I’ve been thinking about the difference between listening (or in my case, watching YT videos) for meaning vs for accuracy with respect to language learning.
By listening for meaning I mean that you are not worried about the exact wording of what was said, your main objective is to simply understand the input. I’d call this listening for the “gist”. When I say listening for accuracy, I mean listening to each individual word that is said and making sure you know what it means and why the phrase was worded that way, and reflecting on whether or not you yourself would say it that way and, if not, making a note (either in your head or actually taking notes in a document somewhere) of the way it was phrased with a view to learning this new way to phrase that idea.
Obviously, listening for the gist is much easier, and thus you can probably get through a much larger quantity of material if you take this approach. But listening for accuracy allows you to learn from fewer examples, because you basically “studying” the content rather than just enjoying it.
All of the above could apply to reading as well.
The reason it’s occurred to me to think about this distinction is that I’ve sort of plateaued in Portuguese, and I think it’s because I’m good enough at it to just watch stuff without paying close attention to exactly what’s being said in a way that allows me to enjoy the content much as I would in English, but I’m no longer learning much from it now. The effort has gone down, but the benefit has too I think.
What do you all think? Have you found that sufficient exposure to your target languages, even if you’re not putting a huge effort into analysing the input carefully, has eventually yielded results, or do those of you who have reached a decent level of fluency still find you need to actively force yourself to study the target language to get better (rather than just improving more or less subconsciously via exposure over time)?