Transcript: How to Listen Your Way to Fluency in a Foreign Language

I listened to this podcast in its entirety and I believe the technique described in detail (Mass Listening by Vladimír Škultéty) is well worth sharing. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a transcript anywhere.

So I decided to spend time and energy to make one. Probably took half a day, perhaps four to six hours in total. At least with a transcript you can speed-read it in ten minutes, or take a bit longer, perhaps fifteen to twenty minutes. That's six times, four times, or three times faster than listening to the whole thing.

If you have an hour to spare, you can listen to the original interview here at http://www.languageisculture.com/episode2/

In case of any discrepancy between the transcript and the audio, the audio takes precedence because it's the primary source.

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-[START]-

David Mansaray (DM): I'm your host David Mansaray.
And you're listening to the Language is Culture podcast, designed to help you learn a language.
Connect with cultures around the world while enjoying yourself in the process [echoes]

Enjoy enjoy enjoy [echoes]

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[1:07] That's italki.com, it's I-T-A-L-K-I dot com. Let's get into today's show.

DM: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Language is Culture podcast. I'm your host David Mansaray and I'm very excited to introduce my guest today going by the name of Vladimír Škultéty. And Vladimír is what I would call a very enthusiastic language learner and I've invited him onto the show today because he has studied a number of different languages and he likes to do so travelling around the world. And at the moment Vladimír is in Taipei. Correct?

Vladimír Škultéty (V): Yeah.

DM: And we're going to speak a little bit today about increasing the rate at which you learn a language through massive listening. But before we jump into that, I just want to say Hello to Vlad, how are you doing today?

V: Hello David, it's very nice to be on your show again.

DM: Thank you for agreeing to come on to the show. And my first question, you know, going to be, a bit of a nice break thought, I want you to tell me a little bit about your journey as a language learner, and maybe tell us about the languages that you're, you know, tackling at the moment.

[2:22]
V: Right. I grew up in Slovakia, and in Slovakia we speak Slovak and Czech is, was, one of the official languages so we picked it up as kids and I grew up in a, not really in a bilingual family but my mom, she decided to put me in a Hungarian kindergarten, so I could learn Hungarian as well and so I was growing up I had these three languages around myself. And then later as a, when I was eight years old I went to the United States and learnt English over there, and when I was twelve I went to Austria so, to learn German.

So basically I grew up with, er I can't really say I grew up with five languages but by the time I was maybe twelve-thirteen I spoke these five languages pretty well. And then later on, I just ... I just really enjoyed communicating and talking to other people, and er really being a different person when you talk a different language.

[3:13]
And so, so, later on I started learning other languages as well, and it wasn't until I was about 24, 25 when I actually decided to venture out of that safety zone of Indo-European languages and started learning Chinese. Before that I was learning only er Indo-European languages not as a sport er I wasn't any type of a collector of languages or anything like that, I just really enjoyed learning languages. I learnt Italian, French er... and, and others.

And er, when I was 24, 25 I started learning Chinese and it proved to be the most difficult thing that I had to do in my entire life.

DM: Ng ng.

V: And er... Yeah so basically that's it as far as my language learning journey, which I'm still... I'm still with Chinese so far.

DM: Ok so, I know you're a really humble guy, and I want you to, you know, tell me a bit more about, you know, the languages you've already learnt. So you said "I've learnt this language, that language, wer... and some others." Hehe.

V: Hehehe.

DM: So tell us about the languages you have studied and to what level you speak them at, if that's okay.

[4:21]
V: Alright, no problem. Well, me, I will never ever, I mean, speak any language better than I speak my native Slovak language, so, so my native language is Slovak. Czech er... I understand it natively, er... and er probably with a lot of training I could speak it natively but, I'm not there now, I just speak it very fluently but I definitely I think you could tell that through a lot of conversation that I'm not a Czech person.

Hungarian um... I have a pretty good accent, I think a native accent because I learnt it in kindergarten but unfortunately I haven't been with the language for a very long time so ... er I would have to go to Hungary for, for quite some time maybe a month maybe, or more to get to the level I was at before.

So these three languages, the ones that I grew up with basically as a child, er... are at about this level. And then later on, er um, as I said English in America, German in Austria, and Italian I learnt during an exchange, ar, study ar, trip in Italy, er... when I was twenty-four I think or twenty-three. 

I learnt French, partly when I was a child, and later on by myself, but I don't think I speak it too well, er I understand but I do understand a lot because I was doing a lot of mass listening. Hehe, that's what we're going to talk about today. Er... And the other languages that I speak, er are Chinese, that I've been learning for six and a half years now, and I think that finally after six and a half years I finally feel that my entire language learning studies have proceeded to this point where I'm trying to be quite satisfied with myself even though I don't like to say it like that I like to put it like that because it's not a very polite thing to say, but I think after six and a half years, er

[6:07]
I can listen to the news, and I can understand, sometimes even word by word, the entire show. So if the show is one half, one hour long, two hours long, sometimes I really manage to understand it word by word. I can read pretty fast, I think, finally it's about, I can read about, I don't know, forty pages in an hour, depending on the size of the page and miss maybe one or two characters per page.

And er... just yesterday I read about a hundred and twenty pages in one go, and I was, it it it... These are things that I don't like to talk about because they don't sound too polite. But after six and a half years of terrible struggles, hehe, with Mandarin, it's such a wonderful thing to be able to say that, you know, that you're finally able to do such a thing that's seemed absolutely impossible in the beginning.

[6:48]
DM: That's fantastic! And that's really interesting to me because I know there are lots of people who have this perception that Mandarin is a language that is almost impossible to learn and it requires this intense amount of brainpower and... Maybe that is the case but, I don't know. What could you tell us a little bit about, you know, your journey learning this language?

