Language learning depends mostly on three factors, the attitude of the learner, the time available, and learner's attentiveness to the language. If we assume a positive attitude on the part of the learner, and a reasonable and growing attentiveness to the language, and even a method that cultivates the learner's attentiveness, how much time? FSI, the US Foreign Service Institute, divides languages into groups of difficulty for speakers of English:
FSI has 5 levels of proficiency:
On this scale, I would call 2 above basic conversational fluency. FSI research indicates that it takes 480 hours to reach basic fluency in group 1 languages, and 720 hours for group 2-4 languages.If we are able to put in 10 hours a day, then basic fluency in the easy languages should take 48 days, and for difficult languages 72 days. Accounting for days off, this equates to two months or three months time. If you only put in 5 hours a day, it will take twice as long. Is ten hours a day reasonable? It could be. Here is a sample day.8-12: Alternate listening, reading and vocabulary review using LingQ, Anki or some other system.
12-2: rest, exercise, lunch, while listening to the language.
2-3: grammar review
3-4: write
4-5: talk via skype or with locals if in the country
5-7: rest
7-10: relaxation in the language, movies, songs, or going out with friends in the language. depending on availability. To some extent the language needs time to gestate and often things we study today do not click in for months. On the other hand intensity has its own benefits. I have no doubt that someone following this intense program, or something similar, would achieve basic conversational fluency in 2 months for easy languages, and 3 months for difficult languages. To go from level 2 to level 4, or full professional fluency would take quite a bit longer, perhaps twice as long. This reminds me that I wrote something on this a few years ago. If I find it I will post it.
- Group 1: French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swahili
- Group 2: Bulgarian, Burmese, Greek, Hindi, Persian, Urdu
- Group 3: Amharic, Cambodian, Czech, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Lao, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese
- Group 4: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean
FSI has 5 levels of proficiency:
- Elementary proficiency. The person is able to satisfy routine travel needs and minimum courtesy requirements.
- Limited working proficiency. The person is able to satisfy routine social demands and limited work requirements.
- Minimum professional proficiency. The person can speak the language with sufficient structural accuracy and vocabulary to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations on practical, social, and professional topics.
- Full professional proficiency. The person uses the language fluently and accurately on all levels normally pertinent to professional needs.
- Native or bilingual proficiency. The person has speaking proficiency equivalent to that of an educated native speaker.
On this scale, I would call 2 above basic conversational fluency. FSI research indicates that it takes 480 hours to reach basic fluency in group 1 languages, and 720 hours for group 2-4 languages.If we are able to put in 10 hours a day, then basic fluency in the easy languages should take 48 days, and for difficult languages 72 days. Accounting for days off, this equates to two months or three months time. If you only put in 5 hours a day, it will take twice as long. Is ten hours a day reasonable? It could be. Here is a sample day.8-12: Alternate listening, reading and vocabulary review using LingQ, Anki or some other system.
12-2: rest, exercise, lunch, while listening to the language.
2-3: grammar review
3-4: write
4-5: talk via skype or with locals if in the country
5-7: rest
7-10: relaxation in the language, movies, songs, or going out with friends in the language. depending on availability. To some extent the language needs time to gestate and often things we study today do not click in for months. On the other hand intensity has its own benefits. I have no doubt that someone following this intense program, or something similar, would achieve basic conversational fluency in 2 months for easy languages, and 3 months for difficult languages. To go from level 2 to level 4, or full professional fluency would take quite a bit longer, perhaps twice as long. This reminds me that I wrote something on this a few years ago. If I find it I will post it.
I can only speak for myself: Given the body and mind I was dealt, 3 months for Chinese or another level 4 languages (given their difficulty is the same) cannot be done. I realize that our host managed to achieve Chinese fluency, was able to read complicated texts and handwrite in 9 months while courting his future wife at the same time. I know I couldn't achive that, at least not the language part.
Posted by: Friedemann | July 21, 2010 at 08:44 AM
Coco are you as unintelligent in real life as you appear in your comments?
