often speak over top of each other, like the Cachemire Podcast
12. Being in a group of Italians whose mother tongues are standard Italian (it’s harder because they aren’t speaking in microphones, so the sound volume changes, when people move their head away from you)
13. Being in a group of Italians whose mother tongues are dialect, but they are from different regions, so they speak accented standard Italian
14. Being in a group of Italians in a loud pub with music playing in the background
15. TV series in dialect (some dialects are easier to understand than others. I.e. Veneziano is very comprehensible, Romano is mostly comprehensible with a little bit of practice, while Napoletano is pretty much incomprehensible)
16. Movies in dialect (dialect dependent)
17. Being with a group of people who are speaking in dialect (dialect dependent)

It’s not in there, but also dubbed TV series and movies are easier than native ones.

@LeifGoodwin

Stuff efficiency, if you enjoy it, and it works, that’s all that counts.

Ideally, you want both enjoyment and efficiency. Low enjoyment is very demotivating, but so is low efficiency, because you can’t see progress.

@LeifGoodwin

Lýdia Machová learns a language every two years. I think there are ways to accelerate ones progress, through deliberate study. I haven’t figured them out yet !

If you put an hour of study in per day for two years, you come out with 730 hours. If your efficiency isn’t too low and you focus on the spoken language, you should be able to reach B2 in a related language to one you already know in this amount of time (such as a Romance or Germanic language for the hybrid language of English). This aligns not only with the experience of Lydia (who spends an hour per day) and other polyglots, but also language schools. If you do the maths for the classroom time and homework time for the language schools, you come out with a similar number to get to B2 (for Romance/Germanic languages at least). I also passed a free online Italian test for reading and listening comprehension with an estimated ~700 hours too. (Note: passing a language test is easier than fulfilling the criteria of the CEFR levels.)

[Analysis] Is LingQ Intermediate 1 equivalent to CEFR B1 comprehension? A case study in Italian

An update: I just passed a B2 comprehension test. 20/20 for listening and 17/20 for reading. I wasn’t super confident in all my answers, but I still passed. https://eclexam.eu/sample-test-italian/ My statistics: Known Words 13,224 LingQs 32,989 LingQs Learnt 7,496 Hours Listened 474 Words Read 1.527M Hours Speaking 22 Plus the small amount of Anki I did back in the day. I haven’t touched Anki since. Some of these listening and reading has been from TV shows with subtitles. When I used…

It’s probably best to think that some of these polyglots learn a language for two years before moving on. That’s it. Not that they reach a certain level before moving on. Though, Lydia probably does reach a B2 in two years, depending on the language in question. Secondly, B2 is actually not that high. You will have reached what could be considered basic conversational fluency, but you are still lacking in many areas. C1 is a much more solid level of fluency, though, I’m still thinking it’s lacking. My guess is I might be able to pass an Italian C1 comprehension exam either now or very soon and I still consider myself quite lacking.