Deepening Understanding of Language Comprehension#
Why start language learning with listening?
- Because pauses, intonation, and tone 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 while keeping it in our memory, rather than recalling the exact words we heard. This is also why it is easy to understand words but difficult to retain them when it comes to simple English in courses, because working memory is not fully utilized and the course may 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, for 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 of movies and TV shows through major streaming platforms, while books and newspapers have not become as popular. 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 one 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 tone and social background. We do not need explicit deliberate learning, but rather implicit learning 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 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 or familiar words with different meanings during random listening is easier to absorb than reading and memorizing vocabulary, provided that the content being listened to is understood. Listening is more effective than reading and often leads to distraction 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 general speed of 300-400 words per minute for native speakers, not to mention the 500 words per minute speed of avid readers.
In language learning, it is common to have slower reading speed. You can try listening while reading: The Edge browser has an immersive reading feature, and there is also the Read Aloud tool for text-to-speech assistance in reading. Listening while reading provides the fastest speed, reaching over 300 words per minute.
Listening while reading can be understood as either 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. There is a big difference in language density between these two episodes, but we can use tools like subs2srs to extract all the speaking 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 highlight them.
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Learn pronunciation guidance, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet, for example, the GlossikaPhonics YouTube channel.