How much listening do you do?

February 9, 2010 by Josh | 12 comments

I’m curious as to how much listening others do, specifically, listening to material that you have no transcript for. For a while, I was listening to all sorts of stuff; I used Global Maverick’s guide to organizing foreign language listening material with iTunes, synced it with my iPod Touch, and had ear buds stuffed in my ears for hours on end. I’m not sure of how helpful it really is.

I’m certainly not arguing against listening to your target language, but I’m not overly confident that one learns a great deal when listening in this fashion. That is to say, sure, hearing something I already know reinforces it. But all of the words and structures I don’t know tend to just fly by me, lost. If it’s something new, whether a word or a grammatical structure, hearing it a dozen times isn’t going to teach me the meaning of it; on listen #12, it’s going to be a big question mark for me, just as it was on listen #1. I suppose one could argue that you could write down unknown things, but that’s going to involve a lot of rewinding, and considering that there’s practically infinite written material for the major languages, it makes more sense to just learn new words from reading.

Obviously, having a transcript of what you’re listening to alleviates this problem; listen to the item in question, then read the transcript and look up unknown words (or vice versa). Then proceed to listening to it until you’re bored of it.

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A few changes in my routine

December 21, 2009 by Josh | 6 comments

In getting back to my language learning, I’ve been changing a few things. Perhaps the most drastic step I’ve taken is to stop using my old German deck in Anki, which has around 5000 cards in it.

I stopped using it because it simply wasn’t much fun to review. I’m coming around to Khatzmuto’s idea of only entering sentences into your SRS program. I’ve said before that I don’t think you need context for many words, usually nouns, and I still believe this. But I also know that, efficient or not, going through two or three hundred repetitions of mostly single word cards (das Haus – house, die Blume – flower) can become dreadfully boring. So, I’ve started a new German deck in which I’m going to only enter sentences. Any sentences that were in the old deck are (slowly) being moved over.

I’m also going to follow Steve Kaufman’s advice to just let the words overflow. I mentioned before that I’m pretty bad about feeling compelled to “catch” every single unknown word I come across, and I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that it’s just not feasible. The words I really need to know, I’ll run into over and over. With that in mind, I’m giving myself “permission” to run across an unknown word, look it up to understand what I’m reading, and forget it.

Not dead.

October 20, 2009 by Josh | 3 comments

No, I’ve not died, nor have I fallen off the planet. I’m just in the midst of being defeated by far too many papers at the university. Regular Language Geeking shall resume at some point in the near future.