Being a better listener: foreign language edition

September 9, 2022 4:16 PM

Specifically, early stage foreign language edition. What helped you learn to better parse the spoken word in the early days of language learning when EVERYTHING is unfamiliar?

I, a native English speaker, am learning a Slavic language for the first time and finding my listening ability is far behind reading, writing, and even speaking. I might know all the words in a sentence, but cannot for the life of me figure out how they hang together when spoken. Prepositions bleed into nouns; a verb appearing in an unexpected place throws me off so badly I lose all recall ability even when the sentence is repeated several times. I've tried listening to spoken passages, then listening while reading along, and then listening again. After reading I generally understand what each word means and what each sentence says and when I re-listen I can remember what it is all about, but I still can't hear or distinguish the words that I know are being said. This is most deeply frustrating when I'm trying to have a simple conversation with my teacher but can't understand her questions even with multiple repetitions, because I KNOW I could string together a decent answer if I just knew what I was suppose to be responding to...

The techniques I used learning Spanish don't seem to help me much here. I think this is in part because I was exposed to Spanish for such a long time in school that I never really had to go through this stage - by the time I really set my mind to getting better at the language, I could already understand enough that whatever I listened to, there was some context I understood that could help me fill in missing vocabulary or an unexpected verb tense or whatever. That isn't the case this time around. Techniques that might work at a more advanced level - watching a movie with subtitles, finding a native speaker to converse with - don't make sense for me yet.

So, what has helped you improve your very early-stage listening comprehension in a new language? Perhaps worth noting is that learning this language is literally my job at the moment - I have tons of time and plenty of resources to devote to it, but I also need to keep up with a pretty ambitious (to me) rate of language acquisition. I can feel my reading/writing/speaking ability pulling ahead of my listening every day and I know it's going to cause problems unless I can figure out a way to address the gap.

posted by exutima to Education (19 answers total)

There's definitely a benefit to listening to lots of stuff in the new language even when you're not understanding it - you'll get benefits other than comprehension. You brain needs a lot of exposure to the lanugage to start recognising its most basic sound units. Find a radio station in your new language, put it on in the background as you go about your day, and let your brain absolutely bathe in the sounds, spaces, rhythms of it. Don't strain to try and understand it, just let it play. It might feel like a waste of time because it just seems like noise, but your brain needs lots of that raw input to start to recognise the building blocks and that will eventually trickle down into your learning.

I learned Estonian (totally unlike English) through immersion while living in Estonia, and I remember every night I'd go to bed and put my head on the pillow and hear almost deafening Estonian chatter filling my head. There were no actual words in there, nothing I could understand being said, but it was like being in a loud party full of people speaking Estonian. And it was definitely Estonian, not English, even though I couldn't hear any words. It was, I'm sure, my brain rehearsing, sorting, playing back all those phonemes and tones and rhythms that I'd been bombarded with just going about my day, and building new neural pathways to start to make sense of them and be able to categorise them, then recognise them, and eventually to use them.

The changes in my comprehension of the language around me were gradual but important. At first when I listened to Estonian, it sounded like an endless stream of sound, where I couldn't even tell where one word ended and the next one started. Then one day I was listening to the radio, and realised I could easily hear separate words in there. I couldn't translate any of them, but I could definitely hear separate words and it was so different to listen to! That's the first step that opens the door towards actual comprehension. You probably never had to go through it with Spanish (or rather, you never noticed yourself going through it because it happened more gradually, and when you were younger and your brain was a little more wired to absorb these things, and long enough ago that you've forgotten it).

Listening immersion is super-useful, even in the early stages when it doesn't come with comprehension.
posted by penguin pie at 5:00 PM on September 9, 2022 [14 favorites]

Seeing people speak. I know a lot of people recommend watching cartoons, but I honestly learned the most fastest when I could watch the mouth and face of the person speaking. Movies or TV shows in the original language are great. Mouths make predictable shapes for sounds.

After that, I got a foreign language version book and audiobook of a book I knew really well (YA books are great for this - just complex enough). I’d listen while I followed along in the book, and since I already knew the story and sequence of events, I was better at word recognition because I didn’t need to ‘interpret’ in the same way.
posted by Silvery Fish at 5:02 PM on September 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

This might be unavailable or too elementary for you (although you can test out of early skills), but Duolingo has a mix of exercises, including pure listening ones where you have the option to play the same audio both at a normal pace or a slower one, which introduces bigger pauses between the words.

Otherwise, the best way to build listening skills is to listen. Perhaps a podcast aimed at beginner users (is there a slow news in your target language podcast)? Podcast players can let you slow down the playback, and then once you get used to that speed, you can pick it back up. Don't read along, or do anything else that triggers your brain's language centres; do it while walking around a park or something like that. I suspect that this is one of those things that is impossible for a while and then 'clicks'.

