Transcription
After such long and tedious work, problems with listening comprehension disappear. Hello everyone. Welcome to my channel. In today's short video, I want to show what exactly I personally do to improve my skill of understanding foreign speech by ear. I had a poll about which skill is the most difficult, and with a small margin, but listening comprehension still won. This is logical, because you can always say something. But to understand what is being said to you, in my opinion, is truly the most difficult skill, and psychologically, among other things, the most difficult, because essentially nothing depends on us here. Recently, on my Telegram channel, by the way, subscribe, because I constantly post exercises there that can be used to develop listening comprehension skills. So, on my channel, I posted a video, it was from YouTube, and it compared how a Latin American woman speaks in lessons and how she speaks in real life. It was an example of "look at this horror, how much real-life speech differs from academic educational speech." And many agreed with this in the comments. And the reason they didn't understand her everyday speech was that, from their point of view, they were being taught the wrong Spanish, this academic, educational one, instead of being taught living Spanish. And this is their biggest misconception, because I studied academic Spanish, moreover, Spanish from Spain, not Latin America. But I understood everything she said. Well, there was one unclear part, but the funniest thing is that not all native speakers understood that part. So, I understood everything, why. Because the academic nature of Spanish has nothing to do with this episode. It's a matter of developing the skill of listening comprehension. She wasn't pronouncing any super complex or rare words. They were, more or less, all from ordinary Spanish. There was, I think, only one phrase that is used more often in Latin America than in Spain. Otherwise, there was nothing special. People just didn't understand what she was saying by ear when she spoke like a real person. That is, she swallows half the words, and shortens or merges some words. But this is all a matter of developing the skill of listening comprehension. It's not about the academic nature of the language. The language level in that excerpt was, well, A2 at most, no more. So you don't need to be at an A1 level to understand it. You just need to work on your listening comprehension skills. And today I will show you how I do it. Once again, I remind you that from my point of view, for a person who has just started learning a language, there are two main tasks. First, to learn all the tedious stuff from the beginning of the textbook. These verb conjugations, present tense, past tenses, the most basic how sentences are formed, adjectives attached to nouns, and so on. And listening comprehension. These two skills are A1, A2 level. If you do everything correctly, then you will understand that you don't have much else to do. You'll just need to practice the language. In general, there are two types of misunderstanding in listening comprehension. So, the first is when you don't know some expressions, words, some grammatical constructions. This usually occurs at higher levels. Well, here you just hear an unfamiliar word, ask again, or look it up in a dictionary. It's the same as what we do, for example, in our native language. The second problem, the most difficult one, is when the flow of foreign speech is just incomprehensible sounds to us, and we don't distinguish them. That is, we don't understand where a sentence ends, where the subject is, where the predicate is. Everything merges into some kind of incomprehensible hum. This problem is usually characteristic of all beginners, and it's what you need to work on, because your brain is not yet adapted to the sounds of another language. It's used to listening only to its native speech, and it specializes in it. And everything it hears that is incomprehensible, it simplifies and merges into some unified sounds sometimes. That is, we don't see the difference, we don't hear the difference between different sounds in foreign speech, simply because the brain has merged it all into one hum. What will you need here? Phonetics. Phonetics is very necessary at the initial stage. You need to not just skim through it and say "this is how they read," but really dedicate a lot of time to it and understand how they form these sounds. Because when you understand how they are formed, it will be easier for you to hear them in speech. Therefore, phonetics is your first step to train listening comprehension. Once upon a time, I had all the same problems as most people with listening comprehension, because listening comprehension for me was sheer torture, as it was limited to a recording being played a couple of times at most in class, from which I had to hear something. It seemed impossible. And, of course, then, like everyone else, I mistakenly thought that I lacked the language level to hear it, that when I reached a higher level, I would hear it all. This was, of course, a mistake, because you can and should practice listening comprehension skills in parallel, because the native speech of most