RadioBanter - View Single Post - A Little Used Tactic in U.S. for Greatly Improving Reception

March 24th 04, 03:32 AM

In article ,
says...
I took French and Spanish in college, and I failed both miserably. I could
usually decipher a small amount of meaning from some simple written phrases,
but it was just impossible for my brain to extract anything from spoken
conversational French or Spanish. If I heard something like "heartache", my
mind would process that word as "har dake" and then it would start trying to
remember the meaning of "har" and the meaning of "dake". It was a horribly
embarrassing experience for me. Still, many nights, I would still sit by my
radio, listening intently to French or Spanish stations, hoping to be able
to understand what I heard. Twenty years later, it remains a totally
impossible effort for my feeble mind..

I've found it helps to watch TV news broadcast in the language you're
trying to learn. (Assuming you can find such a broadcast.) The
announcers usually speak slowly and enunciate clearly, comparatively.
On most of the stories there is also video to provide context to the
words being spoken. At the very least it gets you conditioned to
hearing the language spoken in an environment where you aren't going to
be embarrassed and you have some chance of figuring out what they're
talking about. You're also not going to be worrying about how to
respond... unless you enjoy talking back to the TV.

-- Jay