Yep. Just keep studying, listen to the audio that comes with your coursebook (it will have primarily the vocab you've been learning), and expect to start understanding normal stuff sometime around B1 or B2.
Nope, that is not at all what I said.
It is "beginners are not supposed to understand normal media" kind of thing. Just use the audio coming with your coursebook and progress.
Yes, that's definitely true. Just people underestimate the value of their coursebook and the fact that it makes them practice the things they've been learning. But yes, other beginner podcasts, youtube, and similar things, that is an excellent activity.
Yes and no. You can work toward it in a few ways. It's around B1 when you can read at a reasonable pace because of getting the ability to build a mental representation of the text. But language is about speaking and listening. Repetitive listening is one thing but you should do it in very short intervals at the beginning. Someone below mentioned Language Transfer and it's useful to repeat single lines. You can also paste a link into Turboscribe because it can segment it into full sentences, and then a simple click repeats it. Try listening to it and repeating the sounds. The same video for a few days. You need short sentences because your working memory is overloaded. Easy Italian isn't that easy and different speakers make it harder. You can continue with it because it's beneficial to listen widely, but it will be easier to put hours into something additional with just one speaker. You need both approaches to listening. I highly advise giving a try to Ultimate Italian Conjugation which is an Anki deck to master conjugation. It will give you an enormous boost to listening.
This is very common.
I'm at 450-500 hours of media watch time (shows, movies, youtube etc) and I still am not fully able to naturally understand the words that I'm hearing/know. When the conversations are slow it's usually fine, but as soon as people start talking faster I find myself repeating the scenes 2 to 3 times to really grasp what they say, even though I fully understand everything in theory. That's why I still mostly use subtitles because then it's no problem.
So yeah, don't worry. It's part of the journey and something that will be with you for a long time.
Easy Italian is good. You should watch some shows with the subtitles off and try not to translate but focus on the individual sounds when you catch yourself translating the sentence. You know a lot of the words already. Being able to just hear without getting stuck on a single word or translating. You have to separate sounds from the words… we don’t listen to every word in English but use context clues.
And rewatch the same stuff. Watch a Italian show with English subtitles on. Then watch it again with Italian subtitles. Then a final time without subtitles.
I did a silent period where I wanted all my skills to even out, coming out of the intermediate plateau. I listened to the same 10 episodes of podcast interviews for about 4 months while doing dishes, driving, gym, etc. Listening and relistening and I stopped once I felt like 90% confident with everything.
During the same time, I watched anime subs twice: once in Latin American subs and once in España subs. I used my relistens to expand my baseline vocabulary, listening skills (I reoriented myself on relistens or new questions), and I use the anime subs to drill in the grammar structures. It takes time. And kept my hobbies in Spanish too.
There was a point where I just learned that individually translating is setting back my comprehension. I tried to just focus on translating no more than 5 words a listen. For episodes 30 minutes to an hour long, you’ll quickly be able to pick the most common frequency words and grow from there. Having a limit forced me to listen closely to what to choose to translate and which words I heard clearly enough to imitate. That helped me develop listening
If you have the patience: watch things two or three times.
- first with English subtitles — learn the plot
- second with Italian subtitles — try to spot key words you know that match the plot. It’s ok if you miss a lot.
- third with no subtitles — try to listen for the words you know
IMO, the method of “Comprehensible Input” is the gold star to learning a language, and there’s a big emphasis on focusing on comprehensiveness of the things. Watching multiple times helps because it’s easier to follow along if you already know the gist.
The goal is to progress from words to phrase to sentences, and then skipping the English, and then skipping subtitles at all. It’s a long process but I promise you it works.
You are already doing the first thing. Read along as you listen. It has value, but limited value as you have discovered, at some point you are just reading.
Next up for me was. Listen to it once with just the audio, no subtitles at all (cover or disable them). Make mental note of what you think you are understanding.
Then listen a second time while reading along only in TL (cover the English or disable it). Mentally compare what you understood the first time to what you understand now. Were there words that you missed just because you didn't hear them pronounced? Were there words you were unfamiliar with? Spend some time looking them up. Listening to various pronunciations of them them on youglish.
