How To Improve Your Listening Comprehension In A Foreign Language
Test Yourself Using Blurrable Text
Listening comprehension is, in my opinion, the most difficult part of language learning to learn. And it’s also the hardest to teach. Like we have mnemonics and other memory techniques to teach the actual language itself.
But listening comprehension? It’s just ‘keep listening until it sticks’. Which would be fine. If people didn’t talk at like 1,000,000 words per minute. What they said: can you get me a glass of water? What you think they said: glassofwaterrightnowwhatareyoudoingomgsoslow. Más despacio por favor.
My Chinese Listening Comprehension Is Better Than My Spanish Comprehension
And this is especially problematic with spaced repetition apps like Anki and Litany (iOS, Android). They use flashcards to test you on phrases and words. Which is really good at teaching you the language but not really good at teaching you the listening comprehension abilities.
This was actually especially obvious with Mandarin Chinese. Specifically how much better my listening comprehension was with Mandarin Chinese compared to Spanish. Mandarin Chinese uses indecipherable hieroglyphics as words. This means that you will mostly be using the text to speech sounds to determine the meaning of the phrases.
This is actually something I’ve thought about. It’s why this setting exists:
The thinking goes that if you disable the autospeak setting you would be forced to learn the actual characters. The 汉字 (Hanzi). Of course this hasn’t been tested yet.
Anyways with Mandarin Chinese I noticed that because I could not understand the characters it forced me to improve my listening comprehension. And as a result my listening comprehension was much higher with Mandarin Chinese than it was with Spanish.
So I started a small trial. I turned my phone away from me for Spanish words. And it sort of worked. I mean it’s really hard to use a phone when you’re not actually looking at it. But if you ignored that it worked pretty well.
Enter Litany 1.7.6
Although turning my phone away from my face was a really hacky way to do it. So in Litany 1.7.6 (iOS, Android) I built the system right into the app.
The system is really simple. Now there’s an option in the settings that allows you to blur foreign text.
Then all you need to do is tap on the text to have it unblurred. Or you could just tap on the show button. This will also unblur the text.
And you know it works surprisingly well. I mean, not perfectly. Sometimes I try to press the text to speech button and accidentally tap on the unblur button instead.
Why It Works So Well
So in the book Fluent Forever (affiliate link) Gabriel Wyner says something interesting.
He says that you can actually train yourself to differentiate between easily confused words, what he calls minimum pairs. And you do this by playing the minimum pair and testing yourself on what you heard.
And this is a lot like how the blur functionality works and is why it works so well. Normal flash cards test you on the material. But adding the blur you basically get another review session on top of that so two review sessions per card.
And as a result the cards work 50% better (only 50% because Litany uses both foreign to native and native to foreign cards and native to foreign is not blurred.
Improve Your Active Listening
And you know what? It worked better than I could have possibly imagined. In the brief time I have been using it my listening comprehension has gone through the roof.
Before I would be like, “Oh, did I really learn that phrase or did I just read it?”
But now it’s pretty good. I don’t understand everything, but the things that I don’t understand are likely to be new words that I wouldn’t understand even if I saw them typed out.
I’d say my Spanish comprehension is as good as my Mandarin Chinese now.
Final Thoughts
I really love this feature. I mean, before Litany was hands down the best way to learn a foreign language. And now it’s 50% better. Absolutely amazing. Try it out on Google Play and the Apple App Store.
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