I’ve noticed a lot of advice in language learning circles encouraging people to listen and read at the same time, but I’ve personally found this strategy less effective. Here’s why:
The brain can only truly focus on one thing at a time. When we try to split our attention between reading and listening, we often compromise the quality of both activities.
Instead of deeply engaging with the audio or fully comprehending the text, we end up in a state of partial focus that doesn’t optimise either skill.
This is why I structure my listening practice into two distinct methods:
Passive Listening: This is for times when my hands and eyes are busy, like when I’m cleaning or working out at the gym. Active Listening: This is a focused practice where I listen without distractions no subtitles, no text to lean on. For example, I might watch a YouTube video in my target language and fully immerse myself in understanding what’s being said. This allows me to hone my listening skills directly and pick up on nuances I’d likely miss if I were dividing my attention.
By separating these approaches, I’ve been able to make noticeable progress in my listening abilities.
I’d love to hear how others approach listening practice, what strategies have worked best for you?
I’m a proponent of doing reading while listening (I’d love to have time to do it more honestly!). It’s something I did a lot in the beginner stages, but kind of dropped it in the early intermediate stages, but have come back to it in the late intermediate stages and have found it to be very helpful.
I totally agree with the focus part…but for myself, the reading + listening I’ve found to really help me to see (literally) what I’m listening to. Not necessarily to comprehend everything…which maybe is the problem you’re finding? (maybe not). In any event, I found this very helpful in the beginning stages as one doesn’t know the sound patterns for the words and letters so that gets you oriented to what the words should sound like. I still find it valuable at these later stages in terms of really fine tuning what I’m hearing (and seeing).
Often when I do the reading and the listening I’m not really focusing and comprehension BUT as you learn more words then it becomes easier and easier to comprehend at the speed you are listening.
Reading while listening I DO find I am actually better able to focus. Just trying to listen lets my mind wander. I need something going on to tie up that part of the brain that just wants to wander. For listening alone, that’s where I find driving or doing chores allows me to challenge that activity on its own, without the text.
Another good thing about reading while listening is it keeps me moving through the text. I’m not pausing my reading to overanalyze literally everything. You can get a lot of reading done this way too. In this case, you’re maybe focusing a little more on the reading and trying to comprehend as quick as you can which I think is a helpful exercise too.
edit:
I meant to add…I also believe I’ve seen studies where reading while listening actually does help you to comprehend and retain information better. (assuming you do comprehend what you are reading + listening to)
Listening only,
Reading only,
Reading while listening
all three of these can be effective (lead to a desired goal).
As far as I am concerned, a more interesting question might be:
Under what conditions is it more efficient to use which of these (or what mix of these)?
It might also depend on the type of person you are. If you generally tend to multitask than reading and listening simultanously might work good to avoid the mind-wandering @ericb100 described. A friend of mine always did several things at once. In school he learned while listening to music while watching a series (usually The Simpsons which he knew all episodes of by heart) while chatting with a friend. He was among the top 3 students of our year. When he has to focus on one thing only, he becomes nervous.
I for one prefer to focus on one thing only and usually don’t multitask, and I usually do not do reading and listening at the same time. For those alike reading while listening might indeed not be an efficient method except for linking written and spoken language or as a help in the early stages to easen the understanding. What about you @buxey1, do you tend to do several things at once or only one at a time?
There are lots of exercises that can help us learn a language.
Listening while reading helps train the brain to recognise the words in spoken language. In natural speech, words tend to merge together, and we take short cuts whereby some syllables are lost, or abbreviated. I find I tend to lose the big picture, as I am focusing on recognition of words.
Listening without reading forces us to focus on understanding what we hear, and to recall words and grammar in real time. We may miss details, but we are forced to reconstruct what we hear into meaningful fragments.
Reading without listening helps us focus on details of grammar and spelling and gives us more time to think. The negative is that we read it as we think it sounds, rather than how it actually sounds.
When you watch a YouTube video, aren’t you just splitting your attention between two activities? What’s the difference between splitting your attention between listening and watching a video vs. listening and watching text?
One reason I really like LingQ’s approach of color-coding new vocabulary (as against competitors like Readlang, which at best color-code vocabulary you’re currently learning) is because it allows me to see at a glance which parts of a text need my attention and which I can simply glance over while listening.
Watching YouTube videos, movies, and TV series with target language subtitles is just one form of reading while listening.
On LingQ, to read while listening you must do it within Page View (it’s not really possible within Sentence View as you need to turn the pages too fast). This means there is no video. You only have two modalities - text and audio.
And even on LingQ there are several different ways you can do it:
Read the whole text first, lingQing new words, and only do reading while listening on previously-studied lessons
Read while listening to novel content with auto-lingQ turned on
Read while listening to novel content, but you sometimes may need to pause the audio to lingQ some New Words which you can’t lingQ fast enough
Go through the New Words list first and lingQ them before reading while listening
You can also do extensive reading while listening, where you don’t do any word look-ups. On LingQ, you do this within Lyrics View with auto-scrolling sychronised text. Alternatively, you could do extensive reading while listening outside of LingQ, such as with the physical book in your hand while listening to the audiobook at the same time.
