I’d like to share some insights I’ve had during the 18 months of working pretty intensively with audio.
First of all, I’d make the distinction between listening and hearing. Hearing is involuntary, while listening involves conscious orientation. Listening also requires a tremendous level of of cognitive activity. For example, the brain is forced to filter out the vast majority of the of the peripheral data it hears - we just don’t need to focus on most of the sound that surrounds us. This is because the brain has a limited capacity for conscious attention - we can really only concentrate on one thing at a time.
Attention is selective, and it is only partly under the control of the individual. To get through to a listener with a language lesson, we have to get past the brain’s natural spam filter. If our message isn’t engaging, your brain will simply filter it out. (Remember in college, you may have wanted to listen to a lecture, but the professor didn’t really connect, so you couldn’t concentrate on it.) To my mind, the secret sauce in producing effective audio content lies in making it message-centered and engaging. (But that’s enough, er, trade secrets for one day!)
A second observation: Although it may not feel like it, listening is an incredibly active process. It involves guesswork, inference, split-second parsing, and patching together dozens of clues in the course of even the shortest conversation. Your brain apprehends and decodes incoming messages at up to 5 words per second. It draws on your knowledge of the language, of your interlocutor, of the surroundings, and of the world generally, to piece together the complexity and nuance of conversation, all at lightening speed. Remember too, that people don’t usually speak logically or systematically in real life. As listeners, we have to factor in ellipsis, mistakes, weird pronunciation, or general incoherence. Body language and other things add to the difficulty. And as if that weren’t enough, we have to use the technique known as ‘phonological looping’.
Looping is interesting, so let me offer an example. It’s like holding a sentence in suspended animation until it’s completed in order to make sense of it - retroactively. The best example of looping that I know of comes from Mark Twain’s The Awful German Language. Germans are the world’s masters of looping, as evidenced by this paragraph from Twain’s essay. Here, he translates a complex sentence that puts the main verb at the very end. The reader has to do some serious, retoactive looping here from the beginning in order to find out the meaning. Here Twain is talking about the use of the verb abreisen, to leave or depart. Notice how it seems to take forever before we get to see the predicate:
“The trunks being now ready, he after kissing his mother and sisters, and once more pressing to his bosom his adored Gretchen, who, dressed in simple white muslin, with a single tuberose in the ample folds of her rich brown hair, had tottered feebly down the stairs, still pale from the terror and excitement of the past evening, but longing to lay her poor aching head yet once again upon the breast of him whom she loved more dearly than life itself, DEPARTED.”
(Actually, I made one tiny change to the original, to better illustrate the idea.) Looping is an amazing feat of cognitive gymnastics that we all do all the time and without conscious awareness.
Both these observations have implications for what we do here and how we do it, but this post is already long enough so I won’t go into that. I’d be very interested in your thoughts, however. What do you think about listening and learning?
Btw, in recent weeks Dave Lancashire has been some new and exciting audio developments. We’ll be putting some of these observations to work! Watch this space.
Ken Carroll
中文 Chinese
Leviathan Says:
June 6th, 2007 at 11:39 pm
Hey great entry!
I think Background music and sounds are useful for the brains association with complex languages.
more so because i have a bad “Short - to long term memory”!
谢谢你
Jimmy B Says:
June 7th, 2007 at 1:01 am
Thank you for the LOOPING concept: I had been using a similar analogy to explain the German language to friends, but this one is just brilliant.
It’s also a fascinating “cultural tell” about Germans: You don’t dare interrupt their long long sentences, or you won’t know what they were really meaning to say. The structure of the language discourages second-guessing and interruption.
I’m looking forward to seeing how you integrate this into your lessons!
jpv206 Says:
June 7th, 2007 at 7:30 am
Since I’ve first started using chinesepod, I’ve been thinking about the difference in listening skills between *input* (whether in my classroom or on your podcast) and live communication “on-the-fly.”
Since I was trained in the communicative method, I’ve always believed that input has to be authentic as possible, and always in an authentic context; the student can then bring all their paralinguistic communication strategies to bear.
No matter the age of my student (I teach Spanish) I always find myself having to coach my monolingual students on how to listen, how to take notes, how to remember, because apparently these skills are counterintuitive to some people.
So listening skills are an interesting problem, especially in terms of the podcast. I think you’ve been successful at creating engaging, message-centered themes. I remember once when I was learning French, and Berlitz wanted me to memorize “where is the spark-plug?” Yikes; not message centered! Où est la bugie?
As far as input is concerned, I think the page where you can click on the isolated phrases is golden. As I’ve said before, I’m a little annoyed when the pronunciation is too careful, artificially slow, and the natural intonation of the phrase is lost. However, I do think slow-talk has it’s place: in *clarification*, rather than in input. And the ability to hear the phrase again and again, coupled with the Ken-and-Jenny explanations, is really the strength of the program.