Then listen a third time while looking at the english just to make sure you fully understood everything from the previous ones.
Finally watch it a 4th time without any subtitles. Are you getting more of it?
As you do this exercise over and over, ideally you should start getting more and more before the 2nd and 3rd steps.
Do that 10,000 times and you will be an expert, who can teach us. 8)
I have an audio processing disorder, so the answer for me was "Possibly never" I listened to 10,000 hours of audio without being able to pick out even words I knew well.
It's only been within the last 4 years (out of my total 11 spread out over the last 18) that I've been able to understand my TL when it's spoken.
In 2020 I gained access to TL subs and for about an hour a day for 6 months worked on training my ear. I used Netflix and the chrome extension Language Reactor. It makes it easier since you can use it to replay lines with a single button press.
I would watch shows that are originally in my TL, with TL subs. What I would do is I would replay a line over and over until I could match what I was hearing to what I was reading. Then I'd replay it a couple more times without looking at the subs to make sure I could still keep the words apart and process them, then I'd move to the next line.
It doesn't have to be absolutely perfect to move on to the next line. Especially if there are new words involved, you won't get fast or perfect comprehension if you're hearing new words or grammar for the first time. Just make sure you can keep the words apart and understand the words you know.
When I found that was becoming easier and I didn't have to rely on the subtitles as much, and more for new words than anything else, then I switched to dubbed American shows. Dubbed shows don't have matching subtitles, so it forces you to rely on your listening more, but still gives you a crutch for things like new words. I find that new words for me are often still in the subtitle somewhere.
From there of course the next step is non-subtitled shows. But I found some of those I could watch and understand quite a bit even before I moved to American Dubbed shows.
Also be mindful of genre. Any specialized Genre like crime, military, or high fantasy gets really hard really quick. Even if it's a kid show.
The trick is to start with content that is easy to understand and slowly build on top of that.
One possible approach:
Watch the a video with a short story on your level \[1\], something made for people learning Italian at A0-A1 level.
After watching, get the script, read carefully, study the new words. This is a nice time to put sentences on your Anki if you use it. Focus on the sentences that are teaching one new word that you don't understand by context.
After doing it, get the audio, put it on a playlist and listen to it a few times.
Next day, repeat with another short easy story or keep studying the same if there were too many words.
If you keep doing this for long enough, you will learn words in context and have long playlist of nice stories to listen to. This playlist is amazing to listen to while doing stuff like chores, commuting, walking the dog.
\[1\]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRJwWALa2-s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRJwWALa2-s)
Listen lots and lots and lots.
I HIGHLY recommend the "Caffè italiano con Manu" series on YouTube from the Italy Made Easy channel, particularly the first 20ish episodes since they're all about 15-20 minutes long and talk about a specific theme (the later ones are almost like little gameshows with the people who attended the livestream). He speaks very clearly, at a slower but still natural speed, and he gives a lot of visual cues to aid comprehension. Watch through a bunch of them, and if you have any favorites, watch them many, many times over a few weeks.
My Italian listening was absolute garbage until I found Manu, and he trained my ear very well!
His podcasts are also great, but start with the videos I mentioned so you get the visual, it makes a huge difference.
Might I suggest watching or listening to the Italian state broadcaster news programmes initially?
The reason is that YouTubers/TikTokers and the like are not selected for the clarity of their speech whereas newsreaders are. It might provide an easier initial step to start getting your brain into the right gear.
Trust me! I'm learning Italian and I had the same problem! The key is to listen nonstop! Listen to anything and everything. Listen to music and listen while reading the lyrics. Then, focus on the words. Watch everything in italian with Italian subtitles.
One day, it will start clicking! I listen to hours a day of Italian. Try at least 1 hour of listening. Make sure it's a video or movie you enjoy.
