In studying French and Japanese, I have found it very helpful to listen while following along with the corresponding text. I wondered what would happen if I tried that with a lot of languages for a short time each.

Recently I was mainly working from this article (once through for each language, so about 2 minutes each):
http://www.jw.org/en/publications/magazi...ork-ethic/

And previously, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/SearchByLang.aspx
https://librivox.org/group/512

I didn't have serious trouble with any language using Latin script. Probably Italian was the easiest and Danish the hardest. It got easier the more languages I tried.

I previously tried Russian for a few minutes, and it really wasn't going to happen. After spending 2 minutes each on 20 languages with Latin script, I found that the Cyrillic ones were possible too.

In Korean, it was possible to keep my place at the sentence level because the reader left big gaps between sentences, and the last sound in a sentence was usually one of two things. But I don't think that counts.

Since the time when I did this, hearing other languages around me in real life has shifted a bit. I can't identify them, but they sound more like they are made of words.

A few times in the past, I have suggested the technique to people studying a language and they said they couldn't do it. Is there a trick to it maybe? I probably said "reading and listening at the same time" as in the title, and with further thought, that's a bad description. I get the impression now that trying to read is what breaks it (and that not trying to read is the main thing I got better at throughout the ~25 unknown languages). It's most obvious for languages where I don't know how to pronounce anything. But in Japanese, my reading speed is far slower than the audio, so I'm clearly not reading that in the usual sense either.

Any thoughts? Anyone else curious to try a "2 minutes each" run?

It sounds like you're talking about the 'L-R' (listening-reading) technique, which I think is a -very- important technique for bringing your reading and listening into alignment with each other (depending on whether you focus on the verbal or written language one or the other is likely behind at the intermediate stage.)

Some people use L-R exclusively as a language learning method, which is certainly workable if you have the right mindset and a certain amount of dedication.

thread started by the late great buonoparte: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=6840
the late great buonoparte's introduction to L-R: http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_m...ssages.htm
The learnanylanguage blog entry on L-R: http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/L...ing_Method

It sounds like the essence of L-R, or the innovative feature, is listening in L2 while reading in L1 (step 3). I haven't been doing that. It might be interesting to try sometime.

Although the system is called "listening-reading", the instructions for step 2 have avoided the error that I made:

Quote:you listen to the recording and look at the written text at the same time,
because the flow of speech has no boundaries between words and the written text does, you will be able to separate each word in the speech flow

(I believe it was by one of buonoparte's links that I ended up on the JW site. Not a place I would have thought to look, but it has plenty of useful things.)

What text/audio do people recommend for beginners of the L-R study method?

Yeah, reading L1 while listening to L2 is very useful early on. After getting adjusted to the sound of the language you can skip that step, but pre-reading in L1 before listening-reading in L2/L2 is useful for a very long time.

If you're a beginner to the -language- I would use the coscom and erin materials, anything that came with your textbook (genki and minna no nihongo both have companion CDs). After that a bunch of the hukumusume stories have English translations.

When you're reasonably comfortable with sentences and short works, the Harry Potter books have audio-CDs for the first four volumes and that's really good if you have already read those books (if you weren't reading them in English in the first place though, I don't know how good they would be - the power of using them is largely in -already- knowing the story inside out after reading them and seeing the movies).
There's a good Alice in Wonderland too. (Alice in Wonderland has a ton of wordplay that simply doesn't translate though).

There's a number of Japanese classics that are available in English from gutenberg, in Japanese from aozora bunko, and in audio from various places around the web. I don't have a lot of interest in older Japanese literature personally, but that's what a lot of people go for. Buonoparte collected a lot of that sort of material together for you so it's easy to get going on. It'll certainly help with the classical usages that filter into even modern novels.