How to Learn A Language By Listening
Listening is a crucial part of any language learning and an incredible learning input tool. Listening is very core of learning a new language when making time to study, you need to make time for listening.
Make sure you listen actively to the audio recordings of native speakers and pay attention to how natives speak and pronounce the words of the language. You need to understand the sound of each and every word and you should be able to distinguish their pronunciations with the help of listening on a regular basis. Even if you’re a beginner and you only understand partial words from the entire audio here and there, it’s good to start getting some basic understanding of the language.
By merely paying your focus on just listening to the language, you will not understand the complete usage of the language. Listening will help your brain adapt to unfamiliar pronunciations and sentence structures of the language, but an overall understanding of the language will still be limited if you focus just on listening and not understanding the overall context and message of the audio.
Listening is a far more complex mechanism than just hearing the audio as you need to understand the meaning of the recorded words too.
You can learn a language yourself just like babies and young children acquire speech in the early years of childhood through listening and repeating the words
It can be difficult to learn a language purely through passive listening, it’s a partial effective way of learning and understanding a language.
However, languages that are similar to each other can be particularly easy to learn if you already know one of them. A good example would be French speakers learning Spanish through passively listening to Spanish in their everyday lives.
Choose Material Suited to Your Level
One of the most common mistakes new language learners make is dealing with learning materials which are way too advanced for their level. They directly try to gain knowledge of higher and intermediate lessons without first listening to beginner-level material. Then learners complain that the speakers are talking too fast and it’s difficult for them to make out the words. The ideal listening material is the one that’s a level or two higher than your current learning level.
Contextualize and Look at the Big Picture
When you are trying to understand an audio or a video clip, keep in mind that all the conversations are spoken in a certain context. Try looking at the big picture, you should make efforts to understand the overall meaning and context of the conversations. Look for context clues in the recordings. If you’re watching a video, try to understand and know about the surroundings. Listen to the “Key Words” for Understanding. So when you try to listen to thekeywords, it means trying to understand on an overall basis what is being spoken and discussed. To practice both contextualizing and listening for the big picture, it’s best to study with audio or video clips that have subtitles or English translations.
Listen for Specific Language Features
When you listen to an audio or video clip, you have to play it repeatedly to understand the various tones, rhythms, verbs, adjectives and tenses used. Try to segregate and listen to the various components in different rounds. So for example, you can pay attention in the first round to the tones and the melody of the conversation while in the next round you can focus on verbs and further so on. Focus on a different feature of the language every time you replay the clip, and you will begin to start understanding the clip.
Watch YouTube videos
YouTube is filled with video clips featuring native speakers having conversations in different contexts and levels of language expertise.
Use YouTube to your advantage by improvising your learning skills, so always pick videos that are just a level or two above your current learning level.
Children’s Shows
Children’s shows have the feature of simple sentence construction structure and slower talking rates as they are made according to the understanding level of kids.
The playful games and the music involved in these shows could keep you interested for hours and even make your day exciting. There shouldn’t be any shyness for an adult watching shows for kids as they can really help in the enhancement of language. Such shows are attention-grabbing and attract multiple sense organ’s attention. These shows can help you understand different contexts and situations of conversations.
Watching movies and listening to songs
Movies have diverse plotlines, topics and genres which are good practice for long-format listening. Foreign language movies will sharpen your contextualizing ability, which is one of the most basic skills you require for learning a foreign language.
Songs also have diverse genres and storylines in them. For example, a romantic love song will have words and phrases related to the topic of “love.” Listening to nursery rhymes can help you build a basic vocabulary and understand the usage of words in poetic form.
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