Tips to improve German listening skills (Hörverstehen)

How to improve on your listening skills is obviously going to depend on where you started. So far I can only really give solid tips on how to get to B2, although I am fairly confident that the same sort of idea can help push you beyond B2. I'm currently testing that hypothesis I guess, and you'll see a few more parallel translations posted on the blog as a result.

I've previously posted a bunch of parallel translations during my studies in German so far, the Hitler rant from Downfall being just being the latest in a long line :-) I actually started producing basic translations of the news with much help from Google Translate right back in the early days, so apart from using the material I have already provided, you can make some of your own for whatever material you enjoy. Just get the audio and transcript and match up your translation roughly on a line-by-line basis.

One important thing to do is to find a regular language partner. For the B2 exam, obviously doing all the preparatory listening exercises from an appropriate level of sample exam. Visit the Goethe website, select your appropriate level and look at the "Übungs- und Infomaterial" link. Doing progressively harder exercises until you can handle your target exam's hörverstehen, is a vital exercise. I have some tips on this spread throughout my blog - see here and here, for example.

Here are some pointers from my blog (in addition to this post's content, of course!):
Great website for German learners!
DW Slowly Spoken News 1-Dec-2010
Entenvolk!
DW News 15-01-2011
Desertec - Strom aus der Wüste
Mit Antigeld gegen die Bankenkrise

For some of the above you will need to find the audio on the relevant website. The audio links are usually contained in the parallel translation pdf itself. I don't know how far back the archives for DW's slowly-spoken news go, but hopefully they're all still available.

Don't get discouraged! When I first listened to the "slow" news I was totally shocked and couldn't imagine ever understanding it, let alone the full-speed news, but now I find the slow version just way too slow. It won't take long of this sort of parallel text work to pay off and have you understanding more and more of what you're listening to.

Also, if your language partners would let you, you could probably record your conversations and pick a sample which is mainly of them speaking. You would then write up a transcript (perhaps with their help) and work out a translation however you can. This might be useful, depending on circumstances. However, personally, I'm going to focus on snippets from movies for now :-)

My checkpoint update is: Chinese with Ease: just finished lesson 37, Le Latin: about to start lesson 34 and "Das Todeskreuz": page 164. I tried to sort of start a conversation in Mandarin with a work colleague today but it didn't work. She understood what I said and then just said that it was very good because she could understand it. Not quite the desired result!

Anyone with their own tips, feel free to post them in the comments.