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i don't know why i try to practice listening by watching movies everyday but i still cannot understand and cannot pick up the sentences what they are talking about in the movies. So Please suggest how to do to get better in listenning and speaking skill.
Quote:
Originally Posted by litda
***** NOT A TEACHER *****
(1) I do not know whether it is true, but some people advise:
(a) First, choose movies that really interest you.
(b) Second, just enjoy the movie. Do not try to understand
every word. In other words, get the "feel" of the movie.
(c) Let your ears get accustomed to the rhythm of the
English language.
(d) Some famous people have said that they learned English
by watching American movies and TV shows. If they did it,
you can, too.
GOOD LUCK
*****NOT A TEACHER *****
Not a teacherQuote:
Originally Posted by litda
You'd better watch any film or any TV show with English subtitles so for you to pick up new words and understand better. I personally watch films or TV shows without any, though this requires an advanced level.
Its good to use a headphone to clearly get the words used in dialogs.
* Not a teacher *
Hello, Litda.
Don't worry too much about your listening skills. It takes time to build up. If you keep on practising, you will be fine.
I am a language learner who had the same worries a few years back. I hope my experiences can help you.
In 2008 I secured a position in a training school specialized in Cambridge Youth English, where I had an opportunity to observe young kids as to how they study languages. By languages, I mean both Chinese and English. Growing up in a country, people will find it so natural that they can use their language or languages. People tend to forget that they were not born as the users of a specific language, rather, they were bred so. They just don't remember what happened when they were kids.
In fact, it takes parents a very long time to teach their kids to say the simplest words, let alone sentences. In my case, my mom spent at least twelve months to help me understand and say MOM. In other words, as a language learner, It tooks me at least 350 days to be able to understand and say a single word.
As adults, we don't have to go through what we went through while learning our mother tones as kids. What we can learn from it is that however much we know about this world, however smart we may be, it will still take us a lot of time to get over the first stage. Kids get over it before they understand the meaning of failures, boredom, and so forth. Wo don't have the luxury. What we should learn from kids is that we all will finally be able to use a specific language so long as we practise is like kids, i.e. regardless of all the negative feelings which may dawn on us during the process.
I started to work on my listen in early 2006. I would listen to Bloomberg at the first until two British friends introduced BBC to me in April. In the first two years, I used to listen to radio on line on average five to eight hours a day. However, in the first year, no obvious progress was made. The biggest achievement was that at the end of the year I was able to tell one programme finished and another one started.
I didn't care at that time and kept on listen to it. Looking back from now, I can see clearly every three months or so my listening would make a major progress. First, I was able to tell whether the presenter was a man or woman. That's a big achievement back then. Before that, all what they said was nothing but white noise in the background. Then, I could tell the genre of the programme. After that, I became able to understand the news. I could hear them in China and have been interested in world affairs ever since I was a boy. The combination of these two factors made news the easiest genre to me. And it went on until one day I found that I didn't have to pay much attention to what they were saying on the radio to get them.
At the moment, I'd say my English language listening is not worse than that of my Chinese when I was a middle school student. I can play video games and listen to BBC programmes and still tell the gist of it afterwards. I can understand what people say as long as I can understand it when it's written down.
I was lucky in a way for my ex-girfriend had dumped me. The reasons I decided to work on my language skills were that I needed something positive to cheer me up and, the process of learning a foreign language is, at least at the beginning, really boring and painful and it did make me feel better every time I took a rest and inevitably thought about her.
As a conclusion, I would say everybody can do it as long as they spend a stupid amount of time, as many people would think, on it and keep on practising regardless of all failures until they can use it properly.
So many people have asked me what they should do so that they can finally understand radio programmes. I always give people the same advice. However, most of them are too smart to spend too much time on this. Instead, they would spend too much money on various lessons and schemes, which are said to be able to help make people master a foreign language like magic.
One thing I didn't do well was that I should have worked on my reading at the same time. I am generally a lazy guy. That's really bad. In the first two years I only listened. Had I spent one hour every day to do some reading and master five words, it wouldn't have taken four years for me to feel confident about my listening skills. In fact, I had to read a lot since late 2007 because I found that I could hear clearly what people said on radio and write them down without the ability of knowing what they really meant.
I hope this will be helpful.
Ricahard
Thanks for your advice, it help me a lot.