[james_s_tayler]

>Listening comprehension, IMHO is the last skill to develop in learning a foreign language. The reason is that it's "all or nothing". You either know and recognize all of the words in a sentence, or you can't cope with the sentence at all

So not true. Maybe depends on the way you study but I focus on listening skills hardcore early on. It's what helps build the natural accent. It's definitely not all or nothing. There are islands of understanding. They tend to grow and grow. It starts out with single words, then grows to two words together then grows to partial sentences and then to full sentences among a paragraph. So on and so forth.

[bayesian_horse]

We may not have the same definition of listening comprehension.

When I start learning a new language, I can totally "listen comprehend" stuff that's close to the material I already studied. But the same isn't true for random content at realistic speed.

And the "island" part is compatible with "all or nothing". Because yes, within those islands, you understand everything, and over time, as your proficiency in the language grows, there are more islands of knowing all the words. But it seems to be a lot easier at first to get told what a word means and how it is used, rather than depending on it to appear in a useful context a couple hundred times.

[james_s_tayler]

You do both at the same time if you want the fastest results. You get structured i+1 input that you can cope with for part of your learning and then you dive deep into the the native content and let your brain compute the statistics necessary to eventually be able to recognize the patterns at natural speed.

My definition is of listening comprehension is any information I can glean from listening. Information being a reduction in uncertainty. Doesn't need to be complete. Progress is directional.

I know my language learning algorithm well and I pound it on repeat until my goal is achieved.