Posted by: Steve Kaufmann | July 21, 2010 at 12:11 PM
That is pretty intense, and it practially requires living in the country.
Posted by: Katie Kelly | July 21, 2010 at 01:00 PM
Katie, I did something similar in Hong Kong where essentially nobody spoke Mandarin (the language I was speaking).
Posted by: Steve Kaufmann | July 21, 2010 at 01:01 PM
Coco is a follower of Benny.
Posted by: Steve Kaufmann | July 21, 2010 at 01:04 PM
You are a self-important gas bag, who loves his own voice.
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:17 PM
Coco has been removed for repeated vulgarity. I do not mind criticism. I can rebut that. But I don't want the comments section here polluted with vulgarity.
Posted by: Steve Kaufmann | July 21, 2010 at 01:18 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:19 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:20 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:20 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:20 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:20 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:20 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:21 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:21 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:21 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:21 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:21 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:21 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:21 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:21 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:22 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:22 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:22 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:22 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:22 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:22 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:28 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:28 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:28 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:28 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:28 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:28 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:28 PM
A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.
Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.
The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.
Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?
Not a hope in hell.
This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.
It’s barely better-than-nothing.
I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.
I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.
Results of thousands of wasted hours?
I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:
* @ hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
* @ yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
* @ permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.
I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.
Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.
Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.
My own disappointment with passive listening
This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.
After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.
The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.
Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)
The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.
I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!
Why is it so popular?
It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.
So why is passive hearing so popular?
In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.
Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)
After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.
It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.
The few benefits
Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.
However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.
Here are some benefits, with some warnings:
* In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
* @ don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
* Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
* @ danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.
Be more active!
I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!
Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.
Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.
Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.
Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.
I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.
So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.
Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!
Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
Posted by: Coco Duani | July 21, 2010 at 01:29 PM
This Coco Duani dude is taking all the fun out of this. I may not agree with everything Benny says, but I do enjoy his writing and I'm open to his view points. But don't be a troll about it. Come on. Very weak.
I wasn't sure exactly what "passive learning industry" Benny was talking about, but it's true, there are a multitude of products out there promising fluency in the matter of months, and all you have to do is just I have no idea, but my experience has shown that you can't just put on a set of head phones for hours in a day and come out of it fluent three months later. It takes a lot of effort. Few people who successfully learn languages would argue against that, and yet, friends ask me time and time again, "What's a good product." They want a magic formula. It just doesn't work that way.
Posted by: Katie Kelly | July 21, 2010 at 01:46 PM
I would argue that passive learning does have its place, but would probably be more effective in the country itself, where you are surrounded and bombarded with sounds and images of the language, and your brain's forced to process them, whether it wants to or not, even when you're relaxing.
Passive learning for me, and by that I mean just having the sound on in the background, is not very helpful. It doesn't hurt, but it doesn't have much of an effect, at least for a language I barely understand anyway. The reason being is that while I'm immersed in whatever activity I'm, I find the noise bothersome, and I turn it off anyway.
Sometimes I'll go for a walk and listen to a podcast I can barely understand, to try to get the gist of it. But then, my listening is hyper active -- meaning not passive at all -- trying to understand what I'm hearing, or my mind goes completely somewhere else and I tune it out. But none of it corresponds to my immediate surroundings. It's not the sounds of the people on the street, standing in line, et cetera.
So yeah, that's my long way of saying I see Benny's point.
Steve, I'm taking a trip to Spain and also France, on my own, to meet distant cousins in both countries. Spanish I know pretty well, so I'm looking forward to the immersion. French I started learning a few months ago. I'm a diligent learner, and I think I told you, I've been fitting in weekly conversation practice (or bi-weekly), just to motivate me to keep at it and to practice what I learn. I definitely see a place for Benny's tips. I haven't bought the "hacking guide" because my hunch says it's common sense, but I can't lie, I find his blog to be a huge source of inspiration, and I think he's got some good stuff to say.