V: Nnnggg... Sure. Er well I think it does require an insane amount of brainpower, to be honest, and I think that part of the challenge is with Mandarin particularly is to be able to stick with it. Even through all the like, er, if I should count every time I wanted to give up with Mandarin, um, I lost count. It was... Many times I was just sticking with the language just for the sake of going on. There wasn't any motivation left for me in it.

[7:36]
Any goals left was just sheer... just do... I don't even know that to call it momentum but I didn't want to lose because I just didn't want to give it up. Because it was so hard, there was no motivation for me, and then...

DM: But, but you were able to um, you know, succeed and that... and that's fantastic. And this sort of takes us to what what I want to talk about next, which is, you know, the "mass listening" that you have told me about. And so...

V: Alright.

DM: Before we can relate all of this we can come back to Mandarin in a moment and talk about how this has helped you learn this language. Em but first of all could you tell me what this mass listening is, and why it is very important to do lots of listening in a foreign language when you're learning?

V: Ahem. Sure. Well, mass listening is just a fascinating tag give it before we started this interview... Ar... It's just basically doing a lot of listening, er, to, er, educated, erm educated native speakers. Ar... So, so what I do personally is that I try to listen to as many news programs as I can.

[8:44]
I don't do it as often now, as I used to some time ago when I was learning Russian for instance. I remember there were days when I could listen to these newscasts for eight, nine, ten hours a day. And er, well so I don't do that anymore even though I think I should because it's very helpful.

So what it is, it's basically that you listen to and listen and listen and listen. Ahem. Excuse me. Ar... as much as you can. And ar, you need to get to a point where you are listening to the information and not the language itself. You're listening to that show or whatever it is for the information itself. You're not, you're not going to listen to the language anymore.

And that's where the learning, the fastest learning in my opinion, personally I think. The fastest learning takes place.

[9:27]
DM: Okay. So let's break this down a little bit. I'm a beginning language learner and I want to learn, let's use Mandarin as an example. I want to learn Mandarin, you know. What tips and advice are you going to give me. Because, number one, I don't speak Mandarin at the moment, I can't read it, but you're telling me that listening is very, very important. How do I bridge the gap between my native language and no, sorry, how do I connect, you know, my native language to the other language or find some sort of way to understand what is being said, you know? What's the first thing that I have to do?

V: Right. Well Mandarin is a, slightly specific case, because ar, for a number of reasons. Ar, and one of them being is that, it has absolutely nothing, well very little things that you can actually relate to from the languages you already know. Unless you speak a language from the Sino-Tibetan language family, or maybe Japanese, because Japanese has a lot of Mandarin loanwords.

[10:22]
But, let's say you start off with, now we can maybe pick an easier example. Let's say, Russian, or maybe, not for you an easy example, but let's say you are a native speaker of Italian and you want to learn Spanish. Right? And you basically need to learn a language from somewhere. And it sounds really basic and sort of very straightforward, right? You need to learn a language from somewhere but I am convinced that it's not going to be a textbook. It's not even going to be a regular book.

It's going to have to be someone speaking. And you need to listen to that person. Not one. Ideally many, many people talking to each other, interacting with each other, so that eventually you will understand how to do it yourself. Because its... If you go too much into detail, into grammar and all these things, and that's a good thing too, I'm not against it. But you're going from the bottom up.

What you want to do, is you, I think, is you should go from the top down. So look from the language from a distance. Listen to it and absorb. And of course it's very difficult if you start out, right?

[11:31]
So if you're a complete beginner and you start, if you're an Italian start learning Spanish, or in my case I'm a Slovak learning Russian, so what I did, I went online and looked for the best possible native educated speaker material. And that, for in my personal opinion, is news and political talk shows. So I downloaded that, and it might seem difficult, right, because it's... they talk fast, the vocabulary used is very advanced, but that's fine.

Because that's what you're aiming for. I mean, if I talked, speaking a foreign language, I would like to sound as an educated speaker of that language. I don't want to sound like a, you know, I don't want to insult anyone or anything else but I would just, my aim is to sound like an educated speaker of a foreign language.

So I would like to, I'm looking for that model, and what I personally think is the best is all these newscasts, all these political talk shows. So I would download those in the form of an MP3 or podcast. And what I did first thing was, that I just pushed, pressed the Play button, and stopped as soon as I came across a sound or word that I didn't understand. And I rewinded it, and I played it again.

[12:35]
And I tried to analyze, you know, in the beginning it's very very hard because it's just a bunch of sounds, a bunch of gibberish together. So in the beginning you don't even try to identify individual words. You're trying to actually separate chunks of sentences and figure out what is one part of the sentence, and maybe separate these words.

But as soon as you are able to do that, so maybe you can have some introductory, I don't know, one week where you just listen to the language and listen listen listen to get the flow of it. Er but once you sort of can separate these words, what I did was that I paused, like you see I pressed Play.

Now I was listening to this news program. And as soon as I came across a sound that I didn't understand, I pressed the Pause button and I tried to look up the word. I tried to guess its spelling in my dictionary that I had on my computer. And I just tried to guess it. I tried to guess what it was.

[13:23]
And as soon as I came across a translation that looked really similar to, you know, that could fit in to that context, and I felt like that was the word, I noted it into my separate Word document. I pressed Rewind again, pressed Play and then just proceeded until I encountered another word that I didn't know. And then I'd rewind again and this is basically what I did and I went all the way to the end of the recording.

DM: Okay, interesting. So what, what... Ahem, excuse me.

V: That's the beginning.

DM: Okay. So to my understanding, what you're saying is that you're going to get a piece of audio from, an MP3 file from somewhere online, and for a newscast of some sort, and you're going to find the transcript for this, I presume? And you're going to lis-

[14:08]
V: No, no, no transcript.

