Say you know enough grammar and vocabulary to comfortably speak in a language (maybe 80% of common daily vocabulary). How many hours of listening to TV/native speakers/etc does it take to actually be able to understand the language when others speak? Obviously this is different for everyone, but what are your experiences?
(For the sake of comparison, imagine all your listening during the day stuffed together. When I've traveled/lived in a foreign countries, I tend to have a bunch of smaller exchanges at stores, work, etc. throughout the day that add up to an hour or two a day of pure language listening. Radio/TV/etc counts too. Language class does not count, unless your language class consists mostly of watching movies in another language, etc.)
In my case, I learned lots of Spanish grammar and vocabulary in school — probably 90-95% of daily spoken words, and I could read and write well. But I couldn't understand spoken Spanish. I recognized the words, but my brain couldn't process them in time unless people were speaking very slowly. So I started talking to native speakers.
After roughly ...
- 40 hours of listening: I could get the gist of conversations around me.
- 80 hours: understand people speaking to me
- 120 hours: understand conversations between native speakers.
- 150 hours: understand spoken Spanish nearly word for word whether in person or on TV, provided the talk wasn't about something highly specialized.
I also studied Arabic for a few months. I was in Morocco, so I got plenty of listening in right from the start —about 160 hours in total. Unlike with Spanish, I experienced no gap between learning a new word/phrase in class and understanding it in the world.
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