1.

Materi Copas 1
Introduction

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The Listening-Reading method, also known as L-R, is a language learning technique which
focuses on understanding spoken and written language. The method was described in HTLAL's
epic L-R thread.
More systematically about L-R here. Written and compiled by aYa, the originator of the method.
Some links to resources as well. Her most complete notes on the subject in Polish here.
L-R (LR) is meant for awe riders. See flow as well.
LR for Grasshoppers - written by Volte.
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Preparation

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The language you are learning will be called L2, the language you are learning it in will be called
L1. The tools used for this method are the same as for the Shadowing method:

a bilingual text in L1 and L2

an audio recording in L2

Examples of sources to use:

audiobooks plus the corresponding books in L1 and L2

the material which comes with the Assimil courses (not considered to be true LR by aYa
and many others - it's very different from using an audiobook)

Try to find something long and interesting.

Exercises

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The material can be used in a number of ways:

1.

listening (for getting used to the spoken language)

2.

listening while reading L1 (for learning the meaning of the spoken words)

3.

listening while reading L2 (for learning to associate the spoken and written text)

4.

listening while reading L2 and mimicking the speaker (for learning to pronounce the
language, see Shadowing)

Suggestions

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Listen to about 80-120 hours of audio. This is best done by having 20-40 hours of new
material, and listening to each part of it three times. Switch texts if you can understand 5070% easily.

It is best to do Listening-Reading with progressively more difficult material. The ideal

would be to start with an interlinear translation of a children's story.

Don't be afraid to experiment and look for what fits you. For example, in a related
language it might be beneficial to listen with L2 text even when you can already hear word
boundaries, as some similarities might be easier to notice in the written form, while others
are noticeable in the spoken language. Forum member doviende has used it successfully

for German this way, being a native speaker of English.

Sumber : http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Listening-Reading_Method

2. Materi Copas 2
The RL / LR learning method

The Reading-Listening method of learning. Everyone I read about

said it at least improved their language skills noticeably, even if
they didnt do it for nearly as long/often as they were supposed to.
It can replace all other forms of studying but of course if you have
ex. deadlines for language tests then you should probably have it as
an addition whenever possible instead, and a faster method would
be to mix grammar study in with it.
Its very easy if you know a related language, relatively easy if you
already know some basics of the language (basic grammar and
2000+ words), and difficult but not at all impossible if you dont
know any related language or the sentence structure is completely
different from your own. Various people (yes, English and nonEnglish speakers) have learnt English, Russian, even Chinese from
this method just fine.
I was slightly surprised that learning Japanese was not more
difficult than learning English, German or French, just another
language.
This is the basic summary:
- Have a LONG text you know and understand already in your own

language, and a sound recording that matches.

- Read a sentence in your native language
- Read the same sentence, with audio of the text playing at the same
time, in the language you want to learn. You can use a free program
like Audacity to slow down or speed up the audio if you try for a
while and keep finding you just read too fast or slow.
- Do not worry about memorizing, dont look any words up, just
keep going. Enjoy reading.
- After you finish the book, do it again. Maybe do it a third time.
- Then try reading the book in the target language only, with the
audio, for a little bit. Then try listening to the audio only. Then try
reading without listening. (just one chapter or two for this step is
fine)
- When listening only, pause every so often to repeat words that
you know the meanings of. If they sound wrong, stop practising
and practise listening more instead.
- Do this as often as possible. This method is meant to be used
intensively, at least two hours a day.
So it would look like this:
It was at Kamakura, during the summer holidays, that I first met
Sensei. I was then a very young student. I went there at the
insistence of a friend of mine, who had gone to Kamakura to swim.
. (the paragraph goes on)
*have audio paused*
*read: It was at Kamakura, during the summer holidays, that I
first met Sensei.*
*play audio, and as it plays read along:

*pause audio if needed, read: I was then a very young student.*

read along as the audio plays:


