Improving Listening Skills

[oevna]

... but, with something like a Thai soap opera... I don't understand hardly anything... they talk so fast and so crazy... it does me no good to even watch it.

I wouldn't worry too much about Thai soap operas (or any soap operas, for that matter). They tend to use very contemporary slang, which isn't taught anywhere and isn't very useful in general. Of course, unless you want to sound like that when you talk!

I'm going to have to come back to this thread when I have more time and check out those listening exercises. I need more practice in listening comprehension too, and those look like some great suggestions. Thanks everyone!

[cosmono]

Thai Community Radio puts out a half-hour current affairs program every day, available as an MP3 download.

The presenters generally speak clearly, and there is a wide variety of voices to listen to.

The Thai Community Radio website oddly enough seems to host some blog on business and real estate now. Does anyone know if they stopped broadcasting or have a new website maybe? Or if there is another site where some of their programs can be found? It would be a shame if their 1000+ podcast catalog isn't available somewhere anymore ...

[klons]

If it's of any help, I uploaded some Anki cards I made from a TV show subtitled for the deaf. The front of the card is a line or lines of dialogue with matching audio.

To fill in the back is a picture from the video and definitions of any words I looked up if any. It's not a question and answer, I made them so you can take as long as you need

to read and repeat the audio with one click as many times as you need.The first video I typed (copied the subtitles) but that was too tedious so the rest of them I clipped out

the subtitles. Here is a sample of what I used to make the cards:

front of card, dialogue and audio

audio 148.mp3

back of card:

Plus any words I might of looked up. Translation is not included, but this guy is talking about Bangkok and says basically;

A big Benz may pull up and park and they go in a restaurant for some man gai. You might also see a beggar who just got 40 baht go

eat in the same restaurant. (The cards are called The Wheelchair Wanderer)

Edited May 22, 2011 by klons

[cosmono]

Those are some very colorful lines of text . Seriously though, excellent idea. Thanks very much for sharing your deck and the work you put into it, Klons. Unfortunately every time I try to download a shared deck through Anki I get a whole list of errors and no deck, I've not yet been able to figure out why Too bad because your deck looks really interesting...

[troehr]

Alright, so this may sound kinda silly, but it really isn't.

The only way to get better at listening, is by listening. And the best way to make sure that happens (that you listen..) is by finding stuff that is interesting for you. It works better if its less a matter of discipline and more a matter of doing stuff you do already. Partially comprehensible stuff is preferred. While it is possible to take a body of text and audio that you don't understand at all and learn it all, it takes a really long time so if you can find stuff where you already understand the main idea, then you can just focus on the stuff you don't know.

Get a clip (cut up a soap, news clip, or whatever) and listen to it until you can't take it anymore. Then put it away for a while and listen to something else. Cut up the files into pieces. Audacity is a good piece of free software that can help you with that. Its better if you have text, but its more important that you can handle listening to it a bunch of times. Watch out for people who have nice voices. Thai dubbed movies are rough because its the same handful of people all the <deleted> time.

Anyways, just listen. Master what you enjoy first and by being good at that stuff you will have an easy time when you attack stuff you don't like Don't aim for 100%. You can't compete with a native speaker without thousands and thousands of hours of listening so set smaller goals. Drop stuff if it sucks. Move on and listen to new stuff if you get bored. Just keep listening.

Whatever happens, I promise you can't get worse by listening so no time spent will be wasted. A huge portion of the language learning process is done behind the scenes and you aren't always going to be aware of progress. Just keep listening.

The hard part is finding good material.

Ok.. my Thai is an intermediate level I guess (according to Chula), I can read and write on MSN with my Thai friends very easily, and I can speak well too. But... when I listen to a commercial, Thai movie, or someone talks at me full speed... I feel like an idiot a good percentage of the time. I don't know if it's that my vocabulary just still isn't good enough, or what to do to improve my listening. I should say, it isn't total crap... I maybe understand 50% of what is going on, maybe... more or less... but, with something like a Thai soap opera... I don't understand hardly anything... they talk so fast and so crazy... it does me no good to even watch it.

People always say just watch a lot of Thai TV or whatever... but honestly, my brain turns off after 5 minutes of Thai TV because I start my s trying WAY too hard and I just can't be bothered to listen anymore, and my mind turns off. LoL Is there an easier way? I know I need to speak more Thai with my friends... some of my friends only speak Thai, but many of them still speak English to me, especially in public (of course they want to impress people, I know).

I need something around intermediate level listening.. what might that be?

This is good advice. This is the same thing I have my students do when I am teaching listening. Listening over time slowly builds the neural pathways necessary to understand what you are listening to. Studies show the listening time should be around ten minutes. More than ten minutes tends to lead to confusion and actually hinder progress. Most importantly, don't get frustrated if you do not understand everything. Listening is the most difficult skill and is a never ending process.