DM: No transcript. Okay. Tell me a bit more em.. about that in a moment. But what I'm really trying to get at is the fact that a newscast for most people learning a language is something that is considered to be extremely difficult. I know that when I started learning languages, I didn't think that I would be listening to the news for a very, very long time. But you're telling me that you try to do this from the beginning. And I think that this is something that a lot of people are going to find a bit intimidating, perhaps.

So all they're going to think of it as something very, very difficult or maybe unrealistic. Because I know that most learners start with, you know, maybe a textbook, with really, really slow audio, but you're sort of saying the opposite here. You're saying jump right into the language and try to understand as much as you can of this, you know, sort of high register language, which is what you're used to, isn't it? Is this correct?

[15:07]
V: Correct. But you know, it's not easy. It's not going to be easy and it's... the results will start to show after obviously some time. It's not, it's not going to happen right away. The thing is that if you're learning a language as close to your native language as, let's say, Spanish is to Italian or Russian is to Slovak, or even that's across into the European language family.

For instance, if you are, I don't know, if you are an Italian learning German, or if you are a Slovak learning Portuguese, right? It, it... You actually... These languages are very, very similar indeed. And you actually do understand a whole lot. It is just disguised by, you know, the pronunciation or the spelling, or sort of like there is this form in which it is used in a sentence. You know, the same expression that you know how to use.

And if someone told you "Hey, look, this is actually what it is," and you say "Oh yea, it's just disguised, you know." So there's a lot, a lot of things that you sort of unveil with this listening on your own as you sort of try to decode that, and you find these patterns very early on in the stage, in the learning stage actually.

[16:12]
So in my personal experience when I was listening to this Russian newscast or whatever, it took me about a month to be able to, to sort of stop using the dictionary. Er, and just go on and listen to the, er... There was a lot of words of course that I didn't understand. But I could understand from the context where they were neccessary. Yeah, so what I'm saying is that, if the language that you're learning, because you started off with Mandarin you said "How would you learn Mandarin?" using this mass listening method.

So let's talk about languages that are closer to your, to the languages you already speak. If they're closer, I think it's possible to start decoding this on your own. And then when you have that MP3 recording, listen to it over and over and over until that, those words that you sort of separately noted into your Word document wherever, and review them in the evening and so on, they will get more and more automatic.

[17:08}
And by the way I'm sorry to just cross-jump here but mass listening is a very good review method. Because when you're listening to a lot of people talking, then the words that you have learnt before, they just pop up again. So it's a sort of a review as well. So it's very efficient and time-saving as well because you are not only sort of listening to the language to learn the structures, and understand more how people should express their thoughts in it, and learning vocabulary out of context or not using a dictionary.

But also review on those stuff that you learn because it keeps popping up. It's real language, it's not a textbook, it's not a regular book, it's not you know anything artificial. It's just real life language.

DM: Okay so tell me what sort of intensive intensity we're talking about here, because we said listen to a newscast, but you know, try to, er, you know, understand as much of it as possible, you know, using your ears and without transcript and more. We'l get back to why there isn't a transcript involved in a moment. But, tell me, you know, are we talking about two-minute pieces of audio? Are we, you know, listening for hours a day, or are we listening every day, or is it something you do once in a while, you know? Give me more information about the intensity of this process.

[18:24]
V: Right. So, well, we call it mass listening, so it is really mass listening, so it is basically as much as you can, really, on that until you get tired or when you have time.

DM: Can you give me -
V: So this thing about -
DM: Can you give me some numbers, like a figure?
V: Yeah.
DM: Can you give me some numbers for, you know, just to give the listeners an idea of, you know, the process that you went through.

V: So, an extreme case would be like what I did with Russian, when I was listening to, I had a goal that I had to have at least six hours a day. Right? Er, sometimes I did eight, sometimes I did two, sometimes, sometimes I didn't do anything. But some, some, some people might think eight hours is a lot. Well eight hours is a lot, but let's say six hours, if you - if you look at your daily schedule there's a lot of time during the day when you're just walking somewhere or just waiting in line or you're just on public transportation not doing that much, you're cleaning your house, and that's when you can listen to these things.

And if you don't like news, and if you don't like political talk shows, then listen to, I don't know, science talk shows, or, but there are many, many, many things. And especially for these big languages like German, Italian, Russian, if you go to the national radios of these countries they'll have a series of channels and programs that you can choose from, that you can listen to. And it can be passive listening or active listening you know, you can just really concentrate on what they're saying or you can like just have it sort of in the background.

[19:50]
Ar, so because you asked me about the figure, yeah, so definitely more than, say, an hour a day. I would say at least an hour a day.

DM: Oh, so with this technique what sort of progress are you making. At what... at what rate are you progressing in the language in terms of your understanding? Is it something that happens really, really fast because of the intensity? Or does it still take a long time for the words and grammar to sort of sink into your brain? Give me, give me... Give me a bit more information about, erm, you know, how you grow with the language learning through this process.

V: So definitely it's only a part of the learning process because eventually we need to get more skills on your belt like speaking, writing and so on. So this is only one part of it. But what it, what it, actually what you're trying to achieve is to basically... You know that feeling when you can't get that song out of your head, like when you have that Britney song, when you don't want to listen to it you still have it in your head?

DM: [Laughs] Yea.

V: So this is sort of what you're trying to achieve with the whole language. You will have that language in your head. I think Luca or someone else mentioned the word resonate, right? As you would resonate with the language. So that's maybe something you can describe with that word. That language will be echoing in your mind. And that's fantastic because you have something to relate to.

[21:10]
Or, even better you can ar, mimic it, right? Not only the pronunciation and the intonation, but also whole sentence sections and segments and parts of speech and so on.