Anyway, one thing to think about: in the European languages that I’ve studied (French, Spanish, Italian), as a cultural tendency, people tend to talk in paragraphs in contrast to the simple exchanges of, say, chinesepod or my own American English. This requires an entirely different set of listening strategies than what I use than when I’m speaking English with another American. A lot of what I have to do is to get the speaker to slow down; not in terms of words per minute, but in terms of main ideas per minute. As a language learner, I need a second or two between each sentence in order to loop and process.
In any case, it seems like Chinese people talk in short sentences with plenty of breaks, the way Americans do, so I’m thankful for that. It took me a long time to realize that French people expect you (culturally) to interrupt and interject, and if you don’t, they will just keep talking.
Contrast that with Koreans and northern Mexicans, who try to get away with saying as little as possible….
Anyway… were we talking about listening strategies? My blood sugar must be getting low….
Michael Butler Says:
June 7th, 2007 at 8:57 am
Ken,
It occured to me while I was reading this posting that listening and speaking are very different skills and not as interconnected as I once thought.
If, as I increasing believe, we create meaning in multi-unit, lexical phrases but, as you said, we apprehend spoken meaning by rapidly parsing single units (up to 5 words per second) then we are doing vastly different things.
Efficient speaking means pasting (units of words together- my terminology) whereas listening means parsing (in real time).
In any event, isn’t the single most important design element for listening tasks (absolutely must have) comprehensibility?
But then again, perhaps with multiple listening opportunities (and lots of scaffolding) this issue recedes in importance.
coljac Says:
June 7th, 2007 at 9:14 am
Hi Ken,
Yes, you’re right on the money; it’s good to remind us of this fact. One of the challenges to using a product like cpod/spanishsense is to make sure you use them at a time when you can actively listen. The portability of a podcast is a big “selling point”, but of course, as you point out, you’re not going to get as much from a cpod lesson when you’re driving as when you are sitting home concentrating. This is something I have to remind myself of. (I often listen while exercising, which I feel may be less than 100% effective.) Thankfully, Cpod is engaging enough that maintaining concentration is much easier than with many alternatives.
As a German speaker I love the Twain essay. I don’t think it really takes a lot of practice to get the hang of these sorts of German sentences - I think our brains do, indeed, have an innate capability to parse them. It’s worth pointing out, though, that a sentence with 12 subordinate clauses is more common on the page than in conversation. Germans don’t talk like Nietzsche writes, thankfully.
Joon Says:
June 7th, 2007 at 11:22 am
Some good points there. On the topic of innovation and Chinesepod, check out my post at the China Economic Review Editors’ Journal about language arbitrage in China http://www.chinaeconomicreview.....-of-babel/
Joon Says:
June 7th, 2007 at 11:25 am
Some good points there. On the topic of languague and innovation, check out my post at the China Economic Review’s blog on the business of language arbitrage in China.
http://www.chinaeconomicreview.....-of-babel/
James Theron Says:
June 7th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
I was recently thinking of what coljac mentioned. As portable as CPod podcasts are, I just don’t find them effective when driving a car or doing other seemingly simple things that require a fair amount of concentration.
Even on a bus, I cannot effectively study my Chinese lessons. However, while commuting on a subway or light-rail (as long as I get a seat) it’s pretty easy to study–except for the times I’ve missed my stop.
Ken Carroll Says:
June 7th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
I think you can listen to the lessons pretty much anywhere. I like the idea of getting away from the computer for that. You won’t be able to give your full attention to the input when driving, but you can still get a lot from it. (I guess that depends on how you drive!) Of course lolling on a deck-chair on the Gold Coast beach, shades on, under an umbrella, is probably optimal in terms of concentration, but unfortunately, that’s not always possible.
Jeremy Uriz Says:
June 7th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
After 6 weeks of the practice plan I can say that my listening comprehension is better than my speaking. I understand much of what Vera has to say but struggle to squeeze out the simplest response.
I listen to a podcast at least once a day driving to work. I don’t put any expectations on myself to have remembered much of it. It’s like an introduction. The next time I listen (on my lunch break, when I can concentrate) I’ve already heard the dialog, even if it was peripheral. Repetition, repetition, repetition…
Ken Carroll Says:
June 8th, 2007 at 12:07 am
Michael,
You’ve opened a can of worms. Beleive me…
I beleive listening and speaking are different skills, but are joined at the neuron: Both rely ultimately on a cache of acquired items, somewhere in the reticlulated folds we call our brains.
To your other point: Parsing is real, but it’s done in collaboration with a multitude of other activites. (I mentioned some of them above.) We have the ability to do it at an alarmign rate, but we generally don’t need to rely entirely on parsing because the information from the environment (and other factors) usually suffices. (Most conversational communication is said to be body language!)I doubt if we could use parsing alone to tell much about the reality of two human beings arguing over the price of fish, but it certainly provides some clues.
