EP32 - How to Listen Your Way to Fluency in a Foreign Language (Vladimir Skultety)

Language is Culture Podcast

This episode of the podcast is about using “Mass listening” as a shortcut to developing fluency in a foreign language. Vladimir Skultety is an experienced language learning who speaks more than 10 languages. He’s used this approach to develop advance fluency in many of his language, including Mandarin. In this episode we discuss specifically:

• What “mass listening” actually is and why you should use it in your approach to learning languages.
• How to start learning a language with mass listening.
• How to overcome the challenge of listening to difficult speech, especially with languages similar to your native tongue.
• The intensity of the process and how you’ll feel as you go through it.
• The speed of progress when using this method.
• Why transcripts are not necessary for the method.
• What you can do to make it easier in the beginning.
• What the best types of audio are for this method.
• How long you need to listen to a piece of audio for the method to be effective and how to stay focused.
• The benefits of passive and active listening
• Where mass listening fits in the process of acquiring a new language
• How vocabulary goes from passive to active through listening
• Whether using different forms of media to learn a language is a good idea
• How to address different registers of language, from colloquial to formal
• How mass listening helps you in other areas of language learning like speaking, reading and writing