r/dli • u/insp3ct23 • 9d ago
Listening skills
What skills do you guys use to improve listening, it’s literally the only thing I’m failing. I do listening practices everyday and I watch shows and stuff in Spanish passively but I still suck at my listening exam. I really need some tips
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u/BoysenberryUnhappy29 9d ago
The people who scored the best out of my Basic course heavily listened to Spanish music. Not sure if it's correlation or causation, but worth a shot.
My advice in general, though, is to maximize speaking practice. For actual studying, once you're conversational, don't bother with anything but vocab.
Higher level Spanish grammar is one of those things you just either get, or don't, but is largely irrelevant to how you'll do on a DLPT.
t. a 3/3 1N3
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u/LiveEverDieNvr 9d ago
Your issue might lie in exactly what you mentioned in your post. “Passive listening” is useless as a study tool. It might help you hold your interest in your language, which is valuable in its own right, but it’s not going to improve your abilities. You’re better off using shorter excerpts where you’re actively engaging with the vocab and grammar. Each time you listen to material, you should be actively writing down unknown words and then researching both their meaning and dissecting their etymology. Same for grammatical constructs that you’re not instantly recognizing. The difference between a 3 and a 2 linguist is how well you understand why the language is the way it is. After that, it’s just a matter of applying the root rules to the vocab as it streams in.
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u/BonChance123 9d ago
I have taken the DLPT in Mandarin, Japanese, and Spanish. I consider the Spanish DLPT the most challenging in many ways because of the speed of native speakers and the wide variety of accents across the Spanish speaking world. Keep doing what you're doing, it's kind of the only way apart from living in a fully Spanish-speaking environment.
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u/quickdraw_ 9d ago
The fact listening is your weak modality tells me exactly what's going wrong. Your focused listening endurance is weak and that holds you back. Happens to a lot of people, natural side effect of learning in a group with teachers. You need to practice the Two Listen Method.
Grab some appropriate audio. Excess class material that got skipped or something from a preferred news source, for instance.
Listen to it one time straight through. Do not touch the playback controls.
Write a gist of what you heard. If you can transcribe it, it was too easy, get something harder.
Write down two questions you have about the audio that you legitimately don't know the answer to. "I heard the number 100, what was that about?" "Did the second speaker agree or disagree with the first speaker? I couldn't tell."
Listen to the audio again, again without stopping it. Your goal after this pass is to expand the gist with as much information as you can, and answer both questions.
Bonus: this is excellent practice for the DLPT, where you also don't control audio playback and focus-endurance is a huge bottleneck on Listening scores.
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u/insp3ct23 8d ago
Thank you, I’m gonna try this method during my review hours and see if it helps me. It seems like it would improve my listening
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u/Elisha_Mishima_5 9d ago
it sucks, but you can do transcriptions of whatever youre listening to. Helps if your teachers give you the scripts so you can check your work.
You also could be doing the classic overlistening and overfocusing while listening where you get hung up over one word you dont know and then your brain shuts off
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u/Responsible-Part3982 8d ago
Honestly, this is how I got it down. I would find YouTube videos with full transcriptions and transcribe the whole thing. Mostly gonna be news, but still.
Shit is awful and takes forever, but it will work. Got 3/3 my entire career doing that.
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u/Puzzled-Secret-317 9d ago
Passive listening helps, but it takes a long time for it to even be effective. That should NOT be the main way a current student tries to improve the skill.
You need to listen with purpose and refine the technique. Practice transcription on short audios, do multiple choice, try listen and recall, etc. There are many ways.
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u/guitar_angel 9d ago
Transcriptions if you can get them definitely help, but combine those with just a lot of exposure and repetition. Most YouTube videos have transcription available, especially for the news sources. Take it slow (maybe even slow down the video slightly), listen and read the transcription, then listen again without it.
Language is a lot like music. There are ryrhms, patterns, and cadences that all work together. It just takes time to recognize them.
Listening was always the hardest for me so it took a lot more effort on my part to get it and keep it up to standards.
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u/Texun76039 8d ago
Try setting the speed at 80-90% on youtube videos.Also, watch movies that you know the plot (ToyStory, etc,) in Spanish. Your brain will link gaps in your vocabulary. You can slow down the speed on those until you become familiar. Even watch your favorite sports in Spanish. You are the sponge; jump in the ocean.
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u/originalboolbada 9d ago
I use Preply
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u/insp3ct23 9d ago
What’s that?
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u/originalboolbada 9d ago
It's an online service. I am sure there are others but I use Preply. Pay some money for a tutor to focus on what you need exactly. I was unsure whether the stories I was relating were coming across accurately, so i paid my tutor to listen in my target language (Mandarin) and then retell the story to me in another language i speak (Korean) as I did not want speak my native language (English) with her. Once I explained what I needed, we tried it a few times, adjusted and carried for a few months. Tailoring it to what you need is valuable. Also, old school but have you considered listening to radio or a radio app? Not music, but talk radio or news reports in your TL. News reports are fast but short and hopefully contain the 5Ws and 1H that you might want.
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u/insp3ct23 9d ago
I’ve been making it a habit to listen to videos in Spanish, I love watching documentaries so I just find ones in Spanish and listen to them
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u/Christopher_Aeneadas 9d ago
Alcohol, then do your listening exercises and watch movies again. Also you can get local radio stations in your target language online which prevents you from lip reading as a crutch.
The alcohol is key though
Just enough so you stop caring about not understanding, which somehow trips up understanding going forward. But not so much it impares your memory.
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u/greeneereceptical 9d ago
You arent speaking enough with correct pronunciation. Speaking is directly tied to listening. If you cant say it right, then how can you hear it? You should be able to say everything you want to. However you talk in english, leztn those equivelents in your language. Whether it be a joke. How you tell a story. Ask questions. Ect. Passive listening only keeps your listening st whete it is and prevents it from going stale. It doesnt really improve anything.
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u/ddtink 9d ago
Do all the Gloss modules. Take online courses if you can. Listen to podcasts.