speakers consists of vocabulary and grammar that are found at levels A1, A2, well, B1 at most. At B2, not much is encountered anymore. In Spanish, as you know, at C1, there is nothing new. That is, if you are already at A2, then theoretically you should understand most of what native speakers say. At least you should hear it all. Everything changed when many years ago, I came across Nikolai Zamyatkin's book. You cannot be taught a foreign language. You can find various reviews online, from positive to negative, but the negative reviews are mainly about people not liking the writing style, the author's peculiar humor. Plus, you need to keep in mind that it is a bit outdated in places. That is, what a person mentions there is no longer used. For example, in the section where he advises buying a large dictionary, as I doubt anyone buys dictionaries nowadays. But even with all this, it turned out to be a very useful book. That is, you just need to understand what to extract from it and see the essence. And the essence there is very cool. And this book, at the time, opened my eyes to the fact that, it turns out, to understand by ear, you need to train this skill separately. And twice in class or at home is certainly not enough. As you know, it's not enough for a dancer to practice a move once. They will practice it hundreds, if not thousands of times before going on stage. The same applies here. And essentially, from this book, I took the method by which I now develop my listening comprehension skills. At one time, I used it to improve my listening comprehension in English. It really helped. That is, at least, despite the fact that I haven't studied English since university, and that was more than 20 years ago, I understand it quite well by ear, at least at the level of watching YouTube videos, watching some educational videos. Difficult movies might be hard for me to understand immediately due to, for example, not knowing the vocabulary, but in general, it's no longer a problem for me. It's precisely thanks to the fact that I paid attention to English listening comprehension at one time. I kind of abandoned English itself, but I improved my listening comprehension, and this saves me a lot, even at work, when I have to participate in some meetings. That is, at least I understand what people are saying, which is already important. The essence of this book is that, firstly, miracles happen in languages, but rarely, and you shouldn't count on them. That is, learning any language is a long, strenuous job. And essentially, only you can teach yourself a foreign language. This does not mean that you cannot work with a teacher or that they are useless, but you understand, right, that the learning process happens here. If you don't do anything yourself, don't make an effort, then neither the best teacher in the world, nor the best textbook, nor ChatGPT, nor the best courses will help you. And he also has an important thought that sometimes it's better to study without a teacher than with a bad teacher. It's better to find a good textbook. His entire methodology is built on creating, as he calls it, a resonant-meditative matrix. That is, 25-30 dialogues or texts of 30-50 seconds. Then you start listening to these dialogues many, many times. The first dialogue might take more than a week. Then it will be easier and faster. You loop the audio, listen, listen, listen, then listen while following the text with your eyes, then read it aloud. The louder, the better, because speaking loudly is more difficult, but switching to quiet later will be easier than if you spoke quietly and then had to speak loudly. The audio, of course, should be read by native speakers. Preferably, he reads without extraneous sounds, but you know, educational books love to add extraneous noise. But for educational purposes, it is considered that, at least, Zamyatkin believes that the fewer extraneous noises, the better. And then we essentially train our brain to the sounds of a foreign language. Well, you know, like learning scales when you study music or dancers practice. Learning a language is a physical process, and it is closer to sports, dancing, knitting, perhaps, or driving, rather than, for example, studying mathematics or physics. He believes that you must start learning a language by listening, by repeated listening. I believe that it is not necessary to only listen, because, well, not everyone can endure it, so I listen in parallel, for example, with taking lessons. One does not interfere with the other, but you can try to follow his method exclusively. And you should spend the most time on listening comprehension at the initial stage if your goal is to speak. Here I completely agree with him. You should immediately understand that it won't be quick, that it will take a lot of time, and the discomfort you will experience in the first few days, as well as boredom, maybe even apathy, is normal. Well, because it's a long, tedious process. Accept it. Among other things, we need this not just to learn to listen, to hear, but also to pronounce, because the muscles of our face are not adapted to the sounds of a foreign language. Therefore, we practice clearly, including strengthening the necessary muscles. What I disagree