One other thought -- are you working on reducing your English accent? That might help you approach the sounds in a different way.
posted by Superilla at 5:02 PM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Children's songs and audio stories tend to be reasonably slow paced and full of repetition. The baseline of understanding a language is getting a handle on its phonetics, and repetition -- even rhythmic singing along -- can help with that. Plus, limited vocabulary which should be accessible.

The problem with jumping straight into adult content is that it skips that step of building an unconscious familiarity with just the basic _sounds_ and _rhythms_ of a language.

So - it might have felt silly, but I very methodically figured out how to search for simple French (my learned language) childrens song collections and book-and-story works. They were fun!
posted by amtho at 5:28 PM on September 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

Watch more TV and movies with subtitles, even English ones. That's helped me with Polish, my first Slavic language, during the past year, because I can start to pick out words that match up with the meaning I see in English. I've also been doing Duolingo and making sure to learn to pronounce the words out loud myself.
posted by limeonaire at 5:30 PM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Techniques that might work at a more advanced level - watching a movie with subtitles, finding a native speaker to converse with - don't make sense for me yet.

NB I don't live in your brain, but it's possible you may surprise yourself there. Watching tons of French-language TV and movies that were beyond me when I started doing it moved me along a lot faster than I think I would have done otherwise. Kind of like learning a complicated melody by ear; each time you listen you catch a few more notes.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:44 PM on September 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

I've found it productive to listen to radio news programmes. You have some idea of what they're going to be talking about, but you don't know how they're going to say it.

You have to be willing to tolerate totally lost sections to begin with (this was during my commute, so that was fine; I also recommend while you're cleaning, cooking or doing the laundry) but the exposure helps over time to pick out the words you do know and give a clue as to common turns of phrase.

Also, if you can find a station with ads, then the ads are repetitive and easy to understand. Usually that's a curse, but here it's quite helpful.
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 7:04 PM on September 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

I didn't realize this at the time, but listening to songs probably helped me out a lot with learning a new language (Spanish).

I was really into the salsa (dance) scene so heard the same songs over and over again - familiarity helps. They had the same themes of love, attraction, sex, cheating, heartbreak, etc. so I learned to recognize a lot of words in the same theme. And then, I love singing, so whenever I would hear a really catchy tune I would look up the words and just try to learn the chorus so I could sing it again and again in the car. That helped me learn specific phrases and expressions, and also copy the pronunciation so that I could sing it just like the singer does.
posted by tinydancer at 8:35 PM on September 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

for me personally, the thing which, by far, has made the biggest different is vocabulary. if you don't know most of the words, even if you can parse the sounds being made, you will not understand things. past a certain point you might be able to guess, but really, for me (I learned spanish, mandarin, and japanese to high levels as an adult), vocabulary was the dealbreaker

for a specific drill that I also have found very helpful, I call this listen/read/readlisten/listen...I should come up with a better name. basically, you find some piece of audio with text. this can work with a video with subtitles, but I think the ideal is something where you have a full audio, and a full text. it's at least a bit less tedious that way. I think the ideally length is 3-5 minutes. audiobooks could work, but keep in mind that literature represents some of the hardest possible content...depends of course what it is, but even stuff "for children" is often harder than you think. children know a lot of words!

regardless, once you have a piece of content, first you listen to it and try really hard to understand what you can. then you read it, and in my case, I always strive for complete comprehension. look up every word. understand all the grammar. then you listen again while reading along. then you listen one last time.

I found this a very, very good way to train my ear. that said, vocabulary is kind (fwiw in mandarin I am at the point where I can listen to complex audiobooks without needing a dictionary and having essentially 100% comprehension...not that that means my opinions on language learning are better than anyone else's, just that they are informed)
posted by wooh at 9:19 PM on September 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Watch movies with English subtitles. You'll be amazed how it helps with matching sounds to meaning just by repetition, it gives you the meaning of entire sentences, and soon enough you'll be facepalming and saying "that's not the right word!" because subtitle translators are paid pennies and work far too fast.

(And my sympathies. Slavic languages plain don't have a set word order!)
posted by I claim sanctuary at 10:42 PM on September 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

I've watched a gazillion hours of subtitled foreign media with no increase in comprehension because my brain just does not want to bother interacting with the audio at all if there is lovely text to read. But if I can offset the subtitles timing so that I have to engage with the audio line alone for a moment before getting the english translation then it becomes much more useful. Force brain to use those listening neurons, and then occasional & immediate reward of a successful recognition.