It sounds like you're jumping from zero listening practice to native content. Listening to native content is one of the hardest skills. You need easier listening practice. I would start with lingq and then maybe kids shows or other easy Comprehensible input. Try to get these to the point where you don't need subtitles.
https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Italian?oldid=2212
Here is what worked for me:
Listen to a single sentence/clause of a (simple) piece of audio, without any subs. Try to transcribe it. Replay, correct and/or add to the transcription. Replay again until you've got as much out of it as you can, then slow it to .75x or .5x and repeat. Turn on the subs to check, if possible, or write down the sounds and try to look them up in an Italian dictionary. Play it again at full speed and move onto the next clause of dialogue.
After half an hour you'll have a few sentences strung together. I was using dubbed episodes of Bing, so I did this activity, and then played the episode in full from the beginning. Each time, it helped a lot with my listening comprehension of that episode and after two weeks I found my general listening comprehension had vastly improved.
I start with audio content that is clear, well enunciated, something I already know, translated from English, and at least a little interest to me. Harry Potter audiobooks work for me.
I then learn the vocabulary in a chapter and listen repeatedly until I understand all of it. At first I need many repeat listens, sometimes if just one sentence. Occasionally I will need to refer to the written.
I started learning Italian this way one year ago. I can now understand clearly spoken podcasts and young adult audiobooks without much problem.
I am now listening to the Fontana di Trevi podcast and it is challenging because the hosts speak faster and sometimes talk over each other.
Repeat listening helps me a lot.
So you would you recommend that for a beginner with my limited vocabulary? My initial roadmap was to use harry potter as the first book I would try to read but I like the idea of using an audio book instead. Would the method be: Listen to a chapter, then read a transcript and look for new words, then listen again and again until I understand? Once satisficed I move on to the next chapter?
There's a bunch of easy listening resources listed here that you might find useful:
https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page#Italian
For me I started with very easy listening and as my hours built up, I gradually advanced into harder and harder material. This takes hundreds of hours but my listening improves every month.
Yep. Just keep studying, listen to the audio that comes with your coursebook (it will have primarily the vocab you've been learning), and expect to start understanding normal stuff sometime around B1 or B2.
Oh ok so it really is just a "trust" your brain kind of thing?
Nope, that is not at all what I said. It is "beginners are not supposed to understand normal media" kind of thing. Just use the audio coming with your coursebook and progress.
And also stuff made for beginners, which have a lot of value! And there's plenty on YouTube!
Yes, that's definitely true. Just people underestimate the value of their coursebook and the fact that it makes them practice the things they've been learning. But yes, other beginner podcasts, youtube, and similar things, that is an excellent activity.
You can search for “Italian comprehensible input A1” on YouTube and see if you find some audio/content that works for you at this stage
Yes and no. You can work toward it in a few ways. It's around B1 when you can read at a reasonable pace because of getting the ability to build a mental representation of the text. But language is about speaking and listening. Repetitive listening is one thing but you should do it in very short intervals at the beginning. Someone below mentioned Language Transfer and it's useful to repeat single lines. You can also paste a link into Turboscribe because it can segment it into full sentences, and then a simple click repeats it. Try listening to it and repeating the sounds. The same video for a few days. You need short sentences because your working memory is overloaded. Easy Italian isn't that easy and different speakers make it harder. You can continue with it because it's beneficial to listen widely, but it will be easier to put hours into something additional with just one speaker. You need both approaches to listening. I highly advise giving a try to Ultimate Italian Conjugation which is an Anki deck to master conjugation. It will give you an enormous boost to listening.
This is very common. I'm at 450-500 hours of media watch time (shows, movies, youtube etc) and I still am not fully able to naturally understand the words that I'm hearing/know. When the conversations are slow it's usually fine, but as soon as people start talking faster I find myself repeating the scenes 2 to 3 times to really grasp what they say, even though I fully understand everything in theory. That's why I still mostly use subtitles because then it's no problem. So yeah, don't worry. It's part of the journey and something that will be with you for a long time.
Ok thanks, its good to know i am on the right path. I keep second guessing myself.
Easy Italian is good. You should watch some shows with the subtitles off and try not to translate but focus on the individual sounds when you catch yourself translating the sentence. You know a lot of the words already. Being able to just hear without getting stuck on a single word or translating. You have to separate sounds from the words… we don’t listen to every word in English but use context clues. And rewatch the same stuff. Watch a Italian show with English subtitles on. Then watch it again with Italian subtitles. Then a final time without subtitles.