*repeat with the next lines*
You may quickly notice that the translation is not very accurate. If
so, edit the translation as you go along - this helps you, and if you
give it to other learners after youre through, it helps them a lot too.
If you want a head-start, couple this method with using a wordfrequency generator. Create a word-frequency list from the text you
are going to listen-read (LR), learn the most frequent 100 words or
so, then use this method.
More detailed explanation and examples:
- First have two long texts (ex. long novels), one in your target
language and the same, very close (if possible) or directly-translated
text in a language you are fluent in. For very beginners of the
language it is very good to have grammar notes in the translation. I
can create direct translations and grammar notes for Faroese,
Scandinavian, and Icelandic for you if you want them.
E-texts (or texts stored as html pages, etc.) are the most useful for
major languages since you can then use a free, pop-up browser
dictionary (like Rikaichan for Japanese, or the site Lingocracy) to
get your literal translation, then you can have a real translation
alongside that. It is best to have the text so that one line is in the
target language then the same line directly beneath it is in your
language. Look here for good examples of both very close
translations, and inter-spaced texts.
If you know hardly anything about the language, the first 3 to 5
hours need to be translated word for word with some grammar
commentary, the way I did for French, English, and German for
Polish learners of the languages. Examples of literary texts for zero

beginners. To
download:http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/mLR/ai.7z
Examples of layouts:
One, two, three, four.
The longer the text the better. War and Peace, Harry Potter, The
Lord of the Rings, etc. Books that even if they arent long enough
by themselves, are part of a series and become long enough when
you read multiple in a row as long as they are in the same theme
and done by the same author. The most important thing is that you
love what you are reading, because you will pick things up faster
when you are very interested in the subject and know it well
already. The length also helps you to not be as tired by re-reading.
"I use The Little Prince, Camus, Kafka, Anna Karenina,
The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, The Old Man
and the Sea, Andersens fairy tales, Lewis Carroll, A.A.
Milne.
I never get tired of them.
Personally I really love Vladimir Nabokov, Osamu Dazai, Sherlock
Holmes, Natsume Sousekis Kokoro, etc. so I do my best to find
those.
- If the language is new to you, get familiar with it. Read some
textbooks and grammar overviews (no intentional memorising of
anything, no doing grammar exercises etc. - this method heavily
focuses on do not force yourself to learn the language, it will
come naturally. All the people I have read so far who said it was
a waste of time, were focusing far too much on picking apart
sentences and being able to understand every word. Learn the
basics of pronunciation. One guy has learnt Cyrillic (and Russian)

entirely from this method and didnt even bother to look up

anything about Cyrillic beforehand.
You should read enough to understand if there is something
important to pay attention to in the language (such as if stress or
intonation affects the meanings of words, basic sentence structure if
it too different from ones you know, how to tell basic parts of a
sentence apart like nouns from verbs).
"For languages like Chinese or Japanese it might help to go through
a beginners course before starting out, but I think ListeningReading is ideal for learning languages with nonphonetic scripts.
How else is one going to learn how to pronounce the words on the
page if you dont have someone else reading them aloud to you?
Looking up every single character would take forever."
Example with Japanese:
- First learn hiragana and katakana. Also read about how kanji and
their radicals/bushu work, stroke order rules (they are very simple),
and learn how to recognize the 214 classical radicals that make up
kanji, but dont actually learn any kanji.
- Learn how to recognize basic conjugations and basic sentence
patterns. Read through the grammar on this site, and then that step
is done. Rikaichan is a really great browser pop-up dictionary, that
not only shows the meanings of words or specific kanji when you
hover over them, it also shows which forms they are in (past tense,
etc.) and tells the meanings of particles you hover over too. Using
this with your Japanese text makes it more unnecessary to be
familiar with basics.
Do not read from texts that have furigana, always use texts with

kanji.
Furigana will handicap you in the long run, and after learning the
radicals kanji are extremely fast/easy to learn. Besides, you have
audio so furigana is completely unnecessary.
When I understand what Im hearing, I concentrate on kanji for a
moment - I dont stop listening, I listen and look at the sentence
written in kanji, I try to identify the components.
Any successful strategy of learning written forms of kanji boils
down to this: a. dissect kanji into components recurring in many
kanji b. name the components and use them as building blocks to
remember new kanji c. learn stroke order rules.
I NEVER learnt kanji as single entities. I always learnt words in
texts (audio + transcript + translation + pop-up dictionary). I never
memorized anything. I relied on comprehensible exposure.
I didnt care about the order of learning kanji or words/expressions,
how frequent or infrequent they are. I was interested in what a given
text meant (be it the title of a movie, a whole story or a novel). I
didnt care whether I forgot or didnt forget. I was sure to come
across them again in future texts.
Longer explanation of the method:
1. Read the text in your native language or a language you know
really well first, since you will only remember what you actually
understand. You should read the whole book beforehand, not just a
chapter or page. This is so you overall know what is coming up in
the book, and dont need to spend extra effort (thus weakening
language-learning concentration) by trying to decipher the plot
alongside actually trying to learn.