with him on is that, for example, he suggests learning numbers not in order, but as they appear. I think this is a bit inefficient and stupid in terms of learning. That is, it's really easier for me to see the whole system of numbers. If you take Spanish, their system is quite simple, and it's better to understand this system, to understand how these numbers are formed. But training numbers is indeed better not in order. Here I completely agree. That is, you can find various random number generators and thus force yourself to reproduce numbers in random order. That's true. But first, for example, you, well, the first time you see them, it's really easier for me to see them as they are given in textbooks, rather than trying to pick something out, to pick something out. Well, because in the formation of numerals, there is usually a system. Then he believes that if you don't dedicate at least 3 hours a day to the language, then everything is useless. Again, I disagree, because, well, with such numbers, none of us will learn anything. Not many of us have 3 hours a day to study a language, for listening comprehension, when we are at the stage where we just listen, listen, listen or listen while following the text, you can indeed find it on the road somewhere, standing in line, but active pronunciation, repetition won't work for everyone. Therefore, I wouldn't cling to 2 hours here. Well, if you have an hour, that's great. I myself am currently studying, trying to, well, at least three times a week, for an hour and a half to two hours, but that's if I'm lucky. And sometimes 0 hours a week, and that happens too. And I also disagree that you should exclusively start only with listening comprehension and not take anything else. I don't find that interesting. I still study the first lessons, learn the first words, practice phonetics, and in parallel, I work on developing this listening comprehension skill. Well, and then I will show you what I do with my French and Spanish. So, I have two languages in progress: French and Spanish. And this is interesting from the perspective that French is at a fairly early stage for me. That is, I will show what I do when I am just starting to master a language, when it is still at a low level. And then I will show what I do when the language is already at a good level. Since French is at a rather low level for me, I, first of all, of course, continue to work with phonetics. In general, ideally, all this should be done with headphones so that extraneous noises do not interfere and also to concentrate as much as possible on what you are listening to. But since I am only demonstrating all this to you here, I will do it without headphones. For the first month of learning any language, phonetic exercises should be performed regularly. Why is this necessary? Because how easily you will understand fluent speech later depends on how well you understand how the sounds of another language are formed. Yes, you can listen endlessly, and it helps many, and many not so much. Therefore, phonetics is absolutely necessary, even if you will still speak with an accent in the future, but accents vary. Therefore, do not neglect the phonetic exercises that are in any normal self-study guide at the very beginning. Here I have a French self-study guide. And, honestly, there are quite a lot of lessons here where phonetics is studied in detail. And these exercises need to be performed regularly and returned to them constantly. Do not stop immediately. When I was studying Spanish, honestly, I continued to do phonetic exercises, well, for at least the first couple of years of studying Spanish. And even now I sometimes do them, I don't neglect them. >> Audio course for the French textbook lefons.ru. Sa za >> sa za >> sha zha >> sha zha >> ka >> ka >> ga >> ga >> sala >> parada >> parada >> artist >> artist >> madam >> madama >> mani >> mani >> pirat >> pirat >> Every new foreign language lesson should begin with practicing phonetics, even if you think you have already mastered everything, do not stop doing it for many months to come, only when the sounds of the new language become as natural to you as the sounds of your native language will you be on the path to understanding spoken language. I generally dislike the idea of studying like children. Nevertheless, before children started speaking their native language, they listened to it a lot and repeated individual syllables, individual sounds a lot. Essentially, they trained their speech apparatus: mouth, vocal cords, tongue. Therefore, phonetics is important. Unfortunately, people often do not pay enough attention to it, and then complain that it is difficult for them to perceive foreign speech by ear, even if they seem to have a high level in the language. All these phonetic exercises at the beginning of normal textbooks and self-study guides are not given for nothing. The people who put them here probably knew something. Therefore, do not ignore them and practice as often as possible. In principle, this is exactly what can be done every day. Those very notorious, at least 15 minutes a day can be dedicated to practicing phonetics. After practicing phonetics, I work directly on listening comprehension. As I said, what is