DM: And when you're making your way through, let's say, a difficult text, you know, what sorts of, and how long does it take you to the code or whatever thing it's saying. Let's assume the text is one story, the audio is two minutes long. Is it an intense process that is really, really difficult that you want to give up, you feel bored with? Tell me a bit more about the experience and how you feel when you're going through this.

V: It's a very, very demanding process actually. To be able to keep your attention focused on, on audio that is very unintelligible in the beginning. And you try to decode it and listen to it over and over again, very focused in trying to understand what they're saying. Let's say after you have found all the necessary words that are in that one sentence or in those two minutes, it's very, very, very difficult and very energy-consuming. And also time-consuming because it takes up time to decode it in the beginning.

[22:21]
And obviously it takes time to show, produce results. So in my personal experience, it took about three days on average for a word to, basically to become, to go from the passive vocabulary into the active vocabulary. On every three days. So that means that it, I'm sure that a lot of your listeners know what is active passive vocabulary, but just to give you an example, if you, if you, if you listen to some audio and suddenly a word pops up, and you go through it and maybe a second later or a fraction of a second later you realize "I know that word! But I don't know that it is, I just know I heard it" and then you maybe even come up with a translation. So that's the passive vocabulary.

And then maybe three days pass, and when that word comes along again, you would just drive through it because you basically own it. Right? So it's a process, processing takes time, and it takes time to show results but once it does start to show results, it's... It turns into a very fast and very effective way of increasing your vocabulary, your language structure, your pronunciation, a lot of, a lot of good things come from there.

[23:30]
DM: Okay. Fantastic. Now you also mentioned that you don't use transcripts when you're going through this process. Which was something that was a bit surprising to me. So can you tell me a bit more about the reasons why you're not using a transcript? Is this a strategy because it helps you listen more or is it just because you can't find transcripts? [Chuckles]

V: You know what, I think that in the beginning it was very much like what you said because I just couldn't find any transcript. But when I, when I, when I first did this, er, it was with Spanish. Ar, and the second time I did this was with Russian. But when I did it with Russian, ar I wasn't looking for transcripts, ar I just couldn't find any, and I had to work with my, with my ar computer dictionary and I hated it in the beginning because it was so much additional work that I had to do plus Russian has a Cyrillic alphabet as you know.

But a week passed, first of all I learnt how to use the Cyrillic alphabet. Second of all I learnt the Russian orthography because the dictionary that I had only worked if you, er, like typed in the exact spelling of that word. So it's, there's a huge learning curve. Erm... And plus if you have a transcript, a lot of the time when you just, even if you see the word written on a paper and then you kind of stop and make your efforts in remembering it, it still is too convenient, you know.

[25:00]
So you just file over any, you tend to forget it easier and yea, I see that word so I just move to the next one. But if you have to make that conscious effort every time to look up a word, search it, it's very demanding and I think your brain kind of knows that and it doesn't want to do it too often so it will remember it. You know, you'll remember the word better, maybe that's how it works. But for me I think that it's slightly more convenient, erm slightly more effective to not have a transcript but to try to look for these words yourself. Of course it's very time consuming but it's more efficient than that.

DM: Erm. Something that I've experienced erm, with listening to audio and having a transcript, is that sometimes when erm I hear a word and I have a transcript, I may just not pay much attention, and just go straight to the transcript and say "What was that?" But when there isn't a transcript available, I find that I pay more attention. So er perhaps not having a transcript can be something that can be a strategy one could use to really enhance the listening skills. What do you think?

[26:03]
V: Exactly. Exactly. When one basically, you are, you depend totally on yourself in decoding what it said, right? Especially in the beg-... It's hard in the beginning stages. Then maybe a transcript would help a little bit in the very very beginning, you know. Because it's too hard sometimes if you have and especially if languages are more difficult, not to mention Chinese now. Er, but, what happens is if you really have to make that extra effort in sort of decoding what it said, separate the words from them, from one another, and then try to find it in the dictionary by yourself.

And when you have that translation you still have to assess on your own whether it is actually the word that you got. Some words have more meanings than one, and so on and so er requires a lot of brainpower. Therefore it is very time-consuming but I think that it shows, you know, it shows results.

DM: Uh huh. Now you've mentioned that it takes a lot of time, and it requires lots of brainpower, so I'm sort of thinking about the beginner language learner and how practical this may be for someone who's starting out. Is the root goal in this approach the intensity? Or are there any other ways in which someone can maybe tweak this with less intensity and then get similar results? Or you know. What are your thoughts on this and maybe choose texts that are not as difficult as newscasts, you know? What are your thoughts on this for the beginner language learner?

[27:35]
V: Ideally, what I did when I was learning Japanese and this is one fantastic ideal that I have to begin with, it's not polite to say so but I had an exchange partner, friend, a Japanese guy who was learning Chinese when I was learning Japanese. So I was teaching him Chinese and he was teaching me Japanese.

And we had these two-hour exchange lessons when we were talking Chinese first about whatever, absolutely whatever we wanted to talk about. And then we were talking Japanese about whatever we wanted to talk about. After that exchange session, I would record in Chinese a summary of what we were talking about and he would record a summary in Japanese of what we were talking about. And then we would listen to the summary until our next lesson in our free time.

And that was a really, really neat trick because basically you are combining a lot of fantastic things in one thing, right? Because you are doing review, you are listening to a native pronunciation and intonation of him, and you're listening to something that you can understand because you were talking about and you can relate. And especially for instance you go out for a walk and you don't sit in one room, you will ar you will have these memory hooks of the places that you walked by, talking about the things that you were talking about.