2. Practise listening and following the target-language text at the

same time. This is only practise in keeping up with the spoken
speed, this is not learning. After you can follow the written text
when words are said (you know when a word is a word and can
pick apart the sounds in the language), it will be much easier to
follow along with the audio and do the method normally. This skill
can form very fast, even within ten minutes.
The goal is not to pick apart sentences, but to understand the
meaning of the text or audio in gist. Pay attention to what is done
and how is it done but who does it or to whom is it done doesnt
matter.
"I used cassettes and two printed books, I had no
parallel texts. When I started only listening to it I
didnt understand anything, just a word here and
there. But when I started reading in Polish and
listening to the German reader at the same time I was
able to understand virtually everything, for the
fleeting moment of course, I didnt bother to
memorize anything, I was just going with the flow of
the soul shattering experience that only a
masterpiece can deliver/provide/drown you."
"And thats it for the time being - no speaking, no reading without
listening, no writing. The parallel written texts are only there to help
me with my listening, at this stage, nothing more."
Stopping to look everything up not only takes a lot longer in
general, but since it is taking breaks from a method that is intended
to be done intensively, it can drastically reduce how well you learn

from the method and how much reading/listening actually gets done
in the same amount of time.
Q: Something strange Ive noticed. Im starting to think in French,
but it is just random non-sense. It will be lots of words, but it is like
a noun here a verb there, past participle her, no sentense just
random words. Maybe this is the first stage of thinking in French
subconsciously, I dont know. Ive never expierienced this before.
A: Thats exactly what happens in the incubation period. If you go
on L-Reading intensively, full sentences will start to pop-up sooner
rather than later. The brain is finding its way through the maze and
building up a coherent system.
To get to a stage called natural listening is:
Being able to understand the gist, while missing some words and
details, of reasonable audio in your target language you havent
heard before. News broadcasts and simple literature are good
examples. By simple literature, I mean for children, or by authors
known for having an approachable style, as opposed to the most
difficult authors that native speakers struggle with at first in
schools.
Reaching the natural listening stage can take from 10 to 30 (or
more) hours, depending on how familiar you already are with the
language, how intensively you can do this method, etc. One
English-native was able to understand 90% of completely new
Spanish texts after using this method for 10 hours a day, after less
than a week.
"I noticed something very interesting about intensive L-R (and then
natural listening) after a while (weeks), speaking (and writing for

languages with alphabet) come naturally, there are only two

conditions to activate the skills, phonetic training and repeating
after the recording here and there while listening to something you
understand and enjoy."
(by L-Reading they mean this entire method, Listening-Reading.)
"Hmm, Ive L2-R1ed about 30 hours of Finnish so far, and now I
can understand 30% to 100% of sentences, depending on the
subject and style of the writing. Is it time for me to switch to L2-R2
now?"
Reply: No, assuming that your goal is to learn efficiently.
I was going to point you to the updated version of the L-R summary
thread, but I realized it hadnt been posted yet, and didnt actually
contain the quote I was thinking of. Nonetheless, it as something
about being at that stage, throwing away your English/L1 text, and
being a little nonplussed when you couldnt quite believe that the
monk was also a lesbian police inspector L1 is still quite useful at
your current level.
"I started to LR russian in march 2009 (when I at last bought a
walkman cell phone). Since then, Ive been LR-ing Kafkas The
castle a couple of times, andThe Brothers Karamazov by
Dostoyevsky. -Both of the books were completely wonderful.
After that, I could speak naturally to a russian man (making insane
grammar mistakes). It was a strange and exhilarating feeling to have
a real conversation in a language I had never studied. He didnt
know any other languages so there were no English back-door.