needed for this? It's just a textbook. In one of the first lessons, I found a suitable dialogue for this. There are many simple sentences here, you can use them. Well, if it's really bad and really, really zero and you still can't hear anything. But when it gets a little better, what do I do? I look for any dialogue from the textbook that, well, more or less imitates normal speech. This is, of course, not normal speech yet, and it's not yet at the speed that native speakers speak, but I'm at the beginning of the journey, so it will do. For my convenience, to listen, for example, on a player or on a phone, with headphones, I slightly modified the dialogue by cutting off everything unnecessary from it, that is, I removed extraneous sounds, removed the introduction in Russian, leaving only the dialogue itself. And thus it can be looped. And so I listen for hours, listen, listen with headphones and get the maximum out of it that I can get at this stage for myself. And after a huge number of listenings, I move on to reading. That is, after listening to this dialogue a million times, I have its transcription, and then I start listening, but following the text of what I am listening to, to connect the words with their spelling. And after some time, I start repeating after the text. That is, I listen and repeat at the same time. This is often called shadow repetition, but as you can see, I do it a little differently, because my task is not to become a simultaneous interpreter. My task is to learn to hear and speak many, many times. The same dialogue in a loop. I listen and repeat. I listen, I repeat along with the dialogue. And in the last stage, I simply read it aloud. And here you can use Zamyatkin's advice. Indeed, the louder, the better. If you have the opportunity to shout, shout, because sounds are practiced when we speak loudly. Unfortunately, when we speak quietly, it is much easier to speak well than when we speak loudly. I also read very many times periodically, even when I move on, take the next dialogue, I still sometimes return to the old ones, checking how well they have stuck in my head. This tedious method has, nevertheless, one very positive effect. These dialogues, listened to and read millions of times, settle in your head and are memorized. And along with this, words, constructions, phrases are memorized. And they settle there almost forever. Essentially, this is also preparation for speech. That is, you gain vocabulary, and not just individual words, but specifically concrete phrases. And in normal textbooks, these phrases are still more or less tied to life and use the first phrases that are most often used in speech. Therefore, you will not only learn to hear and practice sounds, but also gain vocabulary. Therefore, I recommend it to be tedious, long, but effective. Since French is still at a beginner level for me, I will have to do all this many, many times. Practice phonetics and practice these simple tedious dialogues. But there is no secret here. It works. It has been tested by me in both Spanish and English. Therefore, you can, of course, look for fun all the time in learning a foreign language, or you can look for effectiveness. It is effective. Well, and you have to read all this for a long, tedious time. I apologize in advance for the pronunciation, but you won't learn without making mistakes. Again, at the beginning, you don't need to be afraid to pronounce sounds exaggeratedly, because until your speech apparatus is trained, you won't be able to pronounce fluently and correctly anyway. Your task is to train your mouth so that it becomes easier to pronounce over time. Therefore, stretch your mouth, mock yourselves as much as you can. And many, many times, practice this, well, tediousness. Yes, native speakers don't speak so exaggeratedly, they speak fluently, they swallow more sounds. But this is training. We won't speak like that later, because it's more difficult anyway and requires more effort. But we need to make these efforts now to train the muscles of our face. Therefore, endure and train. Well, and listen, yes. I remind you that before proceeding to pronounce all this, I listened to this dialogue, well, in one sitting, I don't know, 10-20 times, no less. And I do this over several days. You don't have to repeat Zamyatkin and listen for 3 hours, but if you can for 3 hours, then that's great in any case. That is, you can really just loop it on your phone, player, whatever you have, and just listen, listen to the same thing many times. It might be nauseating, but I personally like to listen to the sound of foreign speech when I learn a language, so I am quite calm about it. Although, of course, drowsiness arises, as it should. But I understand that this is the only way to understand foreign speech by ear. And if I recall Spanish, it took me, well, probably a year, I definitely spent on similar training before I started to perceive it calmly by ear. Therefore, what I can do easily now is not innate, it's not because I, oh, it's easy for me to judge, not at all, it's just the result of long training. In general, such tediousness will help you start listening and hearing foreign speech. As you can see, the reason why I understand Spaniards and Spanish