Optimal daily listening levels?

[WoAiJolinTsai]

Is there such thing as listening to too much Chinese in a day?

As of now, I've only studied Chinese for 7 months, but I'm really into it and have been meeting my tutor 4 times a week over the summer. I listen to language tapes all the time now it seems.

Is there such thing as too much listening? Today I probably listened to the same 3 minute audio file atleast 50 times, and then I listened to some Chinesepod lessons for another couple hour. Am I doing more harm than good? I'm gonna have alot of free time on my hands for the next month until my semester starts again and I wanna know the best way to utilize it.

Thanks!

[roddy]

What did you actually do for those 50 repititions. If you just had it on in the background while reading a book, it probably didn't do you a great deal of good.

I'd set yourself tasks for each listening - something like . . .

1st - Get a sense of what the piece is about.

2nd: Try to pick out keywords. If you don't know them, try and transcribe them for dictionary look-up later

3rd - Try to guess the meaning of those keywords from context, then look up in the dictionary to check (and hope you transcribed them right)

4th - Paraphrase the main points, using the new vocab

5th - Record yourself echoing the speakers and listen back to where you are going wrong.

etc, etc, etc.

Really, there's a million things you can do. I think someone once said that 5 minutes of audio could provide enough material for three hours of classroom activity, and while that might be a bit excessive a bit of imagination can go a long way. Say you want to practice question structures - if the guy on the tape says 'I went shopping yesterday', you pause the tape and say 'What did you do yesterday', that kind of stuff.

I wouldn't say there is such a thing as too much listening, but it would be possible to either go past a point of diminishing returns due to fatigue or boredom (or just the fact that there's nothing left to usefully learn from it), or to risk an unbalanced skill set by neglecting reading, etc (which some people opt to do, but it should be a decision rather than an accident)

See also some ideas for effective radio listening and ways to develop listening skills

[pattifranklin]

The previous reply has some good advice, and really there are lots of ways to raise your listening skills. One word of advice would be to use moderation in all things. You may be on fire now, but where will you be in two weeks when you feel burnt out? Set a pace and stick with it for a while- whatever the method of studying may be. After a few weeks, re-evaluate and see if you need to step it up or tone it down.

Good luck

[wrbt]

That's what I was thinking pattifranklin... I've gone on extreme listening crazes too and they're almost always followed by me hitting the wall and needing a couple weeks off. Who knows though to each his/her own and maybe first poster can do this forever.

But overall I believe it comes down to it can't hurt. Worst case is applying time and effort so much that it slows down progress.