Does anybody else have trouble trying to listen to the listening practices? They all play back much too fast, or is it just my Windows 10 playing up again?
Some of the listening practices ARE very fast. The idea is that you get a feel for the patterns, not that you understand every single word. Also, when you listen to ordinary people talking,they sound very clear and remarkably slow!
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I meant that they are playing back at a ridiculously fast speed, with Pinky and Perky voices and hardly any gaps between the wordsā¦much too fast to be spoken , even by a fluent personā¦thereās something wrong with the playback speedā¦have a listen to L2s-ym-gw-04.mp3
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Yep, thatās how they are meant to be. No mistake. Honestly, it works. Donāt ask me how, but it does.
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Blimey, Iāll try then.
Itās been described as ālistening to the chipmunks on a bad dayā! 
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But donāt start with the Level 2 ones - those are for people who have been listening to the Level 1 collection for a decent amount of timeā¦ start with the Level 1 - maybe do one each day, and cycle through the 4 accelerated ones - then after about a month of that, youāll be noticing that youāre catching more of the phrases, and youāll be ready to move on to the faster Level 2 setā¦ 
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Righto, that sounds like good advice to meā¦Iāll start back from the beginning again. Diolch yn fawr iawn.
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Would it be worth looking at pitch correction in order to keep the speed but change the chipmunk voices back to normal?
(Maybe this is already done - I donāt have access to the more advanced material)
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I tried that using Audacity (Iād imagined that it was being caused by a fault in my computer connection, or my Windows 10 update problems) but I wasnāt able to improve on it very muchā¦I just assumed it was a technical problem for usā¦
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Oh, I didnāt know they exist. Have to take a look (or Iāve forgotten they do) ā¦
Otherwise there was almost all said about these chipmunk practices in these recent particular topics:
- Listening Practices Level 2 - what to aim for?
- Double speed listening practice as described in Aran's recent videos
- Listening practice too fast
- Speed of listening exercises
- New listening practices sound like Iestyn and Cat are underwater
Here in the list are only the forum topics from this year and I hope it can bring some help and understanding of why and how.
Hwy!
Tatjana
EDIT to include @DaiRobertsās own (I believe first on this forum) topic here
Shwmae Pawb
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Thatās odd - you should have - let me see if I can fix that for you.
On the acceleration - Jeff has worked all possible magic on it, so Iām certain theyāre as good as can beā¦
Utterly useless, just chipmunk gobbledygook. Waste of time!
This is a breach of forum rules, Dai (see here: Forum rules - Welsh).
We have a VERY strict rule here that we expect politeness and friendliness at all times, and your post is neither polite nor friendly (nor true, as it happens).
Please adjust your tone to fit within forum guidelines - we operate on a ātwo strikes and outā basis.
Thank you.
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Because of such thinking of some people Iāve pointed out those topics Iāve listed above, where everything about the listening practices is explained by several of us and where is also several times explained why these listening practices are as they are, what theyāre meant for etc. I hoped I could prevent such attitude with pointing out some of the topics where the matter was already discussed and Iām really very sorry I didnāt succeed in this atempt.
Tatjana
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I fail to see where I broke the rules!! But dim probs, will just lurk from now onā¦parting shotā¦any links to evidence of where such speeded up content helps a language? Diolch.
Iāve been going through the listening practices for the SSI Welsh and Spanish courses for quite a few weeks now and have already noticed them working well for me. Iād like to add my 2 cents on this subject, and make a comparison between speed reading and listening comprehension (Aran discusses this subject somewhat in his book āHighly Intensity Language Trainingā, but Iād like to talk about my own experiences of it).
Years ago I did a self study course on speed reading. The basic concept to train you up was to move your finger as fast as possible across lines of text that you want to read - often up to 5 times faster than you might currently read - while keeping your eyes focused on the text where your finger is. The purpose of using the finger to read was so that your eyes could focus on where you were at all times, rather than accidentally going back to the same line twice.
Using this method, at first everything will seem a bit blurred and incomprehensible, but after enough time doing this on a regular basis, your eyes and brain eventually ācatch upā and are able to start to comprehend what you read at this much higher speed.
The next part of his method was to slow down the rate of moving your finger across text, so that youāre doing it maybe 2 to 3 times as fast as your normal reading speed. Now this is where is gets interesting. He likened it a bit like driving a car at different speeds. Letās say you drive a car at 35 mph, then speed up to 70 mph in a few seconds. What you will notice is that for a short period of time, 70 mph will feel fast, but after a while it simply becomes the ānew normalā and doesnāt feel fast at all.
Now letās say you speed up to drive at 120 mph (donāt actually drive that fast on real roads btw, this is just an example to explain the concept!). This new speed will feel very fast at first, but given enough time driving at this speed, your brain and instincts will catch up and again 120 mph will no longer feel all that fast.