speakers, and English speakers, normally by ear, is this tedious activity. At the beginning, I repeat the same audio materials hundreds of times in a loop, starting with the simplest, then making them more complex. Then I repeat them while following the text with my eyes. In the third stage, I speak along with the audio, repeating after them. But in the fourth stage, I simply read it aloud. And the louder, the better. After such long and tedious work, problems with listening comprehension disappear. I recommend it to everyone. If you have so far thought that your problem with language, with listening comprehension, is that you don't have any talent, then most likely you just haven't studied enough. If you can hear your native language, then you have the talent. It's just that the whole question is that, perhaps, you need to pay more attention to listening comprehension and engage in this tediousness, which, nevertheless, helps excellently, tested not only by me but also by many people. If you search on YouTube for videos about how people learned listening comprehension, how they started understanding foreign speech, normal ones, I mean videos, they all did more or less the same thing, that is, they listened to the same thing many, many times. And all decent teachers advise this. Some advise listening to series, but honestly, it will take much more time. And still, at the initial stage, it is important to understand what you are hearing, which is why I take audio from textbooks, not from any other audio, like from podcasts. You need to connect the meaning of what you hear with the sounds. From this, understanding of what you hear in another language will be born. Well, and in the next stage, we will see what I do with Spanish, because, despite everything, I continue to train Spanish and listening comprehension in particular. I don't stop doing it. Although, of course, everything is much simpler there, less tediousness and more pleasure. But to get to this point, I had to spend many hours on such repetition of the same simplest things. What do I do with Spanish? Despite the high level, I don't abandon listening comprehension. First, I listen to audiobooks from time to time, especially when work allows. Sometimes, like now, there's a rather tedious data collection story. And in this situation, an audiobook is really useful, because on the one hand, it speeds up work, allows me to concentrate on what I'm listening to, and complete my work faster. And I also listen to podcasts on the same platform, I've collected various channels that interest me, and I just listen. The only point is that you need to listen, of course, more or less actively, that is, not in the background, you need to listen carefully. You can turn on a radio station and hope to catch something, or you can simply choose an interesting podcast, see how long it is, and concentrate on what you are listening to during that time. But this is just general listening, not special practice, but just to remind myself of how Spanish sounds, and not to suddenly start getting lost in the sounds of the Spanish language. Also, what I do for my Telegram channel and for Boosty, I also consider it a form of listening comprehension practice, because I have to create subtitles for Spanish series. They are not always there, as a rule, they are not. Well, sometimes subtitles exist, but, for example, Russian ones are not suitable for us. We need original scripts. I try to find them, of course, but first, they are not always available. Second, in reality, even the latest version of the script never 100% matches what we see on screen in the end, because some things are changed during filming. Well, and I also have a special program that recognizes text and creates subtitles automatically, but it hears well what everyone else hears well. And what it doesn't hear well is actually the main difficulty. Therefore, I have to strain my ears quite a bit often, especially in places where everyone is talking loudly and at the same time or someone has some peculiarities in their speech and diction. So this is also, in my case, practicing phonetics in Spanish and practicing listening comprehension. But in general, I continue to do the same thing in Spanish as I do in French. I just use more complex texts, longer ones. For example, in one of the phonetics practice textbooks for level B2, you can find long, interesting texts, as well as, for example, Spanish poetry. You can practice it this way, for example. Well, here I have a poem by Lorca. Well, the vocabulary here is also much more complex. Exactly the same way, loop it, having previously cut off everything unnecessary, and repeat it back and forth. Then follow along with the text. And then do the same, read it aloud. With this more complex vocabulary. And here it is useful, first of all, to continue practicing sounds. After all, I don't live in Spain, I'm not surrounded by the language to the extent that I'm constantly immersed in it. And moreover, I will say that it is, in general, not necessary. It's much better to have such short, but effective practice of speech and sounds, and also listening comprehension. Also, in my player, I have these looped texts from textbooks. Or you can take some