the first week of listening
nobody can honestly promise what a week of listening to a new language will do for you, and this note will not try. what can be said is smaller and more useful. in the first days, some things may change quickly, and most of them are about how the language sounds to you. other things will not change at all in a week, however much you listen. knowing which is which saves you from giving up on day five for the wrong reason, and from expecting on day seven what takes far longer.
the sound may stop being the hard part
the first time you listen to a language you do not speak, much of the strain is the sound itself: unfamiliar vowels, a rhythm you cannot find the edges of, a speed that seems unfair. the ear is quicker to adjust to unfamiliar sound than most people expect.
in 2004 constance clarke and merrill garrett played english speakers sentences in english spoken with spanish and chinese accents, and measured how quickly they could respond to a word on screen after each one. at first they were slower with accented speech than with speech in an accent they knew. within a minute of listening, that gap had shrunk, and in some conditions the adjustment showed after as few as two to four sentences.
hold that at its real size. those listeners already knew every word; they were tuning in to an accent, not to a language. a language you do not speak is a much bigger stranger. still, it is a fair guide to where early change is likely to show: in the strain of the sound, before anything else.
familiar may start to feel good
the second change is in how the language feels to you, and it is easy to mistake for something else.
in 1968 the psychologist robert zajonc brought together a body of evidence for what he called the mere exposure effect. among it were experiments in which people were shown nonsense words and unfamiliar symbols different numbers of times, then asked whether each one meant something good or bad. the more often something had been seen, the better people tended to judge its meaning. none of it involved hearing a real language, and these were made-up words. but the direction is worth knowing. a language that comes round every day for a week may start to feel less foreign and more pleasant to you.
that is a real change, and it can make the second week easier to start than the first. it is a change in how you feel about the language, though, not in how much of it you know, and it is worth not confusing the two.
what will not change in a week
the first thing a week will not do is keep every line for you. in 2015 jaap murre and joeri dros repeated the experiment hermann ebbinghaus made on himself in the 1880s: one person memorised lists of nonsense syllables, then memorised the same lists again after delays from twenty minutes to a month. a day later, most of the original effort had to be spent again. the material was meaningless and the person was one person. it still describes what most people find: a line that does not come round again tends to go.
following ordinary speech is further off still. hilde van zeeland and norbert schmitt estimate that comfortable understanding of spoken english needs between two and three thousand word families, the kind of number no week of anything gets you near. and speaking, building a sentence of your own, is a different job that listening on its own does not do for you. by the end of a first week you will not follow a conversation, and you will not be able to answer one.
a way to see it for yourself
the changes above are easy to miss and easy to imagine, so it helps to keep a record you cannot argue with later.
on day one, choose one track and listen to its first line. without looking anything up, write down what you think you heard, in your own spelling, however rough. write one more line about how the language sounds to you: fast, harsh, soft, blurred. then put the note away and listen through the week as you normally would.
on day seven, listen to the same line and write it down a second time, then add one more line about the sound. put the two notes side by side. if your spelling has more pieces in it, if the gaps fall in different places, or if the second description is kinder than the first, something has moved in your ear. if nothing has, the week has told you something too, and you have lost nothing but a few minutes.
where this stops
this note cannot tell you that any of these changes will happen to you, or when. no research on a first week of listening to a new language as such turned up in the reading for this note, and what does exist comes from labs, from accents rather than languages, and from made-up words. treat the sections above as a guide to where to look, not a forecast.
a first line to write down
driftspeak is subtitles for your ears: lines from albums and films, a line at a time, in their language and then in yours. words i kept is thirteen short tracks of lines kept from records and films on the shelf, about nineteen minutes, free in full in the app, and its first three tracks have free samples on the site.
start the week with words i kept: its second sample is one japanese line, また、昼と夜が逆なの。 ("my day and night are reversed again."), and it can be the line you write down on day one.