The final part of this concept was to examine what happens if you slow down from 120 mph to 70 mph. What you will notice is that 70 mph feels ridiculously slow compared to 120 mph, but in reality itās still TWICE the speed you were driving at originally.
I believe the same applies to listening to speech, and especially so when learning to comprehend a foreign language with your ears. You should listen at fast speeds, which will seem like āgibberishā at first, but your brain WILL eventually start to figure out and comprehend what youāre hearing if you give it enough exposure on a regular basis. Then, if you slow the material down, but still make it faster than the original speed, itāll magically all sound clear as a bell and youāll be able to make out every word clearly (although, of course there will still be words you donāt understand yet because you havenāt learned them - though often these can be figured out from context).
As for me, I said Iāve been going through the listening practices on SSI for the last month or 2, for about 5 or 6 minutes per language. Like some others here, I was skeptical at first, but not anymore. The proof is in the results, and itās already working - Iāve been on Youtube and watched some videos in Welsh and Spanish, and guess what, the speech DOES seem slow and clear in comparison to the listening practices, and I was able to pick out words, phrases and sentences and get a pretty good idea of what was being said. Of course Iāve still got a lot more vocabulary and structures to learn, so I donāt yet understand everything, but if I can start to see the payoff for the listening practices within a month or so, then Iām very excited for the future, as listening skills are usually the hardest thing to master in another language.
To those who may doubt this method - you have to stick with the listening practices consistently, day in day out, for at least a few weeks, in order to start seeing some results, but it will pay off. You only need to do 5 or 6 minutes a day listening in each language (but if you can do more, then great) in addition to the main lessons/challenges, so if you canāt find that time you canāt be very dedicated. Just donāt expect to listen a couple of times to the listening practices and then all of a sudden be able to understand everything you hear. Like I said, itās going to take a few weeks, maybe a few months at least for your brain to catch up. But do them consistently and then go over to Youtube, look up some videos in the language youāre learning, and youāll be amazed about how slow and clear it seems. It really will be a bit like slowing down from 120 mph to 70 mph in my earlier analogy.
I believe most language courses do this the wrong way round - they will teach listening practice at a slow speed, falsely believing that it will make the learner more able to understand what theyāre hearing, so that when sped up to normal speed it will be more comprehensible. But in reality, all theyāre doing is training the learnerās brain to be able to recognise speech at a slow speed, so it will be of no help in the long run of being able to understand real life speakers. So simply trust the method of listening at double speed, and you WILL see results in time.
Iām definitely going to explore the ādouble speed listening practiceā method further in my language studies, and Iāll hopefully write more about it then. Sorry this has been a very LONG reply, but I just felt all this needed to be said.
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If you fail to see what is impolite and unfriendly about saying āUtterly useless, just chipmunk gobbledygook. Waste of time!ā, then Iām afraid youāre not welcome in this community.
For anyone who is not sure about the accelerated listening exercises, please always feel free to ask - weāre happy to explain the thinking behind it, the relevant research in neuroplasticity, and the extensive evidence weāve collected of its valueā¦
But, of course, as made clear in the forum rules, you need to ask in a friendly and polite mannerā¦
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Not at all - itās been a very interesting one! I think youāre absolutely on the money here - Iād add that in our experience with intensive work, scaling up the accelerated listening to an hour a day has quite startling results in just 5 days (one of the recent comments on a Facebook results video of a Spanish learner of ours was that her spoken Spanish was impressive, but it was hard to believe that her understanding of what was being said to her could possibly have developed that much in five daysā¦ ).
Iād like to try and figure out more about how listening work impacts on overall understanding - if you take a single phrase, and record it at 3x or 4x speed, it becomes impossible NOT to understand it, in fairly short order - but youād expect that effect not to apply to other phrases. And yet our listening exercises, which with very few exceptions only include content from our courses, seem to have a fair wider effect in terms of ability to follow what first language speakers are saying.
There may be some kind of overall increase in processing speed - or perhaps the parts of the language that you become able to process faster give you a couple of extra microseconds to deal with other words/structures that you havenāt practised listening toā¦
One thing seems clear so far - itās very valuable to separate practise for new vocabulary and practise for accelerated processing - accelerated materials work much better with already familiar content. Weāre looking forward to seeing how helpful accelerated versions of Becaās content will be - Iām expecting it to be useful as a faster way to revise, but of limited value for the initial process of becoming familiar with the content.
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I know that Iāve posted before about my experience with the sped-up listening practices, but this comment is rather too black-and-white for me to ignore, sorry!
Briefly, in response to realising that my Welsh listening skills were very poor, and that I hadnāt been doing the listening exercises carefully, I started a regimen in which I listened to the sped-up listening exercises for 10 minutes nearly every day. I had previously tried to listen to the Radio Cymru weekly summary programme (āPigionā), and had not really understood anything.
After about 2-3 months of this daily practice, I again tried the Pigion, and the improvement amazed me. From experience, I can say that this method worked for me. And I still use the exercises (but not every day now), and I understand more of them as time goes on.
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