Keith Lard Makes a Valuable Contribution

"I've been watching a lot of Friends dubbed into Spanish, which is good
because I already know who everyone is and what's going on because I've
seen most of them before in English. They do speak very fast, and the
deadpan delivery makes it hard to tell which bits are meant to be
funny, but the canned laughter helps. I'm picking up lots and lots of
little phrases and fragments, and I get excited when I understand a
whole chunk at once. I think there are two skills involved in
listening: the first is actually decoding a continuous stream of speech
into its component words, and the second is knowing what those Spanish
words mean. It's the first skill that really benefits from a lot of
listening. What used to be high-speed noise seems to magically
crystallise after a while into well-formed Spanish sentences. Even if
you don't understand the sentences completely, you can get valuable
context to help you guess the words you don't know.

And as he points out, you always get things in context. Certain phrases
and constructions crop up absolutely all the time, and you just learn
them as blocks or templates which you can use to build sentences. If
you start off by learning grammar, and you know past participles are
formed by taking the infinitive stem and adding '-ado' for -AR verbs
and 'ido' for -ER/IR verbs, you might have trouble remembering whether
it's 'he olvidado' or 'he olvidido' for 'I forgot'. You have to
remember which kind of verb the infinitive is and work forwards from
there, and you could still get it wrong. On the other hand, if you
listen to a lot of Spanish, you've probably heard people say 'he
olvidado' a million times, and you never once heard them say 'he
olvidido', so you just know.

It's this 'just knowing' which gives you a big confidence boost. Words,
phrases and sentences arrive in your brain fully-formed and correctly
pronounced, without you having to laboriously construct them from
grammatical rules and then double-check that all the adverbs agree and
so on. Similarly with listening comprehension, after a while you start
understanding things as blocks of meaning, not individual words.
Translating word by word into English is much too slow when people are
speaking at full speed - you need to hear the Spanish, understand
what's being said without mentally working out an English translation,
and immediately be ready to listen to the next bit.

It's a little bit Zen because you need to stop trying so hard to
understand and just let the sounds come in. I could liken it to Magic
Eye for the ears, because it's when you stop struggling and let your
subconscious brain get on with it that it suddenly happens. At first in
flashes, but then in bigger and bigger chunks until you can understand
whole sections of dialogue. When you're not focusing on mentally
translating into English, you've got time to absorb context and body
language and facial expressions which all help convey what's being said."

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