Reading/Writing Fine, Listening/Speaking Awful!

[hedwards]

@imron, We're not going to come to agreement here. Listening skills are reading lips, facial expressions, body language and inferring from context in addition to the literal mechanical process of sounds getting into the ear. And it's unfair to expect anybody that has, or believes they have, poor listening skills to develop them in the absence of the other information that native speakers use to learn.

 

Native speakers don't learn to listen through the radio typically, native speakers typically learn from in person interactions. They have all the context available to them or at least the ability to ask about whatever they don't get.

 

Anyways, I'm sure this is more theory than the OP is really interested in, so I'll leave it at that. But, I'd strongly recommend that you read up on listening skills, because being this literal about it is counterproductive. I was able to skip most of that when I was learning to listen to German broadcasts only because my parents came from German-American communities where there is and was a huge amount of culture that had been brought from German lands by our collective ancestors.

[imron]

Listening skills are reading lips, facial expressions, body language and inferring from context

You are right, we are not going to come in to agreement here.  There is a meaning of "listening skills" which refers to a person who is a "good listener", e.g. someone who listens to what you have to say, shows empathy and reads between the lines of what you are saying and inferring things from context based on body language and so on, but that's completely different from "listening skills" in the context of language learning which require training the brain to be able to process the auditory input stream fast enough.

 

And it's unfair to expect anybody that has, or believes they have, poor listening skills to develop them in the absence of the other information that native speakers use to learn.

I disagree.  Think of it like high altitude training.  Training without those things makes the base skill stronger, and then when the non-aural cues are available your skills will be even better.

[Coys1991]

I watch anime not for lip reading but in hopes of gaining new vocabulary and also just recognizing old words I have learned in past studies.