Practicing listening during a pandemic: Training your ears for language learning
In a previous post, I talked about the importance of repetition in learning pronunciation. Long story short: you have to build new muscles in order to make new sounds.
Listening skills require similar effort. You also have to train your ears (okay, actually your brain) to recognize the new language. Things like the prosody (stress and intonation patterns) and the sound distinctions that might not exist in your language.
For example (coming from an English L1 background):
French “ou” vs. “u”
Mandarin “x” vs. “sh”
Irish vowels with (“á”) vs. without (a) fadas
Once again, repetition is your friend.
You need lots of audio input to train your ears to the sound of your new language. Ideally, you should be listening to a variety of people from different regions, with different accents, of different ages, etc. Luckily, for several languages, there are a lot of online resources that can be used for building listening skills.
It’s also important to distinguish between listening to learn the sound of a language and listening for comprehension. The tips below are about training your ears, not about understanding 100% of what is being said.
A few things that work for me:
If you’re a beginner:
Find songs/TV shows/movies/YouTube channels in your target language and put them on even if you can’t understand them yet. You’re going to work on listening to sounds, not on understanding words.
Songs might be the best place to start because even in our native languages, most of us probably sing along to songs without understanding all of the lyrics (and maybe just make up our own).
Don’t put on the subtitles in your native language or your brain will stop listening and just process the content in the written text.
Over time, your brain will start to pick up on patterns of the intonation, pitch, and rhythm of the language. After a while, you will start to recognize where words start and stop instead of just hearing a stream of sounds.
If you’re more advanced:
If you can read fairly well in your target language, find songs/TV shows/movies/YouTube channels in your target language and put them on with subtitles in your target language. Look for connections between spelling and pronunciation of sounds.
Listen to a “slow” podcast or watch a “slow” YouTube video in your target language. Listen/watch without subtitles. Then listen/watch again with subtitles in your target language.
Find short news clips to watch. If they have an accompanying story with background information, even better.