[28:50]
So you will remember the words more effectively, easily and so on. So maybe the beginner learner could do this, you know, listen to the summaries of exchange, of the content of your exchange class. Even though it's sometimes very hard, you know. Not a lot of people have the chance to have an exchange partner and they just have to rely on whatever audio. In that case, I just guess yea, well try to find audio that is one level up higher than what your level is, your current level is. And try to decode and listen to that.

DM: Okay, it's really interesting and so now what I'm thinking about is, em, the importance of the type of audio, what is chosen. You like to listen to newscasts. Is this because it's absolutely "the best way", quote on quote, or is it just your preference or because it's the register you're looking for? And can one use different types of audio? Let's talk a little bit about the selection of audio here.

V: Right. When it comes to my personal preference I think it's what you mentioned. It's really sort of erm newscasts and political talk shows and science talk shows. They really sort of blend a lot of the good stuff that you can get from massive listening.

[30:03]
Erm, and plus I'm interested in these topics. And plus also the information I just want to know what's going on in the world. Ar and so for me personally, and I'm looking for that register as well as mentioned. I'm looking, I'm trying to sound as an educated speaker in the language. And I'm trying to look for people I can learn from, like that literally how to do it, right? Because in the end you just want to learn how to do it.

Not like you want to learn the grammar, you don't want to learn the words or syntax or whatever. You just want to talk like them. And so in my personal opinion the best way to learn is just to look at others who are doing it, you know. And learn from them without any neccessary, I mean any explanations like what when it comes to grammar and so on.

Of course if you're struggling with something, right, and you just can't get your head around it and you don't know what you're doing wrong, then it's fantastic if someone can just tell you the grammar rule for it. Or whatever. So you, we were talking about the suitability of audios. For me personally I really enjoy because of a number of reasons.

Listening to political talk shows and newscasts and science shows, you know, and so on. But I guess if someone loves to listen to erm, I don't know, a football erm, summaries of the week in Spanish, then why not? You know, erm, the vocabulary's going to be slightly different, but still it's a good thing to listen to.

[31:28]
You know, and you can pause as soon as you come across a word that you don't know. Pause it, look it up in the dictionary, try to decode it yourself, rewind and go again until you find another word. Now beginners, like I said, maybe find material that is one level higher than you are, and try to work on that and listen to it over and over and over again. Or do these summaries of the exchange classes that you have.

DM: Okay. This is really interesting and I'm curious. How long did you stick with one piece of audio and, you know, how often do you review them if you do?

V: Well this depends on, ah, I should say the availability of the material. Like there are some fantastic radio stations out there that will update these newscasts every hour with one-hour news blocks. So basically you can just listen to news stuff over and over like everytime listening to something it's new so we don't get bored.

But it's really hard to stay focused. That's another problem that I didn't mention. It's if you listen to something that is difficult to understand, and you know especially if it's a language like Chinese or Japanese that is so far from your native language. Or if you're a beginner in a language and it's really hard to stay focused. So there are some tricks in how you can stay focused.

[32:43]
Er... For instance you can echo what people are saying. So you basically just repeat whatever they're saying exactly on the spot within just a fraction of a second later as whoever says it says it. If you're slightly better, you can wait maybe half a second and then say it in the language that you're listening to. That's Level Number Two, which is harder than echoing it right at the spot, the person... And the most difficult thing to do is to simultaneously translate it into your native language whatever the person is saying.

And the reason why you're doing this is, that you just stay focused on whatever they're saying, right, because it really happens that you listen to something and after fifteen seconds your mind just drifts away, you don't know what they're talking about anymore. So these things are one of, some of the techniques that you can use.

As far as we can, cos you asked me how long do I stick with the same things, I'd prefer new material all the time, because it makes you sort of more aware of the fact that you need to concentrate. On what they're talking about. Right? Because if you listen to the same thing over and over again, then you sort of expect and know what's going to be said. So it could be good on one hand because it's a perfect review technqiue, ar but on the other hand er, not very productive because sometimes you really can get really bored.

[34:05]
So I, I prefer to listen to new material all the time.

DM: And are you making wordlists of the new words that you're coming across or perhaps phrases or collocations or any of these things, are you, are you re-
V: I'm -
DM: Are you really trying to extract the language from it or you're just relying on the audio imprints in it in your mind somehow?

V: Well I highly encourage everyone to do so. And so-
DM: To do what exactly? 
V: To- To do wordlists. To, to, to sort of write down the vocabulary that one has looked for, has found and understood into a separate Word document and review it every evening. I think that's very important. But I'm too lazy to do that, so I don't do it. But I did it with Russian and I know that my learning curve was much faster when I was doing it. But I'm just, I'm too lazy to do it.

DM: Huhuhu... You're too lazy after listening to audio for eight hours eh? Hahahaha...
V: Haha... Yeah.

DM: Let's talk a little bit more about the different approaches to listening. Because I found that really interesting and this is something that I have learnt and I have experimented with as well. There is passive listening, just listening... and just hoping for the best, and then there is active listening where you're doing something to try to enhance the process or increase how much you take from it. So let's talk about the benefits of, let's start with passive listening because I think that would, you know, be a bit quicker to discuss, and then we'll talk about active, and what are your thoughts about passive listening and its usefulness?

[35:42]
Right. Well ideally you should do active listening, right? But it's very, very demanding and it's very tiring. Well, so, passive listening is basically when you have that whatever you're listening to, just playing somewhere, right, and not necessarily, you're not necessarily listening to it, like you're not paying your all-out attention to whatever is being said. You sometimes just miss five minutes of what is being said or maybe two, three sentences.

But nonetheless it's there, you know. It's in the back somewhere playing. And I think if nothing, then you get that sound of the language subconsciously in your brain, you know. You get used to it, you sort of get the intonation patterns, some, at least you have this reference. So when you talk yourself, and use the language yourself, even if it's not a conscious sort of er I don't know how to call it, maybe you're not consciously aware of it, but you know that there is something wrong because what you hear is a bit different. Right?

