Video Message for Benny The Irish Polyglot: Passive Listening

[MrScotchpie]

I think this debate about passive v active learning misses one vital point: Where the learner lives.

Like myself, Benny is European and if we are learning say French, we are only a short distance from native speakers. As such speaking straight away, throwing yourself into the language and surrounding yourself with it, is easy to do and probably the best way to learn.

If however, you live further away, passive learning is sometimes the only option, and therefore the best option for you.

[gaoxinglangblog]

i do heaps of passive listening to memorise words and phrases. i listen to these heaps to learn them

[BaddestJournalism]

you look like leo dicaprio

[Codylangaugesblog]

@BaddestJournalism LOL, I get that a lot.

[mowgli123456789]

the way i understood what benny was saying about passive learning is this..

that it is helpfull if you combine it with some active time of reviewing what you've heard.

i dont think he disscredits it as much as you think. I think he just got so sick of people thinking they could learn without putting any active reviewing time in that he went the complete oposite way with it.

[Stealthanugrah]

@gildedmonk I did the same thing as you, but as I said, I listened in some parts. It's like when u download a torrent, it comes in bits and pieces in no particular order, but in the end you get the 100% mark. I can still recite certain dialogues. I did passive listening too.

But there's a difference, listening is paying attention, passive listening is just hearing, when u pay attention, then that isn't passive anymore. Catch my drift? I'm with irishpolyglot on this one.

[Stealthanugrah]

@gildedmonk Think about that logically. If you play it for about a month, I think you would at least catch yourself listening to one part of it every once in awhile. and soon after listening to each of these parts, you would have compiled them and memorized the whole thing. But I think what we need to learn is how to speak a language not memorize a dialogue, which would be the equivalent of memorizing a physics lecture. One can memorize and learn nothing.

[WaterFor3st]

And now that I've gotten into language, I notice when kids speak. How they don't even know the English alphabet well and can't read or anything, yet they can speak a fairly good amount of English and communicate with anyone. It's amazing.

[WaterFor3st]

Some people may not care for passive listening, but passive listening is one of my favorite things to do for language learning. I mean, the reason I want to learn the language (German) is because I like how it sounds. So I think it would be great to actually listen to it. I don't have to stress myself out or force myself to know it. All I do is listen and the more I listen, the more I'm familiar with it. I love it. Sometimes I even listen to it when I'm sleep.

[Kaytube19]

great video! When I start learning my first foreign language on my own, I will definitely start-off the process with passive listening to help me gain a feel and rhythm for the language. (I mean what you're saying makes sense because isn't that how we all learn our first/ native languages?!)

[WaterFor3st]

@Kaytube19 exactly.

[newstylles]

Man this was such a great vid. Thanks for giving your input on passive learning

[Codylangaugesblog]

@gildedmonk I can recite many of my dialogs as well.

[AndreR241]

As you said, listening only doesn't work. You might memorize the sentences perfectly and you might be able to repeat without any accent, but you don't bet the meaning beyond them. To get the meaning, you have to look the words up in a dictionary. You don't have to work so much on the grammar because grammar is something that works in patterns and you start to guess how it works while listening. I tried to study the English grammar in school but it didn't work.

[AndreR241]

@AndreR241 After that I tried to really understand the grammar by translating it. I tried to reconstruct the rules of the grammar by backwards engineering and it worked pretty well. The reason for that is that you actually understand what you are doing instead of just cramming the stuff into your brain. It's a big difference between memorizing thousands of words and sentences or really understanding a language.

[meyiyiyi55]

listening to another language is how my cranium takes it in.the more i listen the more i learn.

[alkantre]

It would seem I engage in passive learning much the same way you do. One must work with graded and manageable segments--I am afraid watching television in Thai could onlly give me headaches, and the same with any other unfamiliar lang. The main idea is to get the language into your head. Getting the prosody and syntactical patterns can be far more important than getting the total meaning--and your type of passive learning works well here, believe me.

[loki2504]

Cody ! You're absolutely right !!! We need to listen over and over to the same stuff when we're at a beginner's stage ! Otherwise your pronunciation is going to be off and your level will just be very bad... When you reach intermediate level you can listen to podcast, radio, tv etc. I don't know which level he wants to reach but if you really want to reach fluency, Steve, Laoshu,me, Luca etc will always listen xDDD Listening over and over is so important !!!!

[loki2504]

Listening= learn like a kid ! Best method !!!!!!! I never understood Benny ! anyway, you can't become fluent in any tonal language without listening !

[irishpolyglot]

Thanks a million for the video Cody!

Repetition of the same content sounds more promising than listening to the radio or podcasts. I would personally find that quite annoying to hear the same dialogue over and over again, but I can see how it has potential. I'll try it with Hungarian (I do have the books & audio you have too!) and let you know how it goes!