As you can see, the vast majority of these reading while listening methods only have two modalities and are not related to video whatsoever. They are, literally, reading while listening.
I used to like the colour-coding quite a lot as well, but then, after reading away from LingQ, I found that I could easily identify which words I knew well and which I didn’t, so I realised it wasn’t actually too important in the grand scheme of things.
It could also simply be that reading while listening – or vice versa, is a skill that you haven’t fully developed yet. It’s a technique that has served me very well over the years.
From my view, the reading+listening approach allows me to understand the correct pronounce of the words but sometimes, depending of the material that I’m reading, the things get hard to understand. So, I prefer read the content first, then reading+listening the same concept and finally add the audio file to my playlist on LINGQ and I will listen the same audio while I’m doing other tasks. Therefore, I think the reading with audio works, as long as you are prepared and willing to modifies some things in your learning daily routines. But the final goal to learn a language requires much more adopt the habits that you really want to do.
For me its changed a lot since I got better at the language as I find that I watch a lot of foreign YouTube now with foreign subtitles - when I was more of a beginner I would watch eg German with English subtitles then later German with German subtitles and now I try to watch the film first in German, then read, then take the text and translate it - then watch the germany again. This is pretty comprehensive in my opinion.
@BassmasterJJ In regards to chinese symbols: a large quantity of them (80% iirc) are semantical-phonetical composits. So they are formed by using already existing symbols, one of which has a relation to the sound of the word by using a symbols with at least a similar pronounciation. So there is still a link to the sound, even if not exclusively.
On the other hand, you rarely have a one to one relationship between letters and sounds. English pronounciation always feels like someone rolled a die to decide upon it, and it also depends on what English you are using. German has some irregularities, too. For example the letter V can be pronounced like an F or like an W. Some letters form a sound together, like CH or SCH, but you need to know that. And sometimes subsequent vovels form a diphtong, and sometimes not. There are two officially legitemite pronounciations for Thalia in German.
At some point you need to learn how the sounds connect to the symbols used (at least if you want to use both spoken and written language). The encoding system is probably not the decisive factor here.
Components make the most sense in retrospect, and even then only after you already know a large part of the language. The best they can do is help you guess less badly.
As a native English speaker, I promise you that I can do a significantly better job guessing at Spanish or Italian words (both pronunciation and meaning) than Chinese, and its not even close. This remains true after a year of Chinese and no real Italian or Spanish training.
I’m not sure why you’ve not found it effective. Perhaps it is a matter of preference, individual variation, how you’ve implemented, expectations, etc. My mind is more prone to wander with reading or listening alone. The combo really helps me lock in.
Sure, research does show we (humans) are bad at multitasking. Other research shows memory is enhanced with multi-sensory input. I don’t know to what degree we can extrapolate from these to RwL.
In my experience with Spanish (for which spelling is highly correlated to pronunciation), RWL is the activity that most reliably has shown itself to be effective. Working through a few chapters or episodes using RWL noticeably and immediately improves my comprehension of audio only from the same source, even if the speaker was incomprehensible to me before.
I don’t know. I’d be interested to know if you find it effective. I used LingQ to do some brushing up on my Japanese a couple years back, and RwL was really helpful, but I was only trying to remind myself of how certain characters/words were pronounced. I don’t know at all how it would be from the beginning.
I can’t speak for Italian, but as @hiptothehop correctly pointed out, Spanish pronounciation and spelling are highly correlated. I am not even sure if there are any exceptions at all. I don’t find it hard either to guess the correct pronounciation. Plus the languages are relatively closely related. It would be interesting to hear from speakers of non-european languages how they perceive this.
That beeing said you cannot solely rely on guessing the correct pronounciation in Spanish either. It might be that you have to spend less time on it compared to Mandarin for example, but as said, an asian person might has a completely different perception.
I’m not bought by the OP’s claim either, though. I don’t see any harm in reading and listening at the same time. And if one of your major goals is to speak the language, it is probably one of the more efficient approaches.
This feels like a bit of a disingenuous comparison, like you’re playing gotcha, or engaging in whuddaboutism. When I studied Mandarin in Taiwan for two years back in the 1980s my early classes used materials that included Bopomofo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ, Zhùyīn fúhào, 注音符號) phonetic symbols and/or one of the Romanizations like hanyu pinyin along with the traditional Chinese characters.
For someone already familiar with the basic characters and not needing those aids, listening along as you read them would help reinforce proper pronunciation – what with those pesky tones that Mandarin and some other languages are famous for.
My whole point being that the process espoused by LingQ is finding and using content that is appropriate to your level. If you’re comfortable reading that wall of 汉字 then what’s the issue with listening along to audio that matches it? If you’re not at that level, then try using something more appropriate instead.