Even if you are really good at a language, you will learn tons
faster with a translation and when you already know what is
going on than with only target-language material and seeing a
words you dont know and dont have enough context for to get the
meaning (plus you can get the wrong idea when you go only from
context with no translation).
When you are practising speaking, dont look at either of the
texts while you listen or repeat, this is because you will struggle to
read it as it looks like its written or as you have studied, instead of
how it should actually be said, and also because "speaking comes
from your own brain and not from a text that sits in front of
you." So you can just listen on headphones while you commute, do
chores, exercise, eat meals, etc.
Absolutely avoid listening or repeating after non-native speakers,
you will learn incorrectly. Concentrate not on what is difficult for
you (ex. sounds or letter combinations you cant make yet), but
what is easy for you. It usually takes 60-80 hours or more of
repeating practice, including wait time (where you listen to the
audio once before repeating it) in order to completely correctly
repeat simple phrases and short sentences.
- Its easier to use a word in your speech if youve heard it, rather
than just seen it in writing. "having conversations is not learning, it
is using what you already know."
Dont let the idea that you need to perfect everything keep you from
advancing. If youve done Step 3, then move on to Step 4 even if
you dont understandeverything. After youre done with this book,
youre off to LR several more anyway, so dont get bogged down
on your first book.

Example: L2 German, the book: The Trial by Franz Kafka, translated into Polish
by Bruno Schulz (his woman translated it to be exact), the translation is very
good and very faithful.
It took me 3 (three) days (30 to 35 hours of listening) to be able to understand
every single word in the book read in German by Gert Westphal.
What I knew before I started L-R:
I knew the book (I read it in Polish, Russian, etc) and loved it. I could recognize all
the German phonemes and their corresponding letter combinations. I was able to
recognize basic grammar structures (morphology and syntax). I could recognize
in speech and in writing the meaning of some 800 words. (probably less). (I
couldnt speak the language, I never try until I reach natural listening stage.)
As I had no parallel texts with matching chunks, I did the following:
I read a page in Polish, I listened in German and looked at the German text, I paid
attention to meaning, grammar, and letters-phonemes correspondence. Then
another page, and so on, until the end of the book. I understood almost
everything. It was the first day.
The second day: I only read in Polish and listened to the German reader and the
same time. I understood everything.
The third day I only listened to the German reader. I understood almost
everything.
I worked ten to twelve hours a day. I made 15-minute breaks every 45 minutes. I
did some physical exercises. I had three meals a day. I slept eight hours a day. I
was healthy.
And then I tested myself: I took a recording in German it was The Snow Queen
by Andersen. I hadnt read the story before, so I knew nothing about it. And I
understood it
ONE MORE THING: if youre unable to attach the (or at least some) meaning from
what youve just read to what youre LISTENING to, you cannot say it is L-R. I
would consider it pointless. Let me say it once more: L-R is not mechanical.

Why?:
Long texts are because then you get used to the manner of writing
the author uses (and the manner of speaking the reader uses). A
single author is much more likely to stick to certain sentence
patterns, repeat words, etc. and this is what helps your learning by
context even when you havent studied the language before.

The faster it is to glance between the two languages, the easiest this
method is to learn from.
"The layout of the texts to learn is very important.
Sensory memories - visual (iconic) and auditory
(echoic)- are very short and disappear within a
second, so you get lost when you have to look for
words, they should CONSTANTLY be within your eyes
and ears reach."
"Imagine youre a biologist and youve been crossing frogs with
snails and cloning sheep since you were in cradle its your life,
you know hell of a lot about it, it makes you happy and you cant
imagine your life without it. One day you discover theres a
wonderful new theory on how sheep can be grown into lions.
Unfortunately its in the clitty-titty language, and you dont know it.
So you decide to learn the wonderful clitty-titty in a day or hang
yourself.
Notice two points:
you know almost everything about the subject and youre in love
with it.
The texts in clitty-titty will be self-explanatory and highly
enjoyable, you wont get tired (on the contrary, youll get happier
and happier) and youll guess the meaning of at least half of the
sentences in clitty-titty.
And now a real life example: La principessa, a teenage girl, is in
love with Harry Potter, shes been reading the books time and again
and knows them by heart. She decides to become a witch herself: to
go to Hoggwart, she must learn English in a week to prove shes
worthy.

