Listening Immersion

Listening immersion refers to consuming content in your target language for the purpose of building listening comprehension. This may take the form of audio visual content such as movies or audio only content such as podcasts.


Generally speaking audio visual content is easier because the visuals provide context that aids comprehension.


Two Types of Listening Immersion:


Active Listening:


Active listening refers to consuming content in your target language with full attention. This means you actively try to understand what is being said without relying on textual aids, such as subtitles.


Passive Immersion:


Passive listening refers to having content playing in the background as you go about your day. Preferably you should have already listened to this content actively. For example, let's say you watch an episode of a T.V  show in your target language. You can then have that episode playing in the background as you do other things. The idea is that even though you are not paying full attention to the material, it is still being processed by your brain on some level.


I have found passive listening to be a mixed bag. It is difficult to quantify just how much it affects your language ability. On the one hand it helps keep you immersed in your target language as you go about your day. But it can also be a distraction. Whether or not to pursue passive listening seriously is probably best left to individual’s discretion. However, I think it is best to start with two hours of passive listening and adjust the duration as you see fit.


Listening Immersion; My approach:



My personal language learning goals are skewed towards developing reading comprehension. As such my approach to listening immersion is decidedly a little lax.  


One of the biggest challenges I constantly struggle with is finding the right balance between reading and listening. I personally try to maintain a 70:30 split with my immersion. This means that if I have two hours to spend on immersion on a given day, I try to spend 1hr 24mts on reading and 36 minutes on active listening.


I used to aim for a minimum of four hours of passive listening in the beginning. Recently however, I only do 30 minutes on average, because as my listening comprehension has increased I found that passive listening has become a distraction.


Conclusion


This wraps it up for listening immersion.  In the next post, I will cover the Migaku Kanji Addon which helps better integrate kanji learning with sentence mining.

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