how was your jump from intermediate to advanced?

[amanda99]

I can pretty much understand all the intermediate podcasts but the advanced ones are impossible for me!

Any tips on how you made the jump?

I think there was a thread about this somewhere but I can't seem to find it.

Thanks

[Uriel]

Seems like the advanced ones are just people talking faster with heavier accents. I can follow a lot of it if I really concentrate hard and don't blink or stop to puzzle over an unfamiliar word. Don't go by your first impression. Listen to the same one a couple times to pick up what you missed on the first tries. The accents really are the killers -- I run into this at work, too, when eavesdropping on other people. They slur their words, drop consonants, have weird pacing, etc. that interferes with us book-learnin' types. (Granted, they accuse us of the same thing... I had a Mexican friend tell me he only understood about half of anything I said because I "mumble and don't enunciate well".)