A 5-Step Method to Improve Your Listening Skills (Fi3M) (Why listening is…
A 5-Step Method to Improve Your Listening Skills (Fi3M)
Why is listening important?
It takes two to tango
Every conversation requires listening and speaking. Without both, it's not a conversation
No matter how well you speak, you won't be able to use the language very effectively in real life if you can't understand what other people are saying to you.
For most of us, one of the reasons for learning a language is the motivation to enjoy native level content like movies, tv shows or podcasts. In order to really enjoy these, you need to build up your listening skills
If you're not a good listener, there's a limit to how well you can speak. We need to listen in order to pick up the patterns of the language, the sounds, the intonation and the flow. If you don't invest time in listening, there's a limit on how good of a speaker you can become because you'll struggle to perfect these important elements.
Passive vs. Active Listening
What is passive listening?
Why passive listening doesn't work
Why language learning needs to be
If you want to remember things, you need to bring attention to them. This is how our brain know what is important and needs to be remembered and what can be forgotten. In order to remember things (like words or phrases you hear, accents, etc.) and be able to understand them, you need to bring attention to them when you practice and then repeat them.
What kind of materials to use
Resources that contain audio and matching text are ideal.
At a more advanced level, the text is not as important but for beginners and intermediate learners it's practically essential
Why listening is hard (and how to fix it)
Personally, I find listening to be the most difficult language learning skill. Maybe you feel the same way?
Hard to concentrate for long periods
The same words often don't come up again
Sounds are unique
Native speakers often 'smash' words together. This means it's not uncommon to not understand something even if you know all of the words because the sounds get mutated when they're spoken together rapidly by native speakers. The only way to improve your comprehension is to listening. Learning new words but never hearing them isn't enough when it comes to high level, real-life conversation.
Each language has it's own unique ebb and flow. The intonation is different and the flow of the sentences is different. The only way to get used to this is through focused, repeated listening.