So if nothing else, then you have this wonderful reference being built up like, yea you can have these people talk different from my talk, and what am I doing wrong, right? Ar... And passive listening, even if you're not paying constant attention to it, you switch to active at some point. And there are words that you can learn out of context. And those are words that you get for free basically. Right? Because you have a sentence of, say, 20 words, and there's only this one word that you don't know. But it's so obvious from that context that you just know what it means by simply listening to it, by hearing it for the first time.

[37:20]
And even in passive listening, even if you're not paying that much attention to it, through listening, sometimes you'll drift into it, drift back into your active phase, and er... These scarce instances, some instances amount to er pretty much, you know? They amount to pretty much if you listen to something passively for about an hour or two. Two hours you might get maybe ten words, just like that, out of context. And that's a lot, if you do that every day you can do the math, it gets pretty good.

DM: Ok, so let's-
V: And then-
DM: Let's talk now about active listening because I think this is something that a lot of listeners can take something away from. Like in everyone does passive listening even if they don't know what it is. But active listening I think is something that some people may not take into consideration as a possibility or an option. So tell me about the different ways in which we can listen actively and why. First of all, why we should listen actively, and then we'll talk about different ways in which we can do it.

V: Alright. Active listening is, I sort of talked about it here and there, but that's basically what this whole thing is about. You are concentrating as much as you can on what you're listening to for as long as you can. And it's going to be very tiring especially like I said if you're a beginner or if the language is very, very distant from the languages that you already speak.

And you just really make your best effort to stay with the speakers for as long as you can. And then eventually at one point where you will have enough vocabulary and enough, you know, patterns of the language in your mind, then eventually it'll get easier and easier and easier. And you will switch from that struggle with the language to basically a process where you're listening to whatever you're listening to for the sheer information, you know. Because you just want to know what they're talking about. Not because you want to learn the language.

[39:22]
And when this happens, that's when that learning curve really takes off. And so you can actively listen to, you can do active listening after that as well. In fact that's what I try to do. To listen to whatever you can when it's pleasant to listen to. You know, when you don't have to struggle with it anymore. But still you pay attention to what people are saying.

And you know, even not to mention that when you're doing your chores at home, you're cleaning up your room and you're listening to the summaries of your football match or whatever. It's a pleasant thing to do, right? It's not necessarily that you have to sit at your table and just really concentrate very hard. But nevertheless it's selective listening.

So I guess there's a difference between this sort of this point where this learning takes off, before that point and after that point. Before that point I guess that you really need to sit at that desk, with your dictionary and try to decode the language and work at it as hard as you can and rewind and rewind and rewind. And listen to the same stuff over and over again until the passive vocabulary becomes your active one. And then move on and move on and move on.

And then after that when that learning curve takes off, then just on and listen to the sort of whatever you're listening to, for the sheer joy of it, you know? Because you want to just know. For instance I'm listening to political talk shows from New York but about China. And it's really interesting to listen to all these analysts from China talking about a very wide variety of topics.

[41:01]
And without noticing I learnt a lot of expressions, I learnt a lot of words, intonation of suitable expressions at suitable times. That's very important too, that's the culture. Cultural ... of the whole language, right? And you learn much faster that way. When you're listening to something for the sheer joy of listening to that information and not to learn the language anyway. You learn much, much, much faster that way. It's much more pleasant, there's really a lot of positive in that.

DM: Okay. So we have many different skills that we have attack when we're learning a language. Speaking, listening, reading, writing, and where does this mass listening as you call it fit into this process? Are you paying a lot of attention to listening, and is it sort of tilted to only listening? Or is it part of, you know, a bigger scheme of approaches if I can say that?

V: Well, listening among other things, like listening to foreign language podcasts or MP3s among other things, is a way of language upkeep. Right? So if you're not in the country and you're interested in a variety of languages, and you would like to stay in touch with them and keep them at a certain level. Listening to let's say political talk shows or whatever, is a way of, well of course you're not going to be one hundred percent what you were when you were living in Russia, let's say. But you will stay at a level from which it will not be that hard to get back to your absolute best.

[42:40]
So listening is, mass listening, apart from a technique that can be a very effective way of learning a lot of the language and about the language, is also a way of upkeeping your existing languages that you already speak. And I'm sorry, what was the next question? You said that, where does it come in, what is it-

DM: You- Where does it fit into the whole scheme? So what I mean is, you know, reading, and speaking, et cetera, you spend a lot of time doing listening in this approach or are you donig other things as well?

V: Well, it is... I'm... It depends. Ideally you should be in a situation where you can listen and talk at the same time. And preferably a lot. That's when you learn the most. But listening in my personal case, I do a lot of it. Probably most when it comes to my language learning is eighty, ninety percent of what I do is, because of the sheer fact that I'm in Taiwan, and that there are not that many Farsi speakers and Italian speakers and German speakers here, I just want to stay in touch with the language or maybe learn a bit more and deepen and broaden my skills, then listening is probably the only and the most effective way to do it.

[43:57]
And one thing that I forgot to mention is that, mass listening or just ... we call it mass listening but just listening a lot to something, is a shortcut to speaking more fluently, you know. And it's really a shortcut to learning a language because, just giving you an example, when I was learning Russian I knew that I would only be able to be in Russia for one month. And I knew that that one month was just not be enough to learn everything that I would need to learn.

So, but I realized I had about three months to go to, before I left to Russia. But I realized that I can learn a lot of things before I go there, and I can. One of the things that I can learn is I can learn to understand ninety-eight percent of what will be told to me just by doing this listening and decoding this listening. So when I'm at, in Russia I can spend most of my time on learning how to  speak. To basically to sort of forge and melt that, all that information in my mind resonating from all the listening that I have been doing into basically speaking.

