YOU BETTER BE LISTENING IN SPANISH SERIES

You need to have a lot of exposure to native speaker conversation in order to get better at it.

How you can improve your listening comprehension skillsĪs I said, unfortunately there aren’t really any shortcuts for this. When she spoke to me in the beginning it was just a mishmash of sounds that made no sense to me at all.īut after deliberately focusing on improving my comprehension skills ( Glossika was very useful for this) I ended up having a similar epiphany moment about a month ago when I was with her and I suddenly realized that I was understanding her with much less effort. She can’t speak a word of English and when I met her I could barely speak a word of Russian. In that photo at the top of the page is a girl I met in Russia at the start of this year during my Russian language immersion trip. This is how it felt even though I knew it was a gradual process over a long time. It was just a sudden defining moment of realization – almost like my ability to comprehend another language became apparent overnight. “Oh my God! Everything you’re saying right now makes perfect sense to me! I don’t really have to try to understand you anymore – I just get it.” I started studying this language and some its dialects when I was 18 years old and I’m still working away at it.ĭespite my determination and enthusiasm in my first year of Arabic, it wasn’t until about 3 years after I had started that I one day had this incredible epiphany moment during a conversation with some Egyptian friends. I’ve been on a journey with the Arabic language for over 12 years. My experience with foreign language listening comprehension This is why I refer to listening comprehension as the one aspect of language learning that you can’t bullshit ( see my post about it here). There are a lot of people around who claim to master languages in extremely short amounts of time and I don’t doubt that they can speak well but I’m always skeptical about their level of listening comprehension in that time. The only way we train our ears to distinguish sounds in foreign speech is by lots and lots of exposure. There’s no shortcut around this unfortunately.

YOU BETTER BE LISTENING IN SPANISH SERIES

The reason for this is that speech is a series of sound units that are connected together quickly when spoken by a native speaker and they’re difficult to distinguish with an untrained ear. You can be an excellent speaker and be able to read really well yet still not understand more than a fraction of what other people are saying. One of the most difficult parts about learning a new language is listening comprehension (being able to grasp and make sense of what you hear).

The problem is your listening comprehension skills need a lot of work. Have you ever tried to converse with a native speaker of your target language but found that despite being able to speak pretty well you can barely catch a word of what he/she says? Also be sure to visit my Essential Language Learning Tools page where I’ve listed the best tools to help you improve your listening comprehension.

You better be listening in spanish