Improving English Listening With Independent Study
There are those who prefer to study English alone and here are some tips to get better at listening.
Study a little bit at a time.
Only have a few minutes per day to study? Perfect. Believe it or not, that’s even better than having a lot of time to study.
If you are someone with a habit of studying around 15-20 minutes a day instead of a few hours in one sitting, actually you are studying using the method of micro learning.
Simply speaking, micro learning is dividing your task into very small tasks that can be done in about five minutes.
For example, imagine that you’re trying to study the present perfect. You can micro learn it by dividing it into: 1. Affirmative sentences; 2. Negative sentences; 3. Questions; 4. Use; 5. Words that trigger the present perfect.
This is just an example. You can divide your task the way you want, always trying to remember that every individual task should last five minutes at most.
There are a lot of scientific studies that prove that learning 15 to 30 minutes every day is much better than trying to memorize hundreds of new words and grammar rules in one day.
And practicing a little bit every day works for sure. Everybody has 15 or 20 minutes every day to read about a new tense, practice some vocabulary, listen to a podcast or watch an episode of a cool series.
Try to introduce micro learning in your English-learning daily routine. The greatest thing about micro learning is that you only need five minutes to finish a task, so you can do one in the morning, one in the afternoon and one in the evening—or all three when you have a 20-minute break… You choose how you want to do it, just does it every single day!
Listen to the same English podcast every day for a week.
Find a podcast that you find interesting or entertaining and choose one episode. Listen to that episode every day for a week—while you’re driving, riding the bus, washing dishes, etc. Pick out words or phrases that are difficult to understand and look them up on the first and second days. Don’t forget to hit “pause” and listen again.
After a couple of days, you should be able to listen out for these words and understand them. It may also help to memorize parts of the podcast and practice speaking them out loud. Listen for the differences between yourself and the speaker.
By the last day, you’ll find that you can understand much more than on the first day. As your ear adjusts to hearing this English podcast episode, it’ll be easier to listen to new audio in English.
Overhear an English conversation.
If you’re living somewhere where English is spoken, take an afternoon to hunt for an English conversation. When you start to hear English, slow down and listen. At first, you won’t know what they’re talking about since you’ll probably start listening in the middle of the conversation. This will make it even more challenging to understand, but also more fun.
Listen for any new words you may not know, and also try to see if you can catch what the conversation is about. You can search for English conversation on a bus, in a cafe or at a park,
Take advantage of “white noise.”
White noise can mean different things, and its dictionary definition is quite complicated even for native speakers.
When it comes to “normal people,” I would define white noise as some kind of sound, normally continuous, that goes on in the background while you do something else.
If you switch on the radio and listen to music while you do the dishes, that music is your white noise. If I’m listening to a podcast while I water my plants, that podcast is my white noise. We’re practicing passive listening when we use English white noise.
One of the things about white noise is that we normally don’t have to pay attention to it. The music you’re listening or the TV “talking to itself” while you clean the bathroom is just there. You don’t have to be listening to and focusing on them (active listening).
When we learn a language, white noise can be used to our advantage.
Play a podcast, an audiobook or an English series in the background while you clean your flat or iron your clothes (or do any other chore). Don’t pay special attention to it, just let it play and go on with your activities.
You might think that you’re not learning anything if you’re not paying attention, but the truth is that your brain is registering everything that’s happening in the background, and that white noise that you think is only filling the silence is actually making your brain work.
Read and listen at the same time.
Another way to improve your listening skills is to use two sources of information at the same time.
This simply means that you should be not only listening, but also getting your English from another place at the same time.
The easiest way to do this is by watching an English video with English subtitles. This way, you’ll be listening to and reading the words, which will make it easier to understand everything and will help you to remember more.
These practical ideas will surely take you along in your journey of learning English through Listening at a comfortable pace.