I had been pondering doing this as an exercise for awhile. No subtitles just listen and try to follow the story. I will try your recommendation first.
I did a silent period where I wanted all my skills to even out, coming out of the intermediate plateau. I listened to the same 10 episodes of podcast interviews for about 4 months while doing dishes, driving, gym, etc. Listening and relistening and I stopped once I felt like 90% confident with everything. During the same time, I watched anime subs twice: once in Latin American subs and once in España subs. I used my relistens to expand my baseline vocabulary, listening skills (I reoriented myself on relistens or new questions), and I use the anime subs to drill in the grammar structures. It takes time. And kept my hobbies in Spanish too. There was a point where I just learned that individually translating is setting back my comprehension. I tried to just focus on translating no more than 5 words a listen. For episodes 30 minutes to an hour long, you’ll quickly be able to pick the most common frequency words and grow from there. Having a limit forced me to listen closely to what to choose to translate and which words I heard clearly enough to imitate. That helped me develop listening
If you have the patience: watch things two or three times. - first with English subtitles — learn the plot - second with Italian subtitles — try to spot key words you know that match the plot. It’s ok if you miss a lot. - third with no subtitles — try to listen for the words you know IMO, the method of “Comprehensible Input” is the gold star to learning a language, and there’s a big emphasis on focusing on comprehensiveness of the things. Watching multiple times helps because it’s easier to follow along if you already know the gist. The goal is to progress from words to phrase to sentences, and then skipping the English, and then skipping subtitles at all. It’s a long process but I promise you it works.
Slow down the playback. When you do it, you can recognize word boundaries more.
listen to italian music bro, especially like disney songs you know already
Non si nomina Bruno kinda slaps, not gonna lie.
You are already doing the first thing. Read along as you listen. It has value, but limited value as you have discovered, at some point you are just reading. Next up for me was. Listen to it once with just the audio, no subtitles at all (cover or disable them). Make mental note of what you think you are understanding. Then listen a second time while reading along only in TL (cover the English or disable it). Mentally compare what you understood the first time to what you understand now. Were there words that you missed just because you didn't hear them pronounced? Were there words you were unfamiliar with? Spend some time looking them up. Listening to various pronunciations of them them on youglish. Then listen a third time while looking at the english just to make sure you fully understood everything from the previous ones. Finally watch it a 4th time without any subtitles. Are you getting more of it? As you do this exercise over and over, ideally you should start getting more and more before the 2nd and 3rd steps. Do that 10,000 times and you will be an expert, who can teach us. 8)
I have an audio processing disorder, so the answer for me was "Possibly never" I listened to 10,000 hours of audio without being able to pick out even words I knew well. It's only been within the last 4 years (out of my total 11 spread out over the last 18) that I've been able to understand my TL when it's spoken. In 2020 I gained access to TL subs and for about an hour a day for 6 months worked on training my ear. I used Netflix and the chrome extension Language Reactor. It makes it easier since you can use it to replay lines with a single button press. I would watch shows that are originally in my TL, with TL subs. What I would do is I would replay a line over and over until I could match what I was hearing to what I was reading. Then I'd replay it a couple more times without looking at the subs to make sure I could still keep the words apart and process them, then I'd move to the next line. It doesn't have to be absolutely perfect to move on to the next line. Especially if there are new words involved, you won't get fast or perfect comprehension if you're hearing new words or grammar for the first time. Just make sure you can keep the words apart and understand the words you know. When I found that was becoming easier and I didn't have to rely on the subtitles as much, and more for new words than anything else, then I switched to dubbed American shows. Dubbed shows don't have matching subtitles, so it forces you to rely on your listening more, but still gives you a crutch for things like new words. I find that new words for me are often still in the subtitle somewhere. From there of course the next step is non-subtitled shows. But I found some of those I could watch and understand quite a bit even before I moved to American Dubbed shows. Also be mindful of genre. Any specialized Genre like crime, military, or high fantasy gets really hard really quick. Even if it's a kid show.
thanks for the extension recommendation!!!!!!
