Newsgroup: it.cultura.linguistica.inglese
Titolo: Listen, Listen. Listen

I've been speaking to people from all over the world about learning
English (Skype is amazing!) and the most popular advice I’ve been
hearing from all you guys out there learning English is to LISTEN,
LISTEN and LISTEN again.
As someone who lives in a foreign country, I would agree this is a
fundamental thing to do.  I picked up Italian by living there and
hearing it everyday. When I lived in London for two years, I lost
practically all of it because I wasn’t hearing it everyday. So it
essential that you try to listen to as much real English as possible.
So what does listening to authentic English help you do?
You told me:
It improves my accent. I hear the correct pronunciation of words and I
copy them - listen and repeat
Songs are great for new words. And because I sing them over and over,
I learn the words by heart.
I learn lots of new words from the TV shows I watch
I listen to podcasts in the car - the same ones over and over until I
understand it.
The more I listen to, the more I can understand.
It doesn’t matter if I don’t understand every word individually, it is
important that I understand the general gist.
For some ideas on what kind of things you can listen to, see:
http://originallanguage-prof.blogspot.com/2011/02/listen-listen-listen.html

Kerin was thinking very hard :
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Very nice, thank you.
-- 
groetjes Renée
The way to know life is to love many things.
 Vincent van Gogh

 LISTEN and LISTEN again.
If your goal is to use the language to talk you have to use it as much
as possible. For instance I know - in my thinker - how words are
pronounced but often I'm incapable of pronouncing them correctly at the
first try. I say the word and I hear that's wrong so I have to repeat
myself until I get the correct pronunciation. It doesn't help the
conversation very much. ;)
It could seem odd but thinking a word is different than pronouncing it.
"Listen" is a good advice but you have to freaking use the thing. That's
not always easy to accomplish, as a matter of fact it's a bit hard if
you don't leave in a country where others talk the language you are
trying to learn.
Just some random thoughts on the matter.
-- 
Bye bye now,
I'm bored out of my skull. My Life's boring and the sad thing is ...it
could be much worse than that. I could be married. LOL.

 trying to learn.
That was dumb, but it's not the first time I do that. LOL. It's "live"
not "leave", natch.
The thing is, I pronounce them in the same way even though I know they
are not pronounced the same way. I think there's a relation.
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 Just some random thoughts on the matter.
You certainly have a point there.
I think better Italian than I speak it :)
choose - chose
leaf - leave (why leave the leaf :) )  etc.
and then you have homographs: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_homographs
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Agreed - English is horrible because the spelling rarely has anything
to do with the pronunciation. (Italian is magic for that!) To improve
your pronunciation, listen and repeat .... and then do it again....
and again.... and again..... (and again until you can do it in your
sleep!).
To Akira's point about hindering conversation... I think fluency is
more important in conversation. So I understand that it can slow down
the conversation when one of us cannot say the word (or don't know the
word).
But at the same time, communication is a two-way thing. What I mean
is, the person who you are speaking to should help you when you
struggle with the pronunciation. I find when I (try to !) speak
Italian, most people help me out when I struggle to say the word.

Kerin laid this down on his screen :
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There must be a fair amount of dyslectic people in the English speaking 
countries, or at least more people who have difficulties in writing and 
reading than in Italy. I couldn't find any statistics so far about 
that.
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