5 ms·
This is an amazing way to improve your knowledge of a foreign language. When I started reading French novels, I could mostly understand maybe 60% and guess anot
by ekidd 11y ago
This is an amazing way to improve your knowledge of a foreign language. When I started reading French novels, I could mostly understand maybe 60% and guess another 30%. But after 10,000 pages, I was only running into unknown words every few pages, and my understanding of idioms was vastly better.
The same thing works for listening comprehension: Find a DVD box set of easy TV series, one where you can understand maybe 40% of the dialog, and just start watching. It's OK to use a good dub of a series you've already watched. Repeat this with, say, 5 series and you'll see an amazing boost in listening comprehension. TV series are usually better than films for this exercise, because they'll give you 50+ hours of mostly the same people speaking about a limited set of topics, which helps a lot in the beginning.
It seems like the brain is very good at upgrading partial comprehension to nearly complete comprehension. But the trick is getting to an enjoyable level of partial comprehension.
- eru 11y agoA Hungarian friend learned German with Star Trek The Next Generation this way.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoYeah, probably a third of my (arguably limited) German vocabulary comes from watching Star Trek at Sat.1.
- Natsu 11y agoI liked to watch subtitled shows for this reason. I seem to pick up words as I go. Nouns seem to be the easiest to figure out, followed by adjectives and verbs, but this might vary depending on just how those words get morphed by the grammar in some languages.
- ecdavis 11y agoThere is a technique called "Listening-Reading" that's fairly well known within the language-learning community. The idea is straight-forward: Get a novel-length text in your target language, a high-quality recording of that text and a literal translation of the text in your native language. Alternate between reading the original text and the translation while simultaneously listening to the recording. The method is supposedly fantastic, but it's incredibly difficult to gather suitable materials. While widely-translated books like Harry Potter seem ideal, the translations are not literal and occasionally the audiobooks do not match the texts exactly. Further info: http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Listening-Reading_Method http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Listening-Reading_Met... http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/!%20L-R%20the%20most%20important%20passages.htm#_Toc346179147 http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/!%20L-R%20th...