Posted by: Katie Kelly | July 21, 2010 at 01:58 PM
I would argue that passive learning does have its place, but would probably be more effective in the country itself, where you are surrounded and bombarded with sounds and images of the language, and your brain's forced to process them, whether it wants to or not, even when you're relaxing.
Passive learning for me, and by that I mean just having the sound on in the background, is not very helpful. It doesn't hurt, but it doesn't have much of an effect, at least for a language I barely understand anyway. The reason being is that while I'm immersed in whatever activity I'm, I find the noise bothersome, and I turn it off anyway.
Sometimes I'll go for a walk and listen to a podcast I can barely understand, to try to get the gist of it. But then, my listening is hyper active -- meaning not passive at all -- trying to understand what I'm hearing, or my mind goes completely somewhere else and I tune it out. But none of it corresponds to my immediate surroundings. It's not the sounds of the people on the street, standing in line, et cetera.
So yeah, that's my long way of saying I see Benny's point.
Steve, I'm taking a trip to Spain and also France, on my own, to meet distant cousins in both countries. Spanish I know pretty well, so I'm looking forward to the immersion. French I started learning a few months ago. I'm a diligent learner, and I think I told you, I've been fitting in weekly conversation practice (or bi-weekly), just to motivate me to keep at it and to practice what I learn. I definitely see a place for Benny's tips. I haven't bought the "hacking guide" because my hunch says it's common sense, but I can't lie, I find his blog to be a huge source of inspiration, and I think he's got some good stuff to say.
Posted by: Katie Kelly | July 21, 2010 at 01:58 PM
I do not listen to things that I do not understand. I will listen to things that I do not fully understand but then I will read the transcript and save the words and phrases I need to learn. This is effective.
I do not see what Benny's point is. Is it just that having the radio on in the background will not help you all that much? That is not a big point requiring a lengthy post.
Posted by: Steve Kaufmann | July 21, 2010 at 03:25 PM
Benny needs a lenghty post to tell you he's going to write a short post he also likes to use a lot of links to send you back to previous blog posts, there are normally at least three per post that trackback to his other posts that say the same things.
He is a bit long winded for no reason (in his comments too) but I go with Katie in that I do think he says some things that make sense, the real problem is that he just hasn't learned languages the way he claims is the best way.
I'm a natural reader so for me I'll stick to mostly lingqing and reading. I should be talking a bit more though ;(
Posted by: Blindside70 | July 22, 2010 at 06:40 PM
If we are able to put in 10 hours a day, then basic fluency in the easy languages should take 48 days, and for difficult languages 72 days. Accounting for days off, this equates to two months or three months time. If you only put in 5 hours a day, it will take twice as long.
It would probably take considerably longer than twice as long at 5 hours per day. Remember Ebbinghaus' Forgetting Curve? The longer you take to learn, the more yuu forget.
Posted by: Kevin Geoghegan | July 23, 2010 at 05:07 PM
Kevin, I do not agree with the effect of Ebbinghaus's Curve on language learning. Language learning is not just a matter of remembering and forgetting. It is a matter of developing a series of patterns related to language. In my experience these just take time to develop, and continue to gestate even if we leave the language alone for a while. So I think the intensity benefit would wash with the gestation period and the results would be similar.
Posted by: Steve Kaufmann | July 23, 2010 at 05:32 PM
@Steve Kauffman, please delete the extra posts by Coco. They make for a very unpleasant reading experience on this page.
I don't think there are hard and fast rules for learning language that apply to everyone. I can certainly attest to passively learning a couple of languages. I never made an effort to learn them, but listened to people speaking them for years. Now I understand them well enough, even though I can't speak them to save my life... :)
I think there are multiple components to learning and, depending on what you want to do with a language, a particular type of learning might work perfectly for you (while it may not be appropriate for another person).
Posted by: RKahendi | April 14, 2012 at 08:39 AM
I am not in favour of deleting people's opinions. On the other hand these comments of Coco's are so long that I doubt that many people read them. I haven't.
Posted by: Steve Kaufmann | April 14, 2012 at 08:54 AM