Answer Question
Aural Comprehension in German
I'm 1/3 of the way through Level 3 and at this point am wondering about the experiences of others, particularly in understanding German spoken by a native German-speaking person. The audio portions in level 3 seem to be from "Ella", who appears with Sonia Gill on the podcasts. Since early in my studies, I have used the very last portion of each lesson, where there are three to five pages of sentences that are meant to be used for pronunciation practice, as a means of becoming familiar with the sound of spoken German. I typically do not look at the sentences when I play them and try to understand them only from hearing them. What I find is that I often do not "catch" all the words since, as with any native speaker, they are not enunciated as they are for the lessons. For instance, the sentence in Lev3Lesson11 has a sentence "Geht ihr auch immer in dieses kleine Restaurant". I found that I really don't "hear" the "immer" at all. Understand, this is NOT a complaint about how the sentences are spoken; it is a question to others if they, at this level of learning, experienced the same sort of thing. I assume that one develops an ability to understand the spoken word only with lots of interacting and speaking, but just wanted a sort of "sanity" check on my own learning. Thanks!