Buondì.
Someone emailed me this week with a question:
“Do you also recommend watching TV without Italian subtitles?”
To which I replied:
“It depends on the person. If you’re a beginner, you won’t understand much, but if you’re OK with that then fine. Italian subtitles help you get the general idea, so are better than not watching TV at all. And the worst option is Italian audio with English subtitles, which is a waste of time.
Authentic materials ARE hard, so maybe plan a few months of listening with graded materials first, to build your skills. There are loads of listenings on the club website, besides the paid for material in our shop.”
A few elaborations on that emailed reply:
1.) Building listening skills requires that you practice actually listening, for many hours. Personally I aim for hundreds of hours, for each of the languages I’m learning. It takes years, so I begin immediately, not only after I’ve learnt all the grammar.
2.) Besides time, you clearly need lots of listening practice material. For many learners, resources for their particular lanaguage and level are either expensive, hard to get, or both. For example, there was little or nothing that was much use when I was a beginner in Swedish. In general, there’s not a mass of free material for any of the languages I’m learning, except perhaps Italian, which we do ourselves.
3.) And it’s for that reason that people will turn to ‘authentic’ materials, so TV, radio, podcasts, and so on. BECAUSE of the absence of free material that’s written to be suitable for my level (which is changing, remember) in Swedish/Turkish/French/Spanish, I make it a habit to listen to the radio in those languages, ideally daily. Other people prefer TV, and watching TV series in the language you’re learning is something I always recommend to my students.
4.) But as I pointed out in my email reply, authentic materials are ‘hard’, both initally and on an on-going basis. Understanding Swedish/Turkish etc. radio is never ‘easy’ for me, it just gets more ‘familiar’, and so ‘easier’. I know it’s doing me good because I can measure the improvement (for example with free test materials at different levels), and it costs nothing. So as long as I have time, I’ll continue.
5.) HOWEVER, and IDEALLY, I would not have began with authentic materials only and exclusively but worked up through practice materials designed for students at my level (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2), introducing the radio and TV series as appropriate, initially in small doses and occasionally, later in bigger chunks and regularly.
Conclusions?
If you once tried watching an Italian movie or TV series, or listening to the radio, and threw up your hands in disgust because you couldn’t understand anything (or worse – switched on the English subtitles), do try again: “initially in small doses and occasionally, later in bigger chunks and regularly”. It’ll do you good, I promise.
If you have access to FREE materials that are designed for learners, for example on the club website or our ‘easy’ news bulletins, then you would be foolish to neglect them. Start with the baby steps, saving the big-girl stuff for when you feel ready.
And for all those people who do no listening practice at all because they are busy memorising verb conjugations or learning vocabulary items they’ll probably never use, what can I say?
Remember how people used to learn languages, for example Latin and Ancient Greek, and perhaps living languages too when you were at school, but back in the days before low-cost airlines and the Internet?
Listening wasn’t a priority, right? For the ‘dead’ languages it would have been pointless. For the modern ones, there was little or no opportunity even if we’d wanted to.
So we studied/translated grammar and memorised lists of words. But language-learning today? Most people have the idea of using what they’re learning in conversation, and ideally understanding what’s said to them by the people they’re interacting with.
Their goals are obvious, but they have no idea how to achieve them, other than repeating what they may have tried (often without much joy or result) forty years before.
Most learners should be TRAINING THEMSELVES TO LISTEN AND SPEAK, as priority no.1.
And listening and speaking effectively are NOT functions of studying grammar and memorising lists of words, but separate skill areas.
If you want to speak and listen in the language you’re learning, you have to do those things, regularly.
Everything else is a distraction.
A lunedì.
Rich says
But … but isn’t Easy Italian News “audio with English subtitles” effectively?
Daniel says
No, it’s Italian audio with an ITALIAN transcript. There’s no English on the website, so if you’re seeing text in English, Rich, that’s your browser settings, translating automatically. If that’s the case, you’d be well advised to fix it, sharpish! Start by viewing the website in a different browser, or on an entirely different device. You should see only Italian!
Sue Floris says
I would just like to know if you are allowed to make notes when doing listening exercises and of course during an exam. I find it impossible to remember details in English, never mind Italian. Many thanks in advance.
Daniel says
In an exam your approach should be appropriate to the task, which will vary according to what’s being tested. It’s rare that you would need to take notes because the typical approach is to make the task available before you listen. Read the questions carefully, that way you’ll know what you need to listen for. In most exams you then get a second attempt, so can catch anything you’ve missed, or guess. If you’re taking an exam, get hold of the sample paper or papers and practice with them beforehand.
When practising listening with the more general aim of improving your listening skills, trying to hear everything and remember it is pointless – you wouldn’t do that in your native language, either. What you WOULD do in your native language would be to formulate an idea of why you were listening (is it just your mother rambling on, or the bank manager discussing your loan application?) and therefore how much attention you should give to what you’re hearing, and with what expected outcome is – how would you know that your listening was appropriate and successful?
If there’s no task or transcript, just listen a couple of times and move on. If there’s a task, read it beforehand and do your best at completing it while listening twice at most – 60-70% correct usually means you’re doing OK, and higher than that, that you should move on to harder materials.
And if there’s a transcript, but no task, then you can select how you will use it according to your level, objectives and preferences. The easiest is to read first, then listen. Next comes listening and reading at the same time. Finally, there’s listen first, then read. And you can do it different ways in sequence, according to what you want to achieve.
For a language I knew reasonably well I might listen first without the transcript, to push myself to hear as much as I could. Then listen again with the transcript. And before moving on I’d listen one more time without, expecting to understand much more than at first.
For a language I’m just starting out with, I’d listen and read together (it’s quicker that way), then maybe go back and read the transcript carefully, and then listen and read again.