podcasts if you like. Here I have various subscriptions. If, again, work or some other matters allow, you can turn it on in the background if it doesn't interfere with anything. In the opposite situation, it's best, of course, to concentrate on what you are listening to, if you are listening to it for educational purposes. If your task is simply to listen to some material that interests you and enjoy it, then do whatever you want. I listen to an audiobook while I work. And all this I do so that my listening comprehension skill in Spanish remains at the required level. English, by the way, I also periodically listen to some, for example, podcasts or watch conversational videos on YouTube. Can you train like this by watching series? At the initial stage, it will be a bit difficult, because, first, you won't understand everything, and it's very important to understand what they are saying to connect these sounds with their meaning. And second, well, you understand, to practice a short dialogue, you don't need much time. Even if you loop it and listen 10 times, it's still not much. And series, especially considering that there is not only speech, there are some episodes where everyone is silent, nothing. And there is, for example, only music. So it's not a very effective method, and it will take a lot of time, and I wouldn't recommend it. Although I did train English on sitcoms at one time, but sitcoms are quite conversational genres, there is also more speech than anything else. Music is pleasing at the initial stage when we understand something, but it won't help much, because they don't speak like that. You can often hear advice that it doesn't matter if you don't hear everything. In life, this really happens. We can even miss something in our native language, but this has nothing to do with the learning process. When you are learning and practicing listening comprehension, you need to hear everything. You need to wear out the recording and hear everything you can from it. There should be no blank spots. So, for this, you need the text, so that you can later fill in these blank spots if you still haven't heard something. Therefore, there should be no "oh, I didn't hear something, and that's okay." This is the learning process, you understand? It's like in dancing. If you need to point your toe in an exercise, then in the exercise you need to point it especially strongly, even stronger than later in the dance, because this exercise practices the skill. If you don't practice it during learning, then later during performance, everything will be bad. The same applies to listening comprehension skills. You need to hear everything. Second. Ideally, these should be recordings by native speakers. No, God forbid, and podcasts, guys. Well, if you are learning a language to communicate with neural networks in the future, then, of course, listen to neural networks. But if you plan to communicate with live people, you need to listen to live people. Even if at the initial stage it's just actors, it's still better than just and and because actors are not perfect, even very good actors. They have speech peculiarities. Listen to live people if you plan to communicate with live people. Leave generated garbage for something else. Therefore, all these: "Oh, ChatGPT generated this for me, made an audio recording." I listened: "Guys, this is not good enough." As educational material for practicing listening comprehension. For communication with a live person, as educational material, you need a live person. You can easily find such material at the initial stage in any decent textbook or self-study guide. At the advanced stage too. There, as a rule, the dialogues are more interesting, and actors speak faster. Well, in the end, you can cut up some podcasts. And as a promotional reminder, on my Telegram channel, if you want more, you can subscribe to Boosty or sponsor, we analyze all this. That is, I usually post an excerpt from a series, a series filmed by native speakers for native speakers and acted by native speakers. And I give time, for example, to try to figure it out by ear. These are short excerpts. And then we analyze, including the speech and why they used certain tenses. But this can also be used for practicing listening comprehension skills. Therefore, subscribe to my channel if you are learning Spanish. And also subscribe to Boosty sponsors. There I post additional content that I don't post on my Telegram channel. I hope my experience will help someone, and you will stop being afraid of listening comprehension, because once again, I was in your shoes and also thought that it was very difficult, almost impossible. And I thought that to hear, you need a very high level. But practice shows that you can reach C1, but, for example, not understand conversations of native speakers on the street if your listening comprehension skill is not developed. It has an indirect relationship to your language level, to how many words you know and what grammar you know, if you don't hear the sounds and don't extract its components from speech. Thank you all for your attention. Happy upcoming New Year. Although I still have, as you can see, autumn leaves. I don't have time to decorate anything. See you soon.