Two things occur to me at this point. First, as Eric Lennenberg pointed out as far back as the 60s, all speech, regardless of language, tends to be uttered in short bursts of emphasis, rather than a consistent stream. (Just read that last sentence again, pasuing on the commas, and you’ll see what I mean.)These bursts are called intonation units, and they exist for a reason: respiration. (Ouch!) It could well be that we decode in lexical units because we encode in lexical units, and we do that because we have to breathe! (Lantian, where are you?)
The second thing that has been on my mind is actually pretty scary. In fact, I almost didn’t dare write it in the original post, but hey! I quote from Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson
“.. the linguistic meaning of an uttered sentence falls short of encoding what he speaker means: it merely helps the audience infer what he means.”
At best, all of this is probablistic.
I’ll let you do the inferring now as to why this is potentially so scary!
Ken Carroll
Clever Dick Says:
June 8th, 2007 at 7:07 am
Speaking of Germans, it was Hitler who was actually the master of looping. His evil speeches from the balconey at the height of the Third Reich were intense and passionately evoked meaning only after he had completely finished his lengthy diatribes. (Of course, people didn’t dare interrupt him in the middle of his sentences for fear of the consequences). This was his one true admirable trait. If only he had invented GermanPod instead of trying to conquer the World…what a sad waste of lingusitic talent !
Jonathan Says:
June 8th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Joon,
Nice editorial on the link you posted. I will be very interested to see that concept of mobile language learning play out with Nokia.
Ken,
James touches on the environmental aspects of e-learning I was going on about in my letter.
The “can of worms” quote you almost didn’t mention, may be true in ‘Theory’. Let’s invite them to comment on it AFTER a generation of Chinesepod listeners are functional or fluent as a result of our learning of the Mandarin ‘Encoding’ process. Right now, after less than two years in existence, we’re just a community of thousands of enthusiastic, leading-edge, maybe even addicted participants in the Chinesepod ‘encoding’ process. In just a few short years, we’re going to be a global village of HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of functional Mandarin Speakers.
Will we infer the meanings of the Mandarin speaker’s sentence correctly every time? No, of course not. But I’ve been speaking English for over 30 years, and I still misunderstand people all the time.
The bottom line is any time you have two people communicating, there are layers of blocks that cloud meaning. Language is just one of the separators. Intent, emotion, subtext, purpose, urgency, context, Fruedian needs, wandering minds. You name it-we navigate it to communicate with one another, whether we know it or not.
Jonathan
TaiPan
Ken Carroll Says:
June 8th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
TaiPan,
You tell ‘em! I think your avatar says it all. we will prevail.
Ken Carroll
Jonathan Says:
June 9th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Ken,
Much of verbal, written and stand-up comedy relies on the audience’s natural function of looping and contextualizng all data as it comes in. Jokes depend on the predictive quality of the mind, to make you laugh.
Think of any punchline; it’s probably funny because it broke some structure the comedian led you to believe existed before the last line, or the switch, or the reversal.
For Example:
…um… hmm… if I knew any clean jokes, I’d print them here.
You get the idea… right?
jonathan
AuntySue Says:
June 9th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
There’s a big difference between what you mean to say, and what you mean to convey. In early language learning, we are only concerned with saying what we mean to say. Once that’s down, we can look at what we convey when we say it. That could start as early as Lesson Two, e.g. when you learn what the words ni hao really express. So I suppose we’re really learning two spoken languages (or whatever you call them) at once. That must be why grammar and culture are usually taught at the same time, to assist these understandings, except that they are often overdone and become ends in themselves.
AuntySue Says:
June 9th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
“early language learning” should be “traditional style beginner’s language learning”. Aargh, my kingdom for an eraser!
Henning Says:
June 10th, 2007 at 4:06 am
Coming back from a conference I want to add that even the most relevant content blurres fades away from conciousness if it is presented in a dull manner. On the other hand even some rather fad research results can enforce high degrees of listening when the presenter is enthusiastic. This is why I like Chinesepod.
And with regard to the German language I want to, after some back-and-forth pondering regarding the lack of reference to those complementive means of complexityenhancingplaceholdercompoundlatinismnoun- constructions, and under the notion of the similarities between the Germanic languages English and German, add that this holds only in certain settings (conferences!) and in some minor degree true in the written world, as in spoken communication we usually do not know where we started anyway with our sentences which doesn’t really matter as actually nobody cares because just in Chinese 90% of the information is infered from context.
Henning Says:
June 10th, 2007 at 4:08 am
Oh no, that could be easily misunderstood: Of course CPod content is relevant. But it is the enthusiasm that makes it smooth to listen to it - and thereby effective.