This has always been my struggle with French as well. I have never quite able to crack the aural/listening component of the language.
How did you overcome the “wall”?
How did you overcome the “wall”?
Most people just severely underestimate the amount of work it is. You probably need 1,000 hours of listening to be decent, and 2,000 to be strong. If you practice 30 minutes a day, that will take 11 years.
So the only “trick” is that you need to find things that you genuinely enjoy doing in French. So that you can practice for multiple hours each day without burning out.
I’m a native English speaker who has a very high level in Spanish. It takes a long time for your brain to figure out how to decode the type of mumbling people use in casual speech.
Yes, practice vocabulary, practice grammar, read. But you’re probably already doing this. You just need to listen to a ton of stuff right at the edge of your abilities and you’ll notice improvements every few months.
My one final tip would be to not get in your head so much. Literally everyone who has learned a language will tell you that if you review vocab, do grammar exercises, and listen to the language for 1-3 hours every day, you’ll learn it.
But it happens so slowly that it doesn’t feel like it will work while you’re on the journey. It’s sort of like the gym: if you lift every day and eat healthy, you will have muscles in a year or two. But it’s really demotivating because you won’t notice a drastic difference even after 3 months.
What I find helps me to make progress is two things:
1) prioritize vocabulary (you need to know a word to have any hope of recognizing it in speech)
2) listen to "comprehensible input" at your level. I like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/@FrenchComprehensibleInput who has levels labeled for his vids, I also like https://www.youtube.com/@wanderingfrench because I'm interested in Canadian French and I find her especially clear and easy to understand, as well as charismatic.
Obviously this does not work if too many words in the sentence are unknown. And I'm not saying not to learn new words. But it is far more important in my opinion to read / listen so much that you get faster and faster. Especially if you are listening to speech, where you can't pause / rewind, and if you spend too much time on one thing you just get left behind entirely. Don't know a word - just skip it / ignore it and concentrate on the whole stream.
Audiobooks also work.
And work on your grammar and vocabulary. Listening gets easier if you intuitively know what you should hear (tenses, conjugations, plural or singular words etc).
1. Consistency. Make sure you practice a little every day. For example, I use an app that tells me every day what vocabulary I should practice that day. It takes ten minutes of my day, and does wonders.
2. Communication. Start talking to someone as soon as possible. If you're learning a Germanic or Romance language, after 6 months you should be able to find someone online to chat with. Of course it's going to take you 15 minutes with a dictionary to understand the other person's message and another 15 minutes to write the reply, but it truly does wonders because it allows your brain to see the language as a language.
3. Fun exercise: try vocalizing your internal monologue in foreign language. Don't focus on correctness at all, it's about familiarizing yourself with the language.
4. Find some interesting media in your target language. It's going to be difficult because most important stuff is available in English, but for example you might try movies or YouTube channels. Especially the latter is great because YouTube videos rarely ever have English translation, so you know that either you watch it in your target language or not at all. There are apps that allow you to listen to foreign radio stations. Why not doomscroll in your target language.
5. Don't give up until you reach level B2 and you can talk without consciously thinking about it.
6. Understanding native speakers talking naturally to each other is literally the hardest part, so don't treat it as a benchmark until you reach fluency.
7. A common mistake is to treat the whole thing as a "sequence to sequence" task and think about the target language in the context of your native one. Your actual goal of learning the word X is to have your brain understand the abstract concept behind it.
8. It's going to suck and you'll hate it. There's no way around it. Keep practicing and adjusting your techniques to your liking. One day something will "click" and you'll actually "feel" the language.
Why do you want or need to learn that language? Is it important? Is it valuable? Is it fulfilling?
As I've found, the biggest "wall" to learning languages is convincing yourself that learning the language is worth the immense hassle and effort.
But without the carrot at the end of the stick, it's unlikely you'll be disciplined enough to stick to it. A new job is a natural place for many people to pick up a new programming language because everything else is also new. For languages it is no different. Can you learn a language outside of the country where it's commonly spoken? Sure, but it's going to be 100x more difficult and you have to generate all of the discipline yourself. If you can crack that problem and build the discipline, then you've basically won the war if you can hold in there "long enough for your enemy to starve." :D
I take a recording of a conversation in the language, one that's made for language learners.
Then I listen to it until I know it BY HEART.
Usually that takes about 100 listens.
Every time I listen, I understand a bit more. Sometimes I look at the transcript to understand a section that evades me.
I don't move on until I can recite the whole thing BY HEART.
Then, I take the next dialogue.
Do you think it could work as well with a short story or novella? Perhaps one of the books by Olly Richards? I find the dialogues in textbooks absolutely mind numbing most of the time and while easy books for learners aren't that interesting anyway, at least it's a full story and not people ordering lunch or a trip to the doctor for the 99th time!
Like, less than a minute.
Repetition is key, and if the text is too long, it’s not repeated enough.
To me, it’s not mind-numbing until I can “sing along” because I know it by heart. And then I move on to the next, slightly harder, text.
You don’t have to always listen to it actively, you can put it in while doing other work.
Some language self-learner books are better than others.
We take for granted regional dialects when speaking our own language and in some languages, dialects can be a huge component of the language. Being able to just go outside and sit on a bench and listen to people speak in the language you want to learn is a huge advantage. Every day, you will passively pick up some words from the context of passers-by. You'll also start to subconsciously figure out what words are "common" in a different way that the lists of "1000 most common words in X langauge" can convey. You also learn how to put them together in context and how some words travel together within a certain context.
If I was tasked with learning a language abroad, I would spend 2-4 hours a day consuming native content and make it a priority to speak with a coach online 1-2 times a week, trying to work my way up to holding a conversation for an hour straight.
After living here for almost 2 years now, I can just barely get to 1 hour when speaking to my boss (super grateful btw!) but I'm really drained mentally by the end of it. With each meeting it gets easier though and now I can somewhat even make out the local dialect. Learning a language is a numbers game and the reason we often attribute superior language learning skills to kids is simply due to the fact that they have so much free time to listen, absorb, speak, and make mistakes without people judging them because they're kids. I'm fully convinced that adults can learn just as fast or faster, but our own egos often get in the way to putting in the work to learn.