Listening/Reading for gist vs accuracy

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Ciarán12
Listening/Reading for gist vs accuracy

Postby Ciarán12 » 2018-08-24, 19:34

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)?

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Re: Listening/Reading for gist vs accuracy

Postby linguoboy » 2018-08-24, 20:19

I find that nothing improves my fluency in a target language like reading.

Spoken language generally uses less complex syntactic structures and a more restricted vocabulary than written language. This isn't always true--some texts are written in an extremely colloquial style. Newspaper articles tend to use simple sentences and only introduce vocabulary as needed to talk about particular subjects. But you can seek out longer reads, both fiction and non-fiction, which will force you to stretch your comprehension more than listening to news reports or popular songs would.

So yeah, if you find yourself plateauing, my recommendation is, "Read a book."
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

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Re: Listening/Reading for gist vs accuracy

Postby Antea » 2018-08-24, 20:43

I am used to watch a lot of videos, as you know. I agree that at first I considered myself lucky enough when I could listen to the “gist” of it and just catch the general meaning, especially when listening to languages like Arabic. But I have noticed that, like in everything else, the more exposure you get, the more and easier it’s to get the meaning of the words. So I think that it’s a good method and it also helps.

Of course, I agree that nothing it’s better for vocabulary and structure, than reading a good book. But I also think there are some languages (not necessary to mention which ones :roll: ) in which is very difficult to do it and a considerable amount of time and effort will be needed, whereas listening is just so easy and rewarding.

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Re: Listening/Reading for gist vs accuracy

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-08-25, 3:16

I forget when, but at some point, I decided to start watching more (Mandarin) Chinese movies, so I watched Raise the Red Lantern (大红灯笼高高挂). I can't say anything concrete about how it may have improved my Mandarin. However, nowadays, what I do instead is to rewatch it extremely slowly and try to pick out every single vocabulary word I don't automatically recognize (and perhaps construction, if I can find one that's unrecognizable enough to jump out at me). I've also started doing the same with a much more obscure Taiwanese movie called Five Girls and a Rope (五个女子和一根绳子; both movies are apparently from 1991). I think it's too early to say how effective this approach is, though. I am similarly picking out vocabulary items from various books I have.

I have already tried doing something like this with Malayalam, but I couldn't really pace myself in that case because I was doing it while translating my grandfather's diary, and of course I wanted to get the translation over with! I'm also sort of trying to do something similar for my other languages.

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Re: Listening/Reading for gist vs accuracy

Postby Ciarán12 » 2018-08-25, 8:46

vijayjohn wrote:I forget when, but at some point, I decided to start watching more (Mandarin) Chinese movies, so I watched Raise the Red Lantern (大红灯笼高高挂). I can't say anything concrete about how it may have improved my Mandarin. However, nowadays, what I do instead is to rewatch it extremely slowly and try to pick out every single vocabulary word I don't automatically recognize (and perhaps construction, if I can find one that's unrecognizable enough to jump out at me). I've also started doing the same with a much more obscure Taiwanese movie called Five Girls and a Rope (五个女子和一根绳子; both movies are apparently from 1991). I think it's too early to say how effective this approach is, though. I am similarly picking out vocabulary items from various books I have.

I have already tried doing something like this with Malayalam, but I couldn't really pace myself in that case because I was doing it while translating my grandfather's diary, and of course I wanted to get the translation over with! I'm also sort of trying to do something similar for my other languages.



This is pretty much exactly what I had in mind when I posted originally. I've taken the approach before of taking a video and breaking it down, analysing it for vocab, grammar and phrasing and noted that all down to be added to my memrise course, I can say that as a study method I've found this very useful for gaining spoken fluency in the early days. I even went as far with some videos as trying to memorise the entire dialog word for word, to mimic the inflection and accent perfectly as well, which also definitly helps you deliver your L2 with speed and confidence in speech, and helps your listening comprehension too because previously un-parsable blocks of language become untangled and you get used to how the spoken language gets mashed together in real life. This issue for me really isn't whether or not that works, it's just that it's time-consuming and less fun than just watching/listening for pleasure.But because it's more time-consuming, I can't get through as much of it as I could if I didn't demand such intense analysis, which means exposure to less content. Also, as it's quite boring, I'm not likely to regularly give it as much time as I would if I was watching for pleasure only.
On top of all that, it's kind of a continuum; on the extreme end we have actual verbatum memorisation of the audio, then intensive analysis of the audio to pick out vocab and phrases, then just mainly watching for pleasure but trying to make a note of words you notice you don't know, then just saying "fuck it, I'll understand whatever I understand" and just watching entirely for pleasure, and if you subconsciously pick up something useful from it, great.

linguoboy wrote:So yeah, if you find yourself plateauing, my recommendation is, "Read a book."

I agree completely that reading is a good way to pick up new vocab and literary phrasing (which is good even in speech, as it gives you options for how to express yourself). I keep a list of all new vocab and otherwise unintuitive phrases I come across, I notice I rarely need to add to it based on what I hear in conversation, but when I start reading (depending on the book) the list explodes. The difficulty is keeping up with all the new vocab. I decided I needed to ease my way into harder literature, so I put down my copy of Uma Breve História do Brasil which was full of obscure historical terminology and literary turns of phrase and picked up Jogador No. 1 (Ready Player 1) which is much more my pace for now. Do you find the need to study the languages your fluent/near fluent in (say, German for example) in any specifically didactic manner or do you find simple reading/using it is enough to improve it?

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Re: Listening/Reading for gist vs accuracy

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-08-26, 3:40

Ciarán12 wrote:I even went as far with some videos as trying to memorise the entire dialog word for word, to mimic the inflection and accent perfectly as well

I used to do this as well when I was really young (about 8-9 years old) when I was trying to learn French, German, and Spanish using this. Nowadays, I find that I memorize parts of dialogues and such even without trying, which is not the same thing (it's not much unlike memorizing parts of dialogues and such in English in either your case or mine) but still useful for sure!
This issue for me really isn't whether or not that works, it's just that it's time-consuming and less fun than just watching/listening for pleasure.But because it's more time-consuming, I can't get through as much of it as I could if I didn't demand such intense analysis, which means exposure to less content. Also, as it's quite boring, I'm not likely to regularly give it as much time as I would if I was watching for pleasure only.

This is all totally normal, though. IME at least, you don't learn a language by continually focusing on a certain goal, anyway; you learn it by immersing yourself in it (to whatever extent this is possible) and, above all, enjoying it. But of course, to be clear, that isn't to say that your goals are useless or that making a conscious effort to pick out new vocabulary is bad. It's just a small part of the effort that goes into language-learning.


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