Deepening Understanding of Language Comprehension#
Why start language learning with listening?
- Because pauses and intonation in listening determine the understanding of meaning groups, which is more beneficial for improving our reading ability. Many people complain that their English reading speed and comprehension are slow. Under the same conditions, listening is easier to accept than reading because we cannot go back and it is difficult to lose focus.
- Listening involves working memory. After listening, we need to recall the meaning of what we heard without memorizing it word for word. This is why it is easy to understand words in simple English courses but difficult to retain them, as working memory is not fully utilized, and the course may also be a bit boring.
- Compared to traditional vocabulary and grammar repetition teaching, it is difficult to improve language proficiency through reading and traditional teaching methods due to the following reasons:
- The era we live in is much more dominated by movies, TV shows, or podcasts than the publishing industry. It is also easy to switch language sources or sources through major streaming platforms, while books and newspapers have not become as popular as movies and TV shows. Otherwise, we could easily buy books in other languages by casually entering a bookstore.
- The drawback of traditional teaching is that it focuses too much on details, such as studying the distinction between synonyms and antonyms in terms of word meaning, and delving into tense and mood in terms of grammar. It is easy for people to become obsessed with a single direction. Language is multidimensional, and no one can achieve fluency through a single aspect alone. However, listening is holistic. It covers many topics, such as intonation and social background. We do not need to learn explicitly, but rather learn implicitly based on understanding. Imprint foreign languages in our subconscious.
The Best Source for Increasing Vocabulary#
Native speakers have the largest vocabulary in terms of listening vocabulary. Taking English as an example, native speakers have a listening vocabulary of up to 50,000 words, a reading vocabulary of up to 20,000 words, and a writing vocabulary of only 5,000 to 10,000 words.
The general rule for comparing the types and sizes of vocabulary is: (listening > reading > speaking > writing), with passive vocabulary being larger than active vocabulary.
Understanding and comprehending through listening is the first step in encountering language in life, followed by learning to read and write. Often, listening provides the largest source of vocabulary, followed by reading, then speaking, and finally writing.
Encountering new meanings or familiar words with different meanings while listening is easier to absorb than through reading and memorizing, provided that we understand the content we are listening to. Listening is more effective than reading and is prone to losing focus and rereading when encountering areas of non-comprehension.
Improving Reading Speed#
The reading speed specified in the syllabus for domestic English exams such as CET-4 and CET-6 is around 150 words per minute, far less than the average speed of native speakers, which is generally 300-400 words per minute, not to mention reaching the speed of 500 words per minute for people who enjoy reading.
In language learning, it is common to have a slower reading speed. You can try listening while reading: Microsoft Edge has an immersive reading feature, and there is also the Read Aloud tool for text-to-speech assistance. Listening while reading provides the fastest speed, usually above 300 words per minute.
Listening while reading can be understood as listening or reading while listening.
How to Improve Listening Skills#
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Condensed audio
Condensed audio refers to converting movies, TV shows, etc. into dense audio for listening, which can quickly improve language skills. One way to increase listening skills is to increase the density of listening materials.
Why is watching American dramas or anime sometimes not very effective? If you take a look at their subtitle files, one episode may contain 450 lines of dialogue, while another episode may only contain 250 lines. The difference in language density between these two episodes is significant, but we can use tools like subs2srs to extract all the spoken segments and merge them into one file to achieve better immersion. And we can use all available time to listen to the target language. -
Anki listening cards: When listening to listening cards, the brain should focus on understanding and comprehending rather than generating subtitles. During this process, you will discover which words are easy to mishear and can mark them for review.
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Learn pronunciation guidance, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet, for example, the GlossikaPhonics YouTube channel.