listening skills assessments?

[markpete]

tl;dr -- looking for objective listening skills assessment to use as pre- and post-test

 

Hi, all.  I've started working on my listening skills in particular lately, because I think it's the weakest part of my language abilities.  But I don't want to do this for three months and end up not knowing whether I'm improving enough to make it a worthwhile investment of time.

 

The skills that I want to improve are 1) my ability to pick up and distinguish sounds and tones; and 2) my ability to process what I'm hearing quickly enough to keep up in a conversation.

 

I'd like to avoid making it a de facto test of my vocabulary at the same time.  (I totally understand that many people will say that a large vocabulary is a necessary part of being able to understand what's being said, but in this case I want to separate that out and just test the skills I mention above.  So ideally I'd learn the vocab used ahead of time or test using words I already know.)

 

I'd also like it to be as objective as possible (e.g. something that results in hard numbers rather than me thinking to myself "hmm, I think I mostly understood that... 4 out of 5 stars).

 

Any ideas / suggestions / approaches others have taken?

 

Thanks!

 

   Mark

[imron]

Read this post.  Then read the follow ups.

 

You'll need to find other content than what was linked in that thread because the links to the content are long dead.  I like 锵锵三人行, which has no subtitles (so pure listening only), but does have transcripts in the sidebar next to the main video player (audio only versions of the show are available if you search the web).

 

If you do it daily, 3 months will be enough to see noticeable improvement.

 

In terms of hard numbers, you can measure how much audio you can get through in a set period of time e.g. when you start out trying this it might take you an hour to go through 5 minutes of audio.  3 months in, it might take you an hour to go through 20 minutes of audio.

 

If you're downloading content to study offline, you can also go back and see what you were listening to at the beginning and see how much easier it is to understand and how much more of it you can listen to.

 

There will likely be a ton of vocabulary learning when doing this, but I don't think you can effectively separate that out.

 

You don't need to put that much effort in to learning unknown vocab though and could limit it to just and handful of words a day that you really learn well and for the remaining unknown words you just look them up in the dictionary to understand the meaning but then don't worry about trying to remember them.

 

Don't be concerned about missing out on useful words if you do this.  By definition, if a word is useful then it will appear again soon enough on another day and you can learn it properly then.  If it doesn't appear again on another day then it isn't useful to you yet and so you can safely ignore it.

[markpete]

imron, thanks for this!  I've looked through that post from time to time, and there's some good stuff in it.  I just took a second look at the listening course roddy recommended back in the day.  On his recommendation, I bought the courses (like 10 years ago), but even for the beginning ones, I only knew about 10-20% of their vocab lists and didn't get very far.  Now it's like 80%, so more than good enough for me to dive in just for the listening practice.  And this:

 

Quote

Whenever I don’t understand a section I have little method: rewind listen to the section 1 or 2 more times, use the pause to try to break up the section word by word, and if all else fails and I still don't understand, THEN I look at the script. After seeing the script I listen to the section again all the way through to fully understand it. 

 

is exactly what I've been doing for the past couple weeks, so glad to see that I'm following in others' successful footsteps.  (Although I'm using much easier materials for now-- readings from text books and Chinese Breeze and the like.)

 

I like the idea of tracking how long it takes me to accomplish the task, so I'll do that and hopefully see improvement, but I also decided I'd try using standardized tests as a before-and-after.  So this week I'll take the listening section of two HSK3 practice exams (the highest level for which I already know at least 90% of the words) and I signed up to take a listening skills test through a place called ProFluent, which gives you a standardized ACTFL rating.  I'll try these again in three months and see if I've moved the needle.

 

As always, thanks for the good tips!

 

Cheers, 

   Mark