How To Improve Your Listening Skills

remember you need repetition and novelty after a while if you're listening to the same thing over and over again the brain is picking up less and less and less hi there steve kaufman here today i want to talk about listening skills listening skills how to get better at listening how to use listening to learn a language remember if you enjoy these videos please subscribe click on the bell for notifications so as you know i consider input listening and reading to being to be the keys to learning a language you have to get the language into

you it has to come from outside you have to get your brain used to a new language this is best achieved through listening and reading reading helps you acquire more words but listening gets your brain used to the language and of course listening comprehension is a tremendously important skill because if you're speaking to someone and we all want to speak in the language if you can't understand what they're saying what the other person is saying then it's very uncomfortable and you can't have a very meaningful conversation so how do you use listening to get better

in the language and what are the tips to get better at listening first of all it depends on each each person but i cannot sit down and just listen if i were to sit and i've tried it so i have whatever lesson i'm listening to and i sit down in a comfortable chair and i say i'm going to spend half an hour listening to this podcast or whatever it might be i'm incapable of doing that my mind mind wanders so i can't concentrate if i have dedicated study time then i'm going to read or i'm

going to work on my ipad with link so where does the listing come in listening has the tremendous advantage that we can do it wherever we are i don't have my air pods handy but i have my airpods and i recently bought a new kind of airpod that sits outside the ear and they work really well i went jogging yesterday and i could hear very well and i don't have these things actually plugged into my ear but i can listen first thing in the morning i get up i have a little seven minute exercise routine

i listen i make breakfast i listen if i exercise during the day i listen if i'm in the car i listen so you've got all this time to listen all right so then people say well when you're listening do you always focus all right it is impossible to 100 focus while listening you have to like so much in language learning you have to accept imperfection so when you speak you're going to make mistakes when you listen there's going to be lots of areas you don't understand there are also going to be moments when you are

not focused on what you're listening to you lose track you your mind wanders off somewhere else that's fine as long as you come back and so let's say for a period of 30 minutes that i'm in the car listening to something maybe i'm only focused on what i'm listening to for half that time or i don't know what the number is because i don't worry about it but i know it's not a hundred percent of the time but for whatever percentage of the time i'm listening i'm exposing my brain to the language and i am

getting used to the language now one of the things that's very important is you cannot continue to listen to your target language and not understand anything or only understand five percent that is very inefficient in my experience so if i listen to something obviously at the early stages in the language i don't understand anything but then i will read it i will look up the words i'll review them in link read it again then i'll listen and i still don't understand even though i understood kind of when i was reading and looking up words when

i go to listen i don't understand but that doesn't bother me i know that from personal experience that in time what initially is just noise for me by a process of reading and listening and going back and reading again and looking up words again and listening again eventually more and more of this becomes comprehensible don't listen to the same lesson over and over and over again at one sitting in other words the brain as i've said many times requires repetition and novelty so you can listen to an item a few times then move on to

the next item even if you don't fully understand the first so you have lesson one and you listen and you listen and you read it then you listen again and you understand twenty thirty percent move on to the next one don't try to you know master any particular lesson or content item it's all exposure it's all helping the brain get used to the language remember you need repetition and novelty after a while if you're listening to the same thing over and over again the brain is picking up less and less and less so you have

to move to the next lesson and to the next lesson so keep pushing yourself forward maintain that balance between repetition and novelty and there's all kinds of research into how the brain learns that sort of block learning that third fourth fifth time we read something or we listen to something we are in fact learning less and less so you have to keep moving forward now so don't worry about losing focus don't worry about what you don't understand keep challenging or rewarding your brain with new material but do have enough repetition so that you start to

notice certain things that you didn't notice the first time and this is the next point about listening i can listen to a mini story that i've listened to 30 40 times before so i know the mini story and yet i will suddenly notice a structure a verb pattern verb form that i hadn't really noticed before even though i knew the rule vaguely but the 31st time that i listened to that i notice it in a different way so give yourself a chance to notice things when you go back for that additional pass through the same

material so you're again you're maintaining that repetition and novelty but when you're on your in your repetition activity allow yourself to notice certain things you don't have to notice everything you can lose focus but there will be times when you notice certain things in there that will help you in your gradual acquisition of the language and remember that listening comprehension here is the goal it's not going to be perfect but it will gradually improve and the better your listening comprehension the better your ability to have conversations but again give yourself you know a variety between

repetition repetitious material and new challenging material combine reading with listening try to focus in on certain aspects of pronunciation that you maybe didn't notice before be aware that some of the things that you didn't notice on the first time listening or the second or the fifth or the tenth time you may notice the 20th time you listen so the the process of acquisition of a language is gradual so if you listen and you don't understand don't get frustrated if you listen and read and listen and read and still don't understand don't get frustrated that's normal

and at least in my own case i prefer to be listening and doing something else cleaning up the garage whatever it might be listening fading out focusing in again that works better for me than trying to sit down and say okay for the next half hour i'm to listen to this all right the exception of that of course is if you're watching a movie which is a form of listening but you're watching and listening at the same time and it's rewarding because it's fun to watch a movie and you can see the people you can

almost feel as if you're participating with this family that's why series you know on netflix are so great if it's if it's the same group of people interacting all the time in the series and you watch them and you feel you're a part of them and you're getting that sense of being in that cultural you know uh sphere um all of that is good but i wouldn't you know i consider the the sort of video movies tv series that's more of a reward that's fun you have to develop the ability to be able to listen

without seeing what's going on uh initially sort of repetitious material like the many stories eventually audiobooks where just hearing the words conjures up meaning for you so that you're automatically converting you know words in the target language into meaning and so as you build up to that level of of listening comprehension you are preparing yourself to become fluent in the language so that's my advice treat listening and listening comprehension not only as a primary goal in language learning but as an important way of helping your brain become accustomed to the language so i hope that

was helpful thank you for listening