A short post today to say something that, while it has been said before, certainly hasn’t been said enough: listen to the language you’re studying even if you can’t understand what you’re hearing.
Seriously, if you only listen to stuff you can understand, you’ll never move forward, you’ll just be reinforcing what you already know. You have to push your boundaries, and push them hard. You should be listening to full-speed native conversation from day one. You need to just let go of your desire to understand everything and just soak in the sounds.
I’ve been listening to Cantonese news broadcasts nonstop for two weeks. When I started, despite my grounding in Mandarin, I couldn’t understand a damn thing. It was like the jibber jabber of drunken moon people. By the end of the first week, I was picking out the couple of words I knew, and hearing how the structures matched those that I knew from Mandarin. Now I’m actively picking out new words from the broadcasts, and can at least figure out what the general topic is. Yes, I have the advantage of speaking a related language, but that just speeds the process up. Without pouring about 150 hours of Cantonese into my brain over the last two weeks, I guarantee I wouldn’t have made the progress I have.
Letting go is a really hard thing for adults to do, but insisting on understanding everything means that you are forced to learn everything consciously, and never absorb anything unconsciously. Stop acting an adult, you baby.
Related posts:
- My Cantonese tutor
- Maintaining one language while learning another
- New year, same great flavor; also, directions
- One language or many, take two
- Interview with Steve Kaufmann
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Yes yes yes, my take on this described here http://friedelcraft.blogspot.com/2008/04/best-thing-i-did-in-starting-to-learn.html.
Interestingly I have also started Cantonese and am finding similar (on a slower timeline and capacity), I have a sneaking suspicion that my non-native tone abilites actually help though when picking out words that sound similar. Somebody tried out some Qingdaohua on me recently and were surprised that I understood, thinking about it afterwards it mostly sounded like funky Mandarin but I suspect that a native speaker with better tone skills may be more put off by tone changes than I was.
Cantonese of course is considerably more different.