No problem, she has a magic wand: audiobooks of her prince

(Harry Potter), but, unfortunately she has no English texts.
She listens to the books time and again, after a few times she can
understand every single word.
Notice two points:
Harry Potter is her life, and the texts in English are self-explanatory.

By self-explanatory, they mean you already know the subject. You

are not reading up on molecular physics for the first time and in a
foreign language at that, instead you are (ideally closely) familiar
with the book.
Failure comes from acting as if the target-language audio is just
radio noise in the background that you dont have to pay any
attention to. Watching movies with subtitles is much worse than this
method in terms of how fast you learn, because you have a third
thing to distract you (visuals), unless you mess with the subtitle
speed you cant see the translation of what they say before they say
it (which is the point of this method), and your words-per-minute
rate is a lot less since there is simply less of the language involved
in a tv show than in a novel. How many hardcore anime fans
become fluent in Japanese while only watching anime with
subtitles?
Miscellaneous notes:
On if you should repeat chapters over and over instead of going
through the whole book then repeating the book:
The original explanation suggests at least 20 (40? 60?) hours of new
content. With that amount of input youre likely to get a lot of the

possible sentence structures in the language, as well as vocabulary,

prosody and what not - something that songs (or just about any
regular study material out there) cant give you.
You start reading the target language (again) when youve listenedread the native so many times so you know what means what (and
why). Ive seen 3-4 times [per book] being suggested (which is A
LOT, especially if youre working with even one single audiobook
of ~20 hours - that would equal 60-80 hours of listening).
It is actually worse to repeat small sections because the author
WILL reuse the same words/phrases in later chapters with context
that is most likely even more helpful than what you have now. You
learn automatically when you see a word in five or so different
contexts, its not that you can pick it up automatically if you read
the same single sentence over and over again.
Finding materials:
- On Rhinospike you can submit text and ask for native speakers to
record themselves reading it. Ive had luck with native speakers
recording entire chapters for me at once, but of course people might
be more willing to record if you chop them up into smaller pieces.
If your language is small, your best bet for pre-existing translations
and audio is new popular fiction (Twilight, Harry Potter, Eat Pray
Love, The Hunger Games and The Hobbit) and classics (Dracula,
Sherlock Holmes, The Count of Monte Cristo, the Moomins). The
easiest thing to do is go to a major library catalogue for the country,
type in an author name, and see if translations of the book you want
actually exists. If you are desperate, you can of course pay for a
translation.

Looking around for torrents will probably help you a lot. Also, at
least for larger languages, there are websites for native speakers to
learn English (or other languages), with parallel texts. The
translation is usually not very direct, so you will need to fix that
yourself. An example for Japanese is here.
- Some will require enlisting a friend who lives in the country or
speaks the language, such as if the audio or book only exists in the
library then they can check it out and rip the sound or take photos of
the book pages for you, or advertise on used-item sites for you etc.
Other people have had luck messaging random native speakers on
Tumblr to ask for recordings.
- Sometimes libraries for the blind/dyslexic/old people have tons of
audiobooks or ebooks and will grant you access if you ask specially,
but some countries are extremely strict (such as Iceland and
Sweden) and wont let you have access unless you actually fit their
requirements.
- You may have luck searching newspaper archive sites for stories
since some countries used to publish translated stories in periodicals
- thats how I found a lot of Sherlock Holmes stories in Icelandic
and Swedish. However it will be in older language most likely, so
either you should know enough to be able to tell the difference, not
care (especially if you plan to read that kind of literature a lot), or
get someone to modernize it for you.
- Some countries price audiobooks and/or ebooks as the same exact
price as a physical book, but rest assured if it says ebook it is an
ebook even if the price is the same cost as a physical book.
- They dont always sell English versions of the book at the same
store as target-language versions, or audiobooks at the same store as

