The BEST Way to Hone Your Listening Skills

The listening technique used in bilingual countries worldwide and how to use it to train your ear in any language.

Welcome, aspiring polyglot! An interesting consequence of being an exchange student is that you get to directly compare two different systems. In my case I actually did two years as a senior in high school in two different countries. Furthermore, I experienced private school in Belgium while I attended public school in the US. Both times I was taking Spanish class, something caused by the fact that they wouldn’t let me take English class in Belgium which was less than ideal.

What is it?

Over the course of a year I saw more differences than I could possibly cover in a single article, but there is something they did in language courses that I use in my private classes to this day. That is the act of dictation. We all know what it is on the phone, you speak and the phone writes. Doing it within the context of language acquisition is much the same. You choose a stimulus, listen to it, and write down what you hear.

Herein lies the key to your success. This exercise is extremely demoralizing. You will quickly realize you do not know as much as you thought you did. However, if you are working with material you enjoy, learning things you want to learn, and focusing on things you know you will need, the time will be well spent. If you do it daily you will improve your listening skills faster than just about any other exercise you can do.

This is such a powerful tool that in Belgium and France the native speakers take dictation classes in French. Senior year of high school (6eme secondaire) the students were still doing dictation practice, though infrequently. It is possible that I experienced all of these things because I was placed in a private school. Either way, if I hadn’t had to do this I certainly wouldn’t speak as well as I do.

How you can start

The best part is that, since you are not in school, you can choose whatever material you want to work with for this. Whatever it is that you are interested in, you can find it on YouTube and there are almost always subtitles. They may not be in your native language, but they will be in the language the video is recorded in most of the time. Of course, they are not always reliable, but you will get the majority of the video through those autogenerated subtitles.

You also have the option to slow down and speed up the video so you can work at your own pace. Slowing the videos down can be painful, but if it helps you understand then you have to start where you have to start. The best you are is not the best you ever will be. Moving from .75 speed to full speed will happen quickly, but there will be moments when you need to drop it down.

With that, make sure you are doing everything you can to add variety to your routine. Listening to the same voice all the time is a double edged sword. In one way you will understand better and better every day. On the other hand you may fail to understand different people. Everyone speaks with a different cadence, a different vocabulary, and a different inflexion. If you only learn one person’s way of speaking it can be extremely difficult to understand other people.

Take as much time as you need with each video, but break it into bite size pieces. Trying to take on a ten minute video right off the bat will torpedo your confidence, especially if listening is one of your weaker areas. Doing this will allow you to break free and walk into any conversation with the confidence that you know exactly what is being said. As with most things we suggest doing for your language acquisition, this will be difficult, but those who try it will understand why doing difficult things is so important.

You don’t have to use YouTube either. The only requirements are audio and a transcript. If you have both of those things you can use whatever you want for your dictation work. Podcasts are great and cover countless topics, audiobooks inherently have a transcript, whatever you choose to use, doing this 3 times per week for an hour or two will enhance and accelerate your second language acquisition.

Why don’t we use dictation in the USA for language acquisition?

It may be tempting to ask yourself why we don’t use this particular method in the US, at least not to any meaningful degree, but the answer may disappoint you. Language classes in the United States function primarily as a box checking exercise. List the verbs, repeat the colors, count correctly, make sure you use the right article or you’ll lose points. That’s not how it is abroad, at least not in my experience.

Here we are taught in a way that ensures we pass tests because when we pass tests the schools get more money and when the schools get more money the administration makes more and says we need to make more money to pay teachers, but I digress. What matters is that we don’t do it and the reason is because it doesn’t really help you pass a written test. Worse, though, many educators would avoid them simply because of how demoralizing they are.

In my opinion, a good educator is capable of tearing down and building up their students. Building up is difficult enough, but both are necessary and tactfully tearing students down is difficult. However, when done correctly the resulting confidence, competence, and drive is incredible. Doing difficult things has that natural effect, but during the process it can be easy to forget the end goal.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, as a language teacher the goal should be for the students to speak their language to such a degree that they can express anything they want whenever they want to whomever they want. That is going to require confidence and without having overcome a significant amount of challenges any confidence will not last long.

Alternatively, if you have challenged yourself, or your students, and you have struggled through being bad at things and learned to speak even though you know you will make mistakes and you’ve embarrassed yourself through miscommunication, then you will be able to speak with a confidence that is not easily shaken. If this is your first time taking on a challenge of this magnitude and you find it demoralizing, that is okay.

Everyone feels like you do at one point or another in their language acquisition. You owe it to yourself to make it through to the other side. Once you start taking on more challenging subjects and exercises you will start building confidence immediately. Remember, you do not have to do it perfect, you just have to do it. Even if you are starting with nursery rhymes and children’s stories, at least you will have started.

If this post made you rethink your approach, the next step is replacing what isn’t working. My free downloadable PDFs give you exercises and frameworks that no app provides — real output practice designed to get you speaking, not just tapping.

Want to skip the trial-and-error entirely? My private students go from zero to conversational in 12 weeks with a course built around their goals, their schedule, and their life. See what that looks like.