[44:58]
And it worked! It was amazing. I didn't really plan it, I guess, but it really worked. I was doing this mass listening for about three months before I went to Russia. And then I went to Russia and in that one month I managed to somehow melt all that information to pre-fluent, I guess, Russian at that time. So-

DM: Okay. Fantastic. And another thing that I want to talk about is, the transition from passive to active. And you said that you listen until something becomes active. However, and what struck me was that you said that it becomes active and perhaps I misunderstood, but I was told that you have to do something to make it active. So how do you - How does the vocabulary in your case go from passive to active? Are you doing other things to make it active or does it - What do you feel about the active vocabulary comes as a result of this massive input of audio?

V: You know, I- I er... I really don't know to be honest. Now I'm sure there have been many studies done about this and there are experts on the topic. But I really don't know. It just happens, you know. I guess it's like, when I know you're like hip-hop, right? So when you listen to a new Eminem song, how long does it take you to memorize all of the, or most of the lines in it?

[46:25]
You know, is it an active process? No, it just happens, right? It's, it's... So this is pretty much what happens when we, erm, in my personal case this is how I explain it is that you introduce a word into your passive vocabulary and you let the brain know that it's there. And then the brain sort of adopts it after in my case about two, three, four days maybe, right?

And it's a natural process, I didn't do anything like I don't consciously work on it, I don't know of any way of really speeding it up. There are some words that stick instantly, that's true. There are some words that really stick, I don't know how it happens. But maybe the context is so obvious and like the sound of the word is so distinctive that you just really remember it and sometimes you can even use it instantly without having to give it too much thought.

But generally speaking I think that in my personal case at least, it takes about three days' worth for words to get from that passive vocabulary into the active vocabulary, but without any conscious effort.

[47:32]
DM: Okay, this is really interesting. And the next thing that I want to talk about, you know, listening to the audio is your way of doing it with MP3 files. But what I'm wondering right now is if it's possible to do this way with other forms of media? Such as video, for example. What comes to mind is, lots of people find it difficult to understand movies when they're learning a foregin language.

And something that I've tried before is ripping the audio from a movie and chopping it into small one or two-minute sections, sometimes five minutes, and listening to that again and again. So is this, do you think that this would work for those situations as well? Or somebody wanting to learn through video, mass video watching perhaps, is or, what do you think about that?

[48:21]
V: Well, you know, I mean, I'm very well aware of the fact that not everyone likes to listen to news for eight hours a day. So if you can't find anything more suitable for you of course, the only problem with movies is, especially if you compare them to newscasts, is the amount of, the actual amount of words. There is three, four, five times more words and expressions in news than there is in movies. You know, in movies there are, sometimes, I don't know, some French movies might have twenty minutes without anyone saying a word.

DM: Hahahaha.

V: So, it depends on the movie, but there are some movies that there isn't that much that is said. You know, and apart from like this, movies even though they are, how should I put this, they do not represent real, real, real life speech. Like they do, in a way, but they're still slightly artificial, you know. And that doesn't happen in a newscast. Well, newscast maybe it does, but when you have a political talk show or science talk show or whatever talk show, football talk show, people talk, just as they would, or very closely as they would in their normal daily lives. So that is real language. And that's what you're trying to learn, ultimately.

[49:40]
DM: Okay. This is fantastic. And one more question is, how do you address different registers? Because you like to listen to newscasts, and that's a very special register. Most people in a country don't speak like the people do on the news. And so do you do anything else to try to understand or to pick up slang, colloquial ways of expressing and expression in a language? Or do you literally stick to newscasts?

V: Now, that's true. Actually I wanted to mention earlier that if you're learning a language, Arabic for instance, then if you're going to listen to the news, you're probably not going to get very far with speaking, because as far as- I don't speak any Arabic, but as far as I understand, Arabic on the news is a different language, really a completely different language from what is spoken in individual countries where Arabic is spoken.

So it comes to different registers. It is true that news language is different, but then again if you have, I think the slightest sense for language learning, that for languages you are able to tell apart which expressions are purely news expressions, and which you can use in your daily life, right? And as far as- So, so I don't think that would be such a great problem. Especially if you pass that phase where your learning curve takes off and you listen to whatever you listen to just really information, I think that's where you can really tell which expressions are for the news only and which you can incorporate in your daily life.

[51:12]
But as far as slang going, and- I think as rich as slang may be, and as rich as daily life language may be, it is still poor, poor if I can put it that way compared to news. So it's going to take you considerably less time now to learn, you know, the daily talk that you need, compared to understanding news or talking using expressions that, like in my case an educated speaker of a foreign language, of the native language that I'm, a native speaker of the foreign language that I'm learning is using. So, so- Now yeah, go ahead.

DM: No, no... look. Continue-

V: Yeah. So I was just saying that, like for instance in Italy, I notice that the small talk is really a language in itself. Like for instance if you go into a store and just say "Yeah, I want to have, I don't know, this and that," and then the clerk tells you whatever, this is really a separate language world in a language in itself. And... But luckily like I said it's only a couple of, let's say, even if there's a hundred or two hundred expressions, it's going to be less that whatever you're going to need to master or learn for being able to understand, hmm, let's talk about this news again so let's try to understand news again or to read a book or whatever.

So I don't think anybody would stress, I would not put the stress on learning these daily slang expressions and the small talk. Because if you're in a country, it would not take a long for you to learn. You're just picking it up by going to the store daily and talking to your friends.