ebooks, etc. Also it will unfortunately be a lot easier to find audio

and ebooks for books originally from the country itself, that dont
even have English versions. If a movie was made for the book or
the book is famous in the country, then it more likely has an English
version. Titles may have drastically changed between language
versions. Of course, itll be far easier to find audio/ebooks on a
target-language website than on an English one.
- Its much better to have the ebook and no audio verses audio and
no ebook, since you can ask around for native speakers to record
themselves reading from your copy, rather than being forced to buy
physical copies of the books then realizing the audio doesnt match.
You can learn quite a lot about HUMAN NATURE, while preparing
parallel texts:
1. CENSORSHIP: ubiquitous, but North Americans excel in it.
2. Bungling and cheating: I even once saw Crime and Punishment
by Dostoyevsky with the label complete and unabridged on the
cover and I bought it. Then at home I couldnt believe my eyes, I
checked against the Russian original: at least one third of the text
was missing.
The same applies to unabridged audiobooks.
Some Ebooks already formatted into the proper format I think at
least, by people who use this method, for German, French, Italian,
Japanese, Spanish, Russian, and Polish. Resource lists. Russian
forum for hosting torrents of audiobooks/ebooks (not only for
Russian but for other languages too, often related geographically
ex. Baltics and Finnish as well as the major regular languages like
French). Google translate for the forum works just fine but you

need to register in order to get the torrent files. I have an e-book of

Harry Potter in Faroese but dont have audio for one small
part, and a Sherlock Holmes audio CD in Icelandic but dont
have the book, if you can help out please message me!!
the-resident-psycho submitted:
Id like to recommend this wonderful site: http://librivox.org/
This site catalogues 6000 free audiobooks, which you can download
to your computer. Their catalogue already has 33 languages in it. It
also links to a source text, where the audiobooks are read from. Im
personally contributing recordings for this site in my languages
(Tagalog and bisaya), and proof books in japanese.
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/mL-R/
For people who like learning multiple languages at a time.
It was a hobby of mine for some fifty years.
I havent found anything better so far, unfortunately.
1. book2 - 40 something languages, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean
included.
List of people willing to help you record for languages, find
ebooks, has resources for languages, etc:
Tipsforlearninglanguages: Can help find Faroese, Icelandic, and
Scandinavian materials, can make direct translations for them too
(to English).
Tipsforlearninglanguages Swedish cousin: Will record Swedish
audio for books (Stockholm dialect).
Sumber http://tipsforlanguagelearning.tumblr.com/post/40081169302/therl-lr-learning-method
3. Materi Copas 3

Creativity & Languages

Learning languages out of a classroom

Testing the reading & listening method (R-L)

Photo by Emily Carlin

In this post I am discussing the reading & listening method to learn languages. I
came across with this method on the language forum how to learn any language a
great source of inspiration for language learners.
The reading & listening method (R-L) consists in reading a text while listening its
audio version. Here is a summary of the main steps:
1.

During the first step of the R-L method the language learner uses an audiobook in the
target language and a text in his own language or a language with which is familiar. The
first step, reading the text translated in your own language, allows the language learner
to listen and read the text in the second step without having to stop to check the
dictionary.

2.

In the second step the language learner hears the audiobook in the target language
but he reads the text in the same language.

3.

In the third step the language learner tries to repeat loudly the text while listening to
the audiobook.

Ultimately, the language learner gets a lot of exposure to the target language and
should be able to get a feeling for the language.
I immediately liked this method because it is no based on learning grammar and
allows you to use reading material that you are interested in, at least when you
achieve an intermediate level.
Sounds great but does it work?

I am currently testing this method; in this first post I will describe my first
impressions and results after about 5 days of using intensively this method and in the
next posts I will give further information and a final assessment of the pro and cons
of the method.
The first texts that I have used to implement the L-R method are Grimm brothers
fairy tales which are available for free on internet (the copyright has expired)
together with audio versions. The main issue with this material is that the stories are
too short, and the L-R method work better with long text as it is main objective is to
provide a lot of exposure to the language.
Then I used The little prince. It was easy to find both the German version (target
language) with an audiobook and an English version of the text. I listened the whole
book in two sessions. Similarly to Grimm brothers fairy tales, this book turned out to
be way too short to provide the right amount of exposure to the target language
(German in my case).
Now I am using the first book of the Harry Potter series. This seems to work well,
the book is enough long to provide a lot of exposure to the target language. I almost
finished the book and I can notice an improvement in my reading comprehension of
German but not yet any improvement on listening and speaking. I still have not
implemented the third step of the method, where one repeats loudly the text after
listening the audiobook, and this step could be the one that helps speaking improving
speaking skills.
Peter
Sumber http://www.creativityandlanguages.com/2011/03/testing-thereading-listening-method-r-l/
4. MATERI COPAS 4

Listening To Learn Language: The

Listen & Read Method
BY T H E J U N K I E ON F E B R U A R Y 1 4 , 2 0 1 5 0 C O M M E N T S

Listening is one great way to approach a language.