VLC is a media player that allows modifying the subtitle delay. Apparently there is a chrome tool for netflix too but haven't tried it myself.
posted by dragon garlanding at 3:52 AM on September 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is a question I can answer. I second all the ones about listening to podcasts, to beginner podcasts, and watching TV and movies in the target language. You can try watching like 30 seconds or 2 minutes of your TV show without subs, and repeat the interval and try to guess, and then afterwards watch the interval with subs.

After awhile, the interval can get longer.

I used to get discouraged that I couldn't understand my target language and just give up or wait until I was ready. But its the wrong way. The number of reps that you do are all that really matters. You might take some time to see improvement but even if you don't feel improvement, keep doing it.
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 7:52 AM on September 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

I really recommend shadowing to build the link between reception and production and to help build the connection between the written words you know and the sounds you expect to be produced in real speaking vs the sounds that are actually produced by native speakers. If you have a listening text with a transcription, listen to it in intervals while speaking out loud what you hear. You can do it while reading a transcript, but it works best when you're purely focused on the sound, so make sure you do some passes without reading.

A great resource for this is the Language Reactor browser extension for Netflix, which lets you display subtitles in two languages at the same time while also giving you a line by line readout at the side to facilitate per-line rewinding. Slowed down podcasts of easy content (particularly easy news or the like) can also be good, especially if they provide transcripts.
posted by wakannai at 8:42 AM on September 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

To build on How much is that froggie's advice, when I was learning German, I found it helpful to listen to a news radio station that repeated the headlines every 5-7 minutes (InfoRadio Berlin-Brandenburg, in my case). Even if I just had it on in the background, the frequent repetition of the same stories helped me learn to parse the words.
posted by brianogilvie at 8:57 AM on September 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

I used to be a language tutor for many years. Listening is by far the most difficult skill. It's completely normal for it to lag behind speaking and reading.

You are basically hearing a stream of sounds and trying to deconstruct it into words. This takes time.

I'd recommend two things

1. Songs. Listening to the same song over and over while looking at lyrics. It doesn't matter if the lyrics are too difficult at the moment. It's all about getting a few phrases you'll recognize, and getting used to the prosody.
2. Watching game shows - they use very repetitive language. I learned a lot of German as a teen by watching The Price is Right with my host family.

Do basically, a lot of repetition.

If you're learning Polish by any chance I could give more specific recs.
posted by M. at 12:59 PM on September 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: You all are the best, as usual. So much good advice here - hvala!!
posted by exutima at 2:41 PM on September 10, 2022

Two things have really helped me:

1.REPEAT the sentences you're listening to, both while reading the text and without the text. Focus 100% on reproducing what you heard spoken.

Think about how, in Spanish, "mi hija" is usually spoken "meehah", with the mi and the hi combined. This happens in a lot of languages (including English).

If you can find a Berlitz book for your language, they can really help with knowing how those adjacent sounds combine and collapse. I wouldn't want to learn pronunciation SOLELY from a Berlitz book, but their pronunciation guides can really help show how words get broken up or combined orally. For example, this page from Berlitz Self-Teacher French shows how the "Ai-je" in

Ai-je autant d'argent que vous?

becomes just a single syllable - "Ayzh":
Ayzh oh-tawng dahr-zhawng kuh voo?

I used to think these books were horrible, but when I started to use one for Italian, my oral production and listening ability really improved.

2. The other thing that helped me was lots and lots of listening - immersion, as people have suggested above. The thing is, it doesn't matter if you don't understand at first. That's normal. But the more you listen, the more your ear will start correctly breaking down those sounds into meaning.

For me, alternating between audio I'd never heard before and repeat listens of audio I HAD heard multiple times worked well. If you can find some 2-4 minute pieces and go over them as practice, repeating every sentence you don't understand perfectly, and then re-listen to those same pieces on repeat for 20 minutes or so, you might be surprised at how much better your listening gets.

Good luck!
posted by kristi at 4:56 PM on September 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Listening is definitely much weaker for me than reading, but listening to music in the target language seems to help me a bit. I don't mean active listening, just having music in that language playing in the background while I'm working or reading (in English!) or whatever. I'm not trying to pick out words, I don't have a clue what the songs are about, but it seems to help my brain get used to the sounds.

I also find watching English-subtitled films in the target language helpful.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 2:51 AM on September 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think no one's said this yet, but for my listening brain it was really useful to watch stuff in a target language with the subtitles on for the same target language. Made it clearer to me when things are audibly elided, etc. Also made it easier for my brain that requires spelling (to an obnoxious degree) to see how various slang words are at least sometimes spelled. I still remember the moment getting to see "ouais" spelled out. It was exciting.
posted by lauranesson at 7:11 PM on September 13, 2022 [4 favorites]