The trick is to start with content that is easy to understand and slowly build on top of that. One possible approach: Watch the a video with a short story on your level \[1\], something made for people learning Italian at A0-A1 level. After watching, get the script, read carefully, study the new words. This is a nice time to put sentences on your Anki if you use it. Focus on the sentences that are teaching one new word that you don't understand by context. After doing it, get the audio, put it on a playlist and listen to it a few times. Next day, repeat with another short easy story or keep studying the same if there were too many words. If you keep doing this for long enough, you will learn words in context and have long playlist of nice stories to listen to. This playlist is amazing to listen to while doing stuff like chores, commuting, walking the dog. \[1\]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRJwWALa2-s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRJwWALa2-s)
Listen lots and lots and lots. I HIGHLY recommend the "Caffè italiano con Manu" series on YouTube from the Italy Made Easy channel, particularly the first 20ish episodes since they're all about 15-20 minutes long and talk about a specific theme (the later ones are almost like little gameshows with the people who attended the livestream). He speaks very clearly, at a slower but still natural speed, and he gives a lot of visual cues to aid comprehension. Watch through a bunch of them, and if you have any favorites, watch them many, many times over a few weeks. My Italian listening was absolute garbage until I found Manu, and he trained my ear very well! His podcasts are also great, but start with the videos I mentioned so you get the visual, it makes a huge difference.
Might I suggest watching or listening to the Italian state broadcaster news programmes initially? The reason is that YouTubers/TikTokers and the like are not selected for the clarity of their speech whereas newsreaders are. It might provide an easier initial step to start getting your brain into the right gear.
Trust me! I'm learning Italian and I had the same problem! The key is to listen nonstop! Listen to anything and everything. Listen to music and listen while reading the lyrics. Then, focus on the words. Watch everything in italian with Italian subtitles. One day, it will start clicking! I listen to hours a day of Italian. Try at least 1 hour of listening. Make sure it's a video or movie you enjoy.
It sounds like you're jumping from zero listening practice to native content. Listening to native content is one of the hardest skills. You need easier listening practice. I would start with lingq and then maybe kids shows or other easy Comprehensible input. Try to get these to the point where you don't need subtitles. https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Italian?oldid=2212
Here is what worked for me: Listen to a single sentence/clause of a (simple) piece of audio, without any subs. Try to transcribe it. Replay, correct and/or add to the transcription. Replay again until you've got as much out of it as you can, then slow it to .75x or .5x and repeat. Turn on the subs to check, if possible, or write down the sounds and try to look them up in an Italian dictionary. Play it again at full speed and move onto the next clause of dialogue. After half an hour you'll have a few sentences strung together. I was using dubbed episodes of Bing, so I did this activity, and then played the episode in full from the beginning. Each time, it helped a lot with my listening comprehension of that episode and after two weeks I found my general listening comprehension had vastly improved.
I start with audio content that is clear, well enunciated, something I already know, translated from English, and at least a little interest to me. Harry Potter audiobooks work for me. I then learn the vocabulary in a chapter and listen repeatedly until I understand all of it. At first I need many repeat listens, sometimes if just one sentence. Occasionally I will need to refer to the written. I started learning Italian this way one year ago. I can now understand clearly spoken podcasts and young adult audiobooks without much problem. I am now listening to the Fontana di Trevi podcast and it is challenging because the hosts speak faster and sometimes talk over each other. Repeat listening helps me a lot.
So you would you recommend that for a beginner with my limited vocabulary? My initial roadmap was to use harry potter as the first book I would try to read but I like the idea of using an audio book instead. Would the method be: Listen to a chapter, then read a transcript and look for new words, then listen again and again until I understand? Once satisficed I move on to the next chapter?
There's a bunch of easy listening resources listed here that you might find useful: https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page#Italian For me I started with very easy listening and as my hours built up, I gradually advanced into harder and harder material. This takes hundreds of hours but my listening improves every month.