Especially if you want to speak and understand a language . Thats what

most learners want to do. But, ever notice how most beginners are awful at
speaking & understanding a foreign language?
Why? Because they focus mostly on reading.
So, why listening?
There was an interesting audio experiment done. It shows how 1)
listeningcombined with 2) a follow-up translation/explanation gets you
understanding something you didnt know before.
Heres the basic premise of this experiment.

A person listens to a garbled audio message that they dont understand.

Then, they get its true meaning.

And then, they understand what that garbled message was..

Just listen to this 50 second experiment below. Press play.

So, how does this relate to learning language?

Its very similar. If I were to say something new to you in Japanese, Korean or
Russian, itd go in one ear and out the other. Youd forget it. Its garbled to you.
For example, listen to this Japanese phrase:
Audio Player
00:00
Use Left/Right Arrow keys to advance one second, Up/Down arrows to advance ten seconds.
00:00

Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.

If youre not already learning Japanese, this will go way over your head. You
have no translation (old information) to connect it to. Its gone.
As the experiment says, your brain cant process new words/phrases it has no
prior knowledge of.
But if you have the translation and can read along as you hear it now
you have something to connect it to. You instantly understand it. And next time
you hear it again, youll know it. So, what you heard was:

Japanese Phrase: dou desu ka?

Meaning: how is it?

Play it again. Now you have the 1) transcript that you can read with and 2) the
translation. You know exactly how its said, how it sounds, what it means and
how to say it.
You just learned a phrase.
Youve learned some language.
I call this the listen & reading along method.
Alright, how do you apply this to language learning?
There are many ways to start a language. Most beginners start with reading a
textbook. They get good at reading at grammar but their listening & speaking
skills suck. Why? They put 100% effort into reading and 0% effort into listening
and speaking.
Its just a matter of what skills youre practicing and how you choose to start.
Theres no wrong way. But remember, if you practice only 1 thing, youll only get
good at that 1 thing.
Heres how you apply this.
Start learning with Audio Lessons, Video Lessons, Podcasts thats the first
step. I recommend the Pod101 Online Language Courses . However, you

ABSOLUTELY must have the translations and scripts for everything you hear
so you can read along and instantly understand.
Heres the process.

Listen to an audio lesson that you DONT yet understand.

Read along to get the meaning.

Listen to the language again.

Now you will understand it. SIMPLE.

Repeat what you hear to practice your speaking.

Heres an easy example with JapanesePod101 to show how I learn

Japanese with this process.
This sounds so obvious, right?
You hear, get the meaning, and understand it.
Yet, most learners start out by reading and then wonder why their
Japanese listening and speaking SUCKS.
This experiment is a great lesson in why you should use to audio lessons.

Once you hear the phrases, your ear becomes trained for it.

However, you dont yet understand it because your brain has no prior
information to relate it to.

Once you know its meaning, you associate the sound to its meaning.

And when you hear the phrases again, youll know what it is.

Your brain now relates most recent information the meaning you just
learned.

However, if you dont HEAR it first, you wont know what to listen
for. And thats pretty much how conversation flows for beginners. They pick out
words they already know in a conversation and, boom, they know what theyre
being asked.
But reading a word first, and THEN hearing it in a conversation wont
help you identify it. Reading and speaking are two different things. Reading

doesnt train your ear to hear native Japanese conversation. And heres the key
point:
Conclusion:

Hearing the unknown trains your ear.

Reading along gives you the meaning & makes an instant connection with
its English translation

Next time you hear it, you will understand it.

Repeat what you hear to practice your speaking.

Are speaking and/or listening your weak points?

Have you tried this listen & read along method?
Leave me a comment below!
The Main Junkie
SUMBER http://www.linguajunkie.com/featured/listen-and-read-method