[kokesaat]

I downloaded the deck yesterday......windows 7, anki 1.0.1, works fine for me. A bit above my level of listening, but perhaps not too far in the future. Thanks for the effort.

[StChris]

After forcing myself through 2 series of Thai soaps on YouTube, I've come to the conclusion that watching Thai films on DVD is a much better way to improve your listening practice.

First of all the quality of the movies are better than TV, both technically (the often poor quality "echo"-like sound of soaps has already been mentioned), and also in terms of quality of content (with more thought, money, talent and ambition used).

Secondly, and I think especially important if you feel your reading is ok but you're still having problems catching what people say, most DVDs have Thai subtitles (look out for คำบรรยายไทย on the back). You can find soaps with English subtitles on YouTube, but while it obviously helps you understand what's being said, it doesn't help too much picking out the words people are actually saying.

What you do is this: watch the film through one time without pausing. Don't stress too much, just sit back and try to understand as much as you can. After that, go through a second time with the Thai subtitles switched on. This time pause after the end of each scene. If there are any bits you didn't really understand (probably most of it!), then re-wind and pause at the difficult parts and read the subtitles. If there are any words you don't understand, then look them up in a dictionary. Sometimes you'll know know every word in a sentence, but still not understand the meaning, espicially with quite colloquial language. In this case copy the sentence out and ask a friend to explain it to you. Go the the whole scene like this, noting down each new word you don't understand, and then watch the scene again. Do this for each scene until you've finished the film. If by the end you find that you've had to write down lots of new words in the process, then you know that you probably didn't understand because your vocab was insufficient. If you didn't really need to look up any new words, understood almost everything when reading the subtitles and yet still didn't understand most of the movie, then you know that it's a listening comprehension problem. In that case, watch the hard sections over and over again while reading the subtitles, until you begin to comprehend, of just can't take anymore! You can easily record parts of the film using a program like VLC, so you can only focus on the tricky parts, and even record those as MP3 audio files to listen on random/shuffle mode on your ipod/MP3 player.

As a bonus, some DVDs have special extras, like interviews with the cast and director's commentary. After analyzing the film so thoroughly, these shouldn't be too difficult to understand. Most DVDs are only 80-90 baht, so this is a good, cheap way to improve your Thai.

If you're looking for a good TV show, there's one on TV Mon-Fri at 9am (sorry, can't remember the channel, but it's also on the radio 106.0 MHz). It features four Thai women talking a little about the latest news, but mostly stuff about diets, relationships etc. Not normally my thing, but I found that it was the first TV show that I could understand more than 50% of, so it might be good practice for those not quite ready to take on the lakorns.

[cosmono]

If you're looking for a good TV show, there's one on TV Mon-Fri at 9am (sorry, can't remember the channel, but it's also on the radio 106.0 MHz). It features four Thai women talking a little about the latest news, but mostly stuff about diets, relationships etc. Not normally my thing, but I found that it was the first TV show that I could understand more than 50% of, so it might be good practice for those not quite ready to take on the lakorns.

The show you're talking about is probably ผู้หญิงถึงผู้หญิง on Channel 3.

Thai movies are indeed of way higher quality and much more enjoyable than the lakorns. But one thing I like about the lakorns for listening practice is that within the same series the writer tends to use the same words over and over again (as well as reusing the same plots over and over, but that's another story), making it a lot easier to remember them. The advantage of the longer duration of a lakorn vs a movie is you get a lot more exposure to the repeated new word or expression and thus a better understanding of how and when it's used. Too bad most of those lakorns are so crappy. And it's so hard to find a lakorn where the actors actually talk instead of just screaming hysterically most of the time.

[klons]

As to dubbing, the old dubclub might be a thing of a past. The link is to a short news video w/ transcript about the team of dubbers doing the animated film

Rango. Sounds natural to me. I don't know if the movie is out or what. I don't watch subtitled movies on DVD, only because I haven't figured out how to do it

on a mac. I can open and watch the movie files with VLC but that's about it.

Rango dubbers link:

http://news.voicetv.co.th/entertainment/5714.html

[RickBradford]

Another place for fresh listening material is VOA Thai.

There are several news stories (3-4 minutes each) every day, with downloadable MP3s and related (though not always identical) text.

Being interested in current affairs, I find this material relevant and motivating. I generally download the material, translate the text so that I have an English version alongside the Thai, and then listen to the Thai a few times, tracking it with the English or Thai text.

Total time, maybe an hour, but you exercise your listening skills, written comprehension skills and enlarge your vocabulary of words in current usage.

Why, from a single story about the International Monetary Fund, I learnt the words molest (ลวนลาม), victim of lust (เหยื่อหื่น). pull, drag, haul (ฉุดลาก), widespread scandal (อื้อฉาว), boss, chief, Mr Big (บิ๊ก), obscene, indecent act (อนาจาร).....