[52:59]
DM: Okay. And my next question for you is, lots of people spend a lot of time reading when they're first learning a language and they pay attention to the written form. And then they have problems with pronunciation et cetera. Do you think that this approach to listening to a language, lots and lots and lots, is something that helps you in other areas of language learning? Perhaps reading and speaking? Do you find that for example through a lot of listening that you're able to read a bit more fluently? Erm if I can say that, well, force the pace? How does the listening help the other areas of language learning?

V: Right. Well you know, unbelievably and, erm, you're right. Unbelievably, you're right. No, unbelievably, it works. It really helps in other areas as well. I've mentioned that a lot of listening will help you speak more fluently just because you have that reference and you have that database of all these expressions flying around in your head and so on.

But you know, I've been with, I've been learning languages for quite some time and I never really, it never really struck me as much as it did with Mandarin. Because I'm sure that a lot of people studying Mandarin know that reading in Chinese is very, very tiring.

[54:10]
Especially if you're just- For the most of us, Mandarin, for most of the language learning process, reading is really tiring, time-consuming and difficult. And only recently did I trust myself to do this mass listening with Mandarin. Because before that I was really demotivated. I had to look up every single word even after like six years of studies. But recently in the beginning of December, at the end of November I started listening to these newscasts in Chinese.

And after about three weeks, not that long, I just picked up a book that I didn't finish before and I dislike reading in Mandarin just like I said because it's really tiring and time-consuming and not getting me anywhere. And you know what? After these three weeks of listening when I started reading that book, I was not tired at all, and I was going very swiftly through the sentences, you know? It's just as if the language has sort of been systemized in my head, you know.

And these patterns, these language patterns started to be more prominent. I guess, I think I can use that word. And so what happened was I'm listening and next what happened was when I was reading them now, when I started reading a sentence I sort of subconsciously had a, like the varieties in which a sentence could continue and there were not that many of them. Let's say maybe ten.

[55:37]
And so the brain was guessing as I was reading on, how the sentence would finish. And so that's why the process was faster and easier. And like I said I was able to and this is unbelievable to me that I said that. But I was able to read a hundred and twenty pages of Mandarin in, what, two and a half hours?

And it was un- This is something that I couldn't even imagine. I don't know. Five months ago, three months ago. So I'm pretty sure it's because of the fact that I was, I started doing a lot of listening recently, you know. So yeah. To get back to your questions I definitely think that it can help, a lot of listening can help your speaking. And a lot of listening apparently can help your reading as well. Move it a thought.

[56:22]
DM: Herherher. Fantastic. Oh my gosh. I can't believe that we spoke for about an hour on just listening about a language. Listening to a language. And I think you've given some excellent tips here, and I think it's something that all of our listeners should give it a try. Mass listening or lots of listening to audio in a foreign language to, you know, and try to hack your way to fluency if we can say that. Is there anything else that I may have missed that you want to address regarding this topic before we close this episode?

V: Well I think that you know er there's so much that could be told. But I guess that we, I hope that I have, I didn't, I can't call it that I've actually summed up my thoughts. Because it's really you that took me to talk about this. Because that, I don't know, I have never read sort of like a manual to mass listening or anything like that. So I'm just talking about my personal experience.

But I think that pretty much what of what I wanted to like the key points that I wanted to talk about I think we have covered in, if someone would be interested in trying it out, passive mass listening, it's never anything bad, which is turn on the TV or the radio when you're doing your chores and you give it a try.

[57:38]
DM: Okay, fantastic. Now I know that you do a lot of things online especially with the videos that you put on YouTube with your Mandarin videos regarding, you know, to read and write Mandarin. And so could you tell all of the listeners where they can find you on the web? And tell them a little bit about the projects you have done at the moment.

V: So, yeah, sure. Recently, but recently, it's been a year so it's not that recent anymore actually. I have a YouTube channel where I basically do these candid academy-style videos where on the screen I explain, basically on a blackboard setting style, how to write Chinese characters. I talk about their etymology and their components so that students of Chinese or anyone who's interested can remember them through what these characters really are.

So no artificial memory hooks, nothing lilke that. That's just real hardcore analysis of the character, its phonetic components, its etymology which can hopefully either just help you with curiosity or help you with your learning. So I'm talking about etymology of frequent Chinese characters, of numbers, Chinese numbers, things like that because it's something I enjoy reading about.

[58:54]
And it also helps my language learning process as well. The YouTube channel is called "Forever A Student" and I have a blog which is called "Forever A Student" as well, and then a Facebook page as well.

DM: Okay, and also on Twitter. I'll make sure I put a link in the show so everyone can find you and get all of your great knowledge and like you're showing them on the Web.
V: Hehehe.
DM: And thank you very much, Vlad. It was a pleasure speaking to you and I know that we've spoken about a very small part of language learning. I know you have lots of things that you can share with us and I would definitely make sure I get you onto the show again to talk about, I don't know. Maybe we'll talk about mass reading or something, I don't know. Herherher. But we'll figure something out. Thanks again.

V: Thank you, David. Bye bye.
DM: K. Take care.

[59:44]
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[1:01:43] -ENDS-

Three Keys of Effective Language Learning

Having read Steve Kaufmann's blog, I concur that the three keys of effective language learning are:

1. Attitude -> includes motivation and initiative, the most important factor. If you don't care, are not motivated, and/or lazy, you won't learn, period.
2. Time -> time spent getting exposure to the language, practising the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing.
3. Attention to detail -> active listening, getting used to the sound system, absorbing the sentence structure.

I'd like to add that while speaking "fluency" can be faked i.e. made to appear fluent by intensive practise and memorization, listening comprehension i.e. understanding the spoken language cannot be faked. It's either you know it or you don't when people say something to you.

Another thing: lots and lots of hard work. Even if you have a good memory you still need to work hard. Consistency is the key.