Listening: Language Learning Goal 3
My goal in listening is to make sure I get that exposure to the language.
Hi There, Steve Kaufmann here and today, I'm going to talk about listening.
This is going to be the third in my series of my hierarchy
of goals in language learning.
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So you may remember that I said that there areseven goals that I have
when it comes to language learning.
And I kind of have a hierarchy of goals.
My first goal is to acquire words.
The number of words I know is the best indicator of my level in the language.
My second goal was to read a lot and I measure, and I follow
this statistic we have at LingQ on how many words I have read.
Now, the third goal is listening.
It's, it's the third goal in the hierarchy, but in many ways it's
the most important because it's the major activity that I do when
it comes to language learning, simply because it's so easy to do.
So I can get up in the morning and listen, I can listen while doing the
dishes, I listen while I exercise.
I listen while in the car, the train or wherever I am.
I can always listen.
I can listen 15 minutes here, 20 minutes there before you know it, I
have an hour of language learning done.
The listening is how the brain gets used to the sounds of the language, gets
used to the structure of the language.
We, as, as human beings, we have been listening for a lot
longer than we have been reading.
And I think it's natural for the brain to learn a language through listening.
The reading helps.
And I said that in my earlier video, and I can reinforce that by saying,
in fact, if I look at my strategy and listening, so I sort of have two types of
listening: when I start in the language, I need a lot of repetitive listening.
That doesn't mean that I listen to say one mini story 30 times at one sitting,
but it means that I'll listen to that story a couple of times, then I move to
the second story even while I don't really understand the first story that well.
Again, remember the brain wants novelty, repetition and novelty as the great
Manfred Spitzer said, we need them both.
So I can repeat, I can listen to that first story two or three times, but
that is certain point even if I don't understand it, I want something new.
And so typically I'll go lesson one a few times, lesson two, lesson three,
lesson four, back to lesson one, and eventually I'll end up listening to that
first story, 20, maybe 10, 20 times.
In fact, it'll end up being more than that.
The mini stories are kind of the, sort of the gym I like to call it.
That's where I work on my core capability in the language.
So even much later in the language, when I have acquired a lot more words, I
still like to go back to listening to the mini stories, because I always discover
things that I hadn't noticed before.
In other words, things that I'm now open to because I've learned
other things in the language.
So I start to notice them.
Remember too, again, when it comes to, because in, in, in lang...
in listening, I don't really have a goal "I want to listen to so many hours".
I just want to listen.
It's easy to do.
I do it.
Whether that's a hundred hours, 200 hours, I don't pay the same amount of attention
to the total number of hours I've listened to as I do to the reading or the the
sort of, uh, you know, LingQing and adding to my known words total, because
the listening I'm just going to do it.
And, um, but it's important to realize that when you listen, it's
not important or you shouldn't think you need to understand everything,
you don't even have to focus every...
all the time when you're listening, it's just getting the language in you.
And so my goal in listening is to make sure I get that exposure to the language.
It's not to make sure I understand anything.
With enough listening the comprehension will come, particularly if I am, if I
have access, now, the mini stories are relatively simple and there's a lot of
repetition, but as you graduate from the mini stories to more difficult
content, you aren't listening as often.
You're encountering more words that you don't know.
Uh, and so there, I think it's very important to recognize it may be
frustrating that you don't understand and make sure you have access to transcripts
because to listen to something that you totally don't understand, I don't think
is very useful, but if you have access to the transcript and you can look up the
words on LingQ say, and you listen again, it may seem that every time you listen,
you still don't understand the same parts.
Uh, you have that experience all the time.
However, if you keep going, you will gradually understand more and more, and
I've had that experience many, many times.
With more difficult content my strategy typically is to listen, uh, and to, to
cover the material in sentence mode.
So that with timestamps, I can listen to the sentence and even they're
the same words, the same phrase.
I don't understand them.
I can't pick them up.
It goes too quickly.
It doesn't matter.
Gradually you will understand more and I've had that experience.
So the goal in listening is to make sure you listen enough that the brain will
eventually get used to it and make sure you have access to the transcript so that
you can actually read it and have a chance of understanding what you're listening to.
You may still not understand it, but you're gradually building
up to that better level of comprehension and listening.
Comprehension is such an important goal because it's the condition.
Once you have that listening comprehension, you can watch movies, you
can listen to podcasts, you can engage in meaningful conversation with people.
So, and all of those activities, the sort of higher level activities are going
to improve your ability to speak, which is where we eventually want to end up.
That listening is such a key part.
And in terms of a time, it's where I spend most of my time between my
different opportunities to listen during the day I easily get in an hour and
then I only need another half hour or so of reading and LingQing if I'm using
LingQ, uh, and I've got my hour and a half a day of language learning time in.
So listening is the easiest thing to do.
It's very important for forming new habits in the brain for
getting you to notice phrases that you will eventually want to use.
It's the best preparation for speaking.
So while I don't track the number of hours that I listen and, but I can leave
you, uh, again, from my profile, just in a couple of languages, you know, the
extent to which my, my listening activity has, you know, grown, progressively.
But, uh, it's, it's so key to do it.
And even if you stop for a while and when you go back to listening and all
of that listening activity that you have done that has created new language habits
in your brain, it'll still be there.
You might have forgotten a few words, but as you relearn these words, and
as you listen to again, do it again, you'll be back stronger than ever.
So make sure you invest enough time in your listening activities.
And in the next video, I will talk about how all of our input activity gradually
leads us to being able to speak well.
And what the goal, my goals are when it comes to speaking.
So thank you for listening.