Swift Stardom: 5 Tips to Improve Your Foreign Language Listening Skills in a Flash
1. Mentally Prepare Yourself
One of the biggest hurdles to listening skill mastery can be our own perceptions.
Poor mental frameworks cancause us to pursue time intensive but unrewarding tasks, give up quickly when we’re faced with a challenge or simply not achieve as much as we would like to.
For listening one of the most damaging perceptions is this idea that you have to understandeverything. Your language exchange partner is talking to you at a thousand miles an hour, you feel like you have no clue what’s going on and a sensation similar to sea-sickness is beginning to take hold.
Butthat’s okay.
When we’re listening to anything, whether it be a conversation with a friend or a television drama, when we’re starting out we should consider ourselves successful as long as we understand the gist of what we’re listening to.
Another unfortunate belief that has stolen many an hour from language learners is that you can learn from passive listening. By passive listening I mean things like having the radio on in the background while you’re focused on writing an essay or listening to music while trying to study for a brutal science test the next day.
The audio is there, the sound waves are physically entering your ears,but it’s not being processed.
Think about all of the times you’ve watched a foreign movie in a language you haven’t studied with subtitles. Even if you’re physically hearing Chinese when you’re watching “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” you probably didn’t improve your Chinese listening skills any by the end of the movie.
Hence, we must be active listeners.
What is active listening? Giving your full attention to any audio material that you’re using to study.
For instance, if you’re going to watch a drama you should be focused on trying to figure out exactly what is happening in the show’s plot line through the characters’ speech. No talking on the phone. No cleaning your room. Just focus.
And if you really want to push your active listening, try writing a summary midway through what you’re listening to and then again at the end of it. Or, listen to an audio clip, write down five questions about things you didn’t understand and then listen to the file again while trying to answer your own questions.
Both options will help you to keep your attention focused on the task at hand.
How to Improve Your Listening Skills as a Language Learner – an In-Depth Guide
written by
Andrew Barr
Full disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. ?
As a language learner, I found listening to be the hardest skill to improve. That might be because I went about it the wrong way.
I sometimes hear other language learners say that, even from the early stages, they understood their target language perfectly fine.
That wasn’t me.
I also hear language learners say that after practicing for a while “it just clicked one day”. After that, they could listen to their target language and understand everything being said.
That also wasn’t me.
Along my language learning journey, developing listening comprehension was a long, slow and painful grind. The adage of two steps forward and one step back comes to mind, but that doesn’t really capture what I went through.
It was more like one inch forward, two steps back, two months pass, half a step forward, then sideways. Basically, it sucked!
In the end, I discovered why I struggled so much with my listening skills: I’d been developing my listening skills in the wrong way.
In this post, you will learn the one activity most students use [including myself] in an attempt to improve their listening skills. I’ll explain why it doesn’t work, and give three other activities that are far more effective for improving your listening skills.
How To Improve Listening Skills In A Foreign Language – Learn a Language On Your Own [Part 5]
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Before I explain how to improve listening skills in a foreign language, I have one thing to confess.
You wouldn't believe how long I've ignored this skill! I was convinced thatmastering grammarand vocabulary is, more or less, enough to have a decent conversation with foreigners. And that these competencies will take care of the rest.
Boy, oh boy, was I wrong! Of course, like all the theories, it all seemed rosy until it got confronted with reality.
Struggling to understand what is being said in your target language? Here are 12 failproof tips that will improve your listening comprehension.
When learning a foreign language, it’s easy to fall into the trap of solely focusing on building a large vocabulary and memorizing all the grammar rules. But true mastery in a language requires so much more than that.
Even if you memorize a whole dictionary or grammar book [which would be quite impressive], it won’t lead you to fluency and help you use your target language in real life.
Of course, vocabulary and grammar are important, but equally important are the communicative skills that will actually help you use the words and rules you know to communicate such as reading, writing, speaking, and listening.
The latter is notorious among language learners. Naturally, people’s experiences vary depending on the target language and various individual factors, but quite a large number of learners admit that they find listening one of the hardest aspects of learning a foreign language.
In this guide, we’ll take a look at some of the factors that make listening challenging, and then I’ll share with you some of the best tips on how to improve listening comprehension.
Why should I do more listening in a foreign language?
When you improve your listening skills, you’ll understand native speakers better – a fundamental skill for speaking a foreign language.
But listening has another benefit: It helps you learn how native speakers talk.
Of course, if your aim is to have conversations, you’ll also need to practice speaking. But one of the coolest things about listening is that it helps with your speaking skills. The more you listen, the more you’ll find that the right things “pop into your head” when you need them.
Listening helps you get the grammar right
Time for a little experiment. Let’s say you’re a native English speaker and I ask you which of the following is correct:
- Last year I went to London
- Last year I have been to London
Which would you choose?
Most native English speakers instinctively feel that the first sentence is right. They can’t tell you why, but they use it correctly even though they don’t know the rule.
When you listen a lot in a foreign language, you’ll pick up grammar without spending so much time memorising the rules. You’ll just know because it “sounds right” – a bit like in your native language.
This happens to me all the time. For example, German has several ways to say “the” [including der, die and das], which can be confusing for learners. But I know that Germans saydas Foto. Why? Is it because I memorised it in a list of “das” words?
Nein.
It’s because I’ve been watching a certain reality TV show [*Cough* Germany’s Next Topmodel] where they talk about photos a lot.
One of my guilty pleasures is Germany’s Next Top Model. I’ve picked up lots of German grammar just by hearing certain structures being used over and over.This doesn’t mean you should totally ignore grammar, but it does mean that you can pick up a lot relatively painlessly by listening as much as you can.
Listening helps you learn native-sounding expressions
Languages are full of little expressions that don’t translate logically. Look at the literal translations of the phrase “we’re nearly there” in different languages:
Italian: We are almost arrived[Siamo quasi arrivati].
Spoken French: One is almost arrived[On est presque arrivés].
Spanish: Already, we almost arrived [Ya casi llegamos].
Every language has thousands of little expressions like these and the best way to learn them is by hearing them in natural situations [either in real life, or via TV/films etc.]
Listening is a great way for busy people to learn a language
Just in case you needed another reason to increase the amount of listening you do in a foreign language, it’s the busy learner’s best friend. All you need is a smartphone and some headphones and you can listen as you go about your day without it taking up any extra time.
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