Good job though!

So… a Spanish learning CD. playing all the time,  would that give the difference?

If you genuinely achieved this, then at some point you developed a strategy to develop the material you encountered. The failure of many, many others proves that this is not a strategy that most people spontaneously discover.

Passive listening/hearing is not a “technique”, because it doesn't actually describe the strategy people like you use.

If we can't identify the strategy, then we can't recommend that strategy to others. If we can't recommend the strategy, we have no language learning technique.

PS. what's the point of blocking someone if they can just post under any old name anyway?

The sad thing is the people who waste literally months or even years of their lives on this method and get nearly nowhere. It's really depressing to hear about that because you know that not only did they waste that time but if they had used to study properly instead they'd REALLY be somewhere by now, but no, now they're going to have to essentially start all over again with what amounts to a very beginner's level in the language if they want to learn it.

Cheers,
Andrew

It's one of those things that's more useful the more you know – the more vocabulary you have and the more constructions you recognise, the more useful random listening is.

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/foru…

It is from the how-to-learn-any-language.com forum. Someone started a post on whether background radio could help one learn a language. I am in your camp. I strongly believe that passive listening is totally useless unless you need some help falling asleep…. You would not believe the proponents of the passive listening camp! Pleading their case with scientific references no less! I still am (as you are) very skeptical of this approach.

Hogy van magyarul?

PS: I actually just thought of one instance where passive listening could be helpful. When I was learning Portuguese I listened to a TON of Brazilian music CD's. Eventually I was singing along (very poorly) with the CD's. I had no idea what I was singing initially but over time, as my vocabulary increased, I had several of those “A-HA!!” moments. I eventually understood most of the songs perfectly. It helped my speaking considerably. So music might be an exception to the rule!

I am not clear, it seems that it is a big part of AJATT (which some people swear by) but there again anything anybody claims they actually learned is told “that is active not passive”. Does this not just reduce down to Shocking truth that not learning anything doesn't teach you anything.

I agree with you that you should assess the methodology of the research. It would be nearly impossible to conduct a double-blind test in these scenarios, because the test subjects would have to be very stupid not to know whether they were listening to gibberish or a language when they woke up. It shouldn't matter – there is always blind assignment to groups. In the case of the research with babies and finnish (the only experiment I can remember in details off the top of my head), the control groups were played music or silence in their sleep. I'll dig out the rest of the papers when I have time to do a proper literature review. I think it might help you and others to read the information for yourselves.

The 10% myth wouldn't make a good explanation of this even if it were true (you can read a good article about how it's complete nonsense here: http://goo.gl/RIwE). I think there are at least two possible cases if you want an evolutionary explanation for why we can form memories based on sounds during sleep.

Firstly, an obvious purpose of being aware of auditory stimuli during sleep would be to notice approaching danger. This doesn't only mean being able to distinguish sudden noises, wolves howling and that kind of thing. It might also involve being able to differentiate social groups in the area, passing members of the same species and so on. The whole field is speculative but ultimately it's conceivable that there are a huge multitude of situations in which processing sounds during sleep would be adaptive for safety reasons.

Secondly, human evolution has involved great periods of migration, settlement and integration with other races and groups (and even species – Homo erectus coexisting with Homo neanderthalensis for example). The ability to rapidly acquire a new language from your environment would certainly have been adaptive throughout most of human history. Again, that doesn't make it fact, it's all speculative. The point is that it's perfectly reasonable that it might be the case, not so outlandish that it could be dismissed.

I do think this isn't as drastic as you perceive it to be – there is definitely no evidence that you can learn a language without putting in any effort. Your gut feeling that it should be impossible to learn with no effort is probably right. There's just a suggestion that you can compound and accelerate active wakeful learning with the right stimulus during sleep or periods of low attentiveness.

If you look at it this way it doesn't sound so crazy, and you can look for sensible ways in which you could include it in a learning program. All the practical ways of using this phenomenon, if it is true, would have little or no negative impact as they all rely on maintaining an active learning component.

In what way do you have active learning applied first in your native language? I think the possibility of background audio encouraging you to tune out your target language is spurious, and it's completely contrary to my own experience of Japanese. Over the last few months, I've had Japanese audiobooks or hip-hop playing constantly in the background whilst I go about my day, with activities ranging from highly attentive lab work right down to low attentive dishwashing. Over time there is a definite trend upwards in the amount of words and phrases I pick out from the background noise. At the moment, I'm picking up around 20-30 new words/short phrases a day just from the audio because I've noticed them so many times that, when I do look them up, they are remembered for good. Of course this would never work without active learning to support it – but I do spend about 12 hours a day just listening and only a few hours a day actively studying.

It seems you accept that listening which isn't deliberately attentive might be a useful study tool, but are on a crusade to prevent people relying on it too strongly. I think if you had been more detailed and specific in the original post you could have summed up the exact usefulness of listening in its various forms accurately, and the article would have been a good resource for learners to make judgements about how to study. Still, at least you got people talking and thinking about it!

I've been in your shoes years ago. The reason you are not making progress is because most your input is incomprehensible. You need to find audio content that you will understand, that usually means somebody speaking more slow and more clear than usual. But at the same time don't get stuck at the same level, you need to challenge yourself with faster and faster speech. Actually that kind of input is plenty available when you converse with natives because most of them will slow down for you. If they don't, ask them. The key to progress is to keep most of your input understandable.

But speaking to natives is not the only way to get that kind of input. I have personally improved my listening abilities and got rid of my accent using a self-study course I described here: http://thelinguist.blogs.com/how_to_learn_engli… The reason it greatly improved my listening ability (I believe) is because I was exposed to a lot of audio at varying speeds. All my input during the course was very clear to me, I didn't have to rewind and listen again and again. I found the course very effecient as I spend only 40 hours and achieved great results.

Another way that a lot of self studying people use is to listen over and over to audio at normal speaking speed until you understand it. I admire persistance of those people. I guess it works for them, but I personally find such method exhausting and demotivating.