How do you improve your listening skills to get to listening to native content with ease, assuming vocabulary and grammar are not the issue?
Here's what I've found does not work:
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Slow/easy language podcasts. Yes, it's important to get started with stuff like that, but it's extremely boring and limited, and it does not get me over the listening hump. The listening hump is all the phonetic and semantic and grammatical changes made to language when it is spoken at speed. By definition, I am NOT exposed to that in slow language podcasts and so listening to an infinite amount of slow podcasts will not teach me.
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Re-listening to work I know. I've found working from transcribed shows that I can understand them all, but it's from a freaky ability to recall the dialogue, not from a newfound ability to DECODE the dialogue. The flip side of that is if there is something I don't understand the first time through, it doesn´t become more intelligible on multiple passthroughs. So I read the transcript and then it becomes yet another thing I remember.
So I'm wondering if there's an entirely different approach. Like, maybe if I tried reading aloud more often, I'd naturally fall into these elisions and ways of speaking, and having produced them naturally myself, I would hear them better? Because right now, my language production is zero. In fact, my language consumption is entirely passive.
Tell me what you did to get over the hump.
In my case, saturating what I listen to with stuff from the target language. At first what I hear is mostly noise, but as my understanding in the language overall improves, so does what I can understand from listening. And as I listening improves, the more I can pick that isn't covered by lessons, helping in the overall understanding and in the lessons. A virtuous spiral, I think is the saying. =)