Learning while you sleep seems like pseudoscience to me. I'm trying to get people more active with their languages so I will not promote it

[loki2504]

@irishpolyglot which level do you want to reach in thai? I just wonder because resources are quite limited for thai...

[FluentCzech]

Wow! By great coincidence I wrote almost exactly the same thing on Benny's blog. In short, radio or TV in the background is noise. What you are talking about Cody, though, is a different form of listening, where you are actively choosing the content (unlike TV and radio) and are repeating it dozens of times. That repetition of controlled content certainly does work. The part about listening in your sleep is more controversial.

[irishpolyglot]

@FluentCzech Agreed. There is some potential for constantly repeating the same audio over and over again. Although I'd call this quite inefficient. Actively listening to and repeating the audio aloud (and perhaps using some memory techniques) would take 5 minutes of your time and you'd learn just as well in a potential 2 hour repeated listening session.

I'm not a fan of this concept of learning a language "for free" with no work. I'll continue to encourage people to be more active.

[Codylangaugesblog]

@irishpolyglot I agree that active learning is definitely a faster way to learn, but I like to make use of most of my time, so when I am doing chores or whatnot, I listen to audio.

[irishpolyglot]

@Codylangaugesblog If you enjoy listening while doing those chores then who am I to stop you :) If it's fun, keep it up! I'm just doubting its usefulness. I think 5 minutes of focus will give the same result as 2 hours of not paying attention to noise gradually sinking in.

Anthony (@fluentczech) made an excellent point in his comment on my blog that one unfortunate consequence worth considering may be that your brain learns to associate the foreign language with noise you can ignore.

[loki2504]

@irishpolyglot For me, it works because I learn like child ! You learn like an adult, maybe it works for you but not for certain persons.

[irishpolyglot]

@loki2504 Children do NOT learn by passive listening. If you have children you would see how much they are actively paying attention. The ease at which they do this does not degrade from the fact that it's active.

[storebror21]

@irishpolyglot I have to agree with you. If by 'passive' it means listening without paying attention, then you'll learn nothing. If it means listening to the language attentively and trying to make sense of it but not doing anything else (ie making notes etc), then it's not really passive, is it?

[irishpolyglot]

@storebror21 agreed!

[loki2504]

@irishpolyglot Do you believe you can learn a tonal language (like thai) without passive listening?

[irishpolyglot]

@loki2504 I think it's clear from my article that I think passive listening (as I've described it) is a big waste of time. You can learn tonal languagse by ACTIVELY paying attention. What Cody has suggested here seems half-way between passive/active to me.

I got a decent command over Thai tones (see the video I made in Thai to check - it's not perfect, but many have told me that my tones are pretty good despite time invested) with active feedback. Not by having noise play at me all day long.

[cxkozel]

große Video cody Ich stimme passives Lernen ist eine Methode, die ich verwenden

[nihongonojonathan]

Everything gets better with passive listening ... I learned english this way, now I'm doing the same for japanese n german ... If it worked before why not now ?

[gottsein234]

so much gets lost in the translation and i dont want to listen to it because im afraid it will mess me up

[gottsein234]

neue deutsche härte jeder tag und nacht ARBEIT ZU DEN STERNEN UND WIEDER ZURÜCK! i dont really think listening to stuff as a sleep works but i do it anyway all i listen to is german music (sometimes in extremo in other languages and i do like the russian band slot but not to often) now just bought silbermond DVD on amazon today cant wait for that shit to show up i love german music hard and soft dont matter i hate it when german bands to english versions of there songs like LaFee and Oomph! now

[19fas88]

i personally love blindly listening to radio, movies, shows, etc. I see zero harm in doing that. However, you do at some point have to translate what you're hearing. Also, if you watch a lot of sci-fi movies, whether you watch the same movie or a hundred different movies, you're going to get a lot of crossover.

[jmichaelrout]

There is a character limit, sorry. I just wanted to say that while there is no evidence that hypnopædia works, it does make sense that one could learn a little while sleeping. Sleep proceeds through several cycles, with near consciousness being cycled through a few times (alpha waves I think) - this is where one would have the greatest ability to 'learn'. I've certainly had vivid dreams while some foreign language was playing in the background.

[jmichaelrout]

I've found this method works for me. I usually only listen to content about 2-3 times though but lots of DIFFERENT content, then look at the text later like you suggested. I let the dialogues rust away from my memory then visit them later. If there are still any unkowns, then they are probably extremely low-frequency words, but if I take time to use these in my writing that usually cements them.

What's your opinion of the Teach Yourself Swahili?