I had previously made a post about this but I had only 100 hours of listening I am about to reach 300 hours and thought the people that are very new learners would find this post interesting.
Has my listening improved? - yes absolutely I had an hour long conversation with a guy from Tenerife and during our conversation we talked on a range of topics such as, where we was from and general interests and hobbies this was our first conversation so it was around the generic kinds of questions in which you ask someone upon meeting them and I could understand 90% of what he was saying. even when he talked about his PHD and the subjects which involved this I could still understand. which honestly blew my mind.
YouTube videos - they honestly depend on what I am watching I was watching a YouTube video of a guy that stayed the night in a futurist capsule while in the Mexico airport and was able to understand again 80-90% of what he was saying. but again I had watched another video of a guy talking about the war regarding berlin and this was a bit more difficult to understand. because I may have the words but I do not have the listening comprehension of the words when spoken.
Films.
I honestly try to stay away from films as I am not a big film person even in English and find them difficult to understand but again I feel it all depends on what kind of film it is. I remember watching Kung fu panda and that was not so bad. but when trying to watch a series I think it was called La casa de Blanca which is a series about a bank robbery I could not understand anything thing even with subtitles.
I do not think I will be happy with my Spanish until I have at least 500 hours of listening if not more!
Summary.
I need to continue reading books to increase my known words and just keep exposing myself to Spanish content no matter where it is from. ( YouTube, anime , films )
and I will not go into how accents completely change the game.
Wow! Wonderful job. Congratulations. You really have improved. As for films, I advise you to read a thread about film understandin on the “Ask Steve” forum. Steve said that he can’t follow films in most of the languages he speaks, even if he has no problem with face-to-face conversation.
yeah I will give that another read, I do not feel like I will be happy with my Spanish until I have reached at least 25k words and 500 hours of listening!
I personally like flashcards, although I don’t have the patience to make physical ones. I prefer instead to use Memrise and access all the pre-made and user-made courses. It’s a good way to take up 5 or 10 minutes when I have some downtime.
Nice work. Listening practice has always been my achilles heel when it comes to language learning. Its difficult for me to find content that is both interesting and reasonably comprehensible at the same time in large doses.
Movies tend to have limited dialogue so the practice/time spent ratio is not that high either; tv series are better in that regard, but they also tend to be much less interesting of the ones I have seen so far (especially in Chinese).
Spanish is all about the colloquial speech. I understand your preference for books, but TV and movies will help you with that more than news or structured texts (Ignore my word count, I am somewhere between proficient and fluent). The challenge for me was different accents - I was taught by Mexicans, so Argentinian and Castilian Spanish tripped me up. Good luck!
Indeed, but finding an interesting tv series or movie with subtitles that has a lot of dialogue is difficult for some reason. I have been working a lot on it the last month or so tho watching 20-30 or so movies. Rohmer’s films are fantastic for example
It is much more challenging when it comes to Chinese, but I will find a way eventually I hope.
I was glad to have found that thread previously and was surprised when Steve said that he still had some issues with understanding movies, even in Japanese. Ordinarily I wouldn’t be, but I remember years ago, in one of his videos, he said that his Italian was good enough, he could have conversations, “enjoy a movie,” etc. I read a lot more into that ability that was actually true. In hindsight, it makes more sense because Steve has said before, and told me directly through the forum, that it really comes down to “how much uncertainty you are comfortable with.” We were talking about LingQ-less novel reading, but I think it applies here too.
It’s somewhat amazing how much listening comprehension varies by subject matter, context, and speaker. I can watch some Russian YouTube channels and enjoy the content without even paying attention to the fact that they’re speaking Russian. Others channels and other sources, contrariwise, remain relatively opaque.
Interesting post. Im learning italian and my word count is getting there, however iI really need to practice listening more. I’m only on 40 hours after 7 months, iI plan to reach 150 hours by july. I will really ramp it up in my spare time just listening on the fly.
How long did it take for you to reach 300 hours and how is your spanish looking now?