How To Improve Your Foreign Language Comprehension
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?
It’s not that they’re speaking too fast. They’re speaking normally.
The problem is your listening comprehension skills need a lot of work.
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). 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.
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.
There’s no shortcut around this unfortunately.
The only way we train our ears to distinguish sounds in foreign speech is by lots and lots of exposure. Listen, listen and listen some more. And this takes time.
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 extremely well, but I’m always skeptical about their level of listening comprehension in that time.
My own experience with listening comprehension
Next year (2012) marks one decade of my journey with the Arabic language. I started studying this language and some its dialects when I was 18 years old and I’m still working at it.
Despite my relentless determination and enthusiasm in my first year of Arabic, it wasn’t until about 3 years after I had started this journey that I one day had this incredible epiphany moment during a conversation with some Egyptian friends.
“Oh my God! Everything you’re saying right now makes perfect sense to me! I don’t even have to try to understand you – I just get it.”
It really did happen like that for me. It was just a sudden, defining moment of realization – almost like my ability to comprehend another language changed overnight. This is how it felt even though I knew it was a gradual process over a long time.
How you can improve your listening comprehension skills
As I said, there are no shortcuts to this. You need to have a lot of exposure to real, native speaker conversation in order to get better at it.
It took me 3 years, but that was a lot longer than it needed to be. I neglected this area of focus for a long time. It doesn’t have to take that long provided you’re determined and proactive about training your comprehension skills.
Music actually isn’t ideal for this. It helps, but what you need to do is to listen to a lot of real, natural conversation. For this reason, radio talk shows, television and movies are much more beneficial.
Here’s one highly effective method that I use to get the most out of listening material to train my comprehension skills:
Let’s say you’re studying French. Take a good French movie and find a short scene that you like in the movie. Here’s one from Amélie that I’m watching at the moment:
It’s good if the scene in the movie has a short dialogue that’s not too difficult for your level.
Use a video editing program like VirtualDub to cut the scene from the movie into a smaller video file to make it easier for you to use.
Go a step further and use an audio extractor like AoA Audio Extractor to strip the audio track from the video and make an MP3 file out of it for your iPod.
Now you’ve got your favorite foreign movie scene for easy listening while you’re driving, walking or doing the house chores.
Listen to it over and over. Do it until you can clearly distinguish the different sound units.
If you find it hard to make out certain words, try using Audacity to slow down the speed of the MP3 so you can hear it better.
This was written by Donovan Nagel.
If you find this website useful, please take a few seconds to visit The Mezzofanti Guild on Facebook by clicking here and Like it.
Comments: If you’ve got something you’d like to add to this or some constructive criticism you can do that at the bottom of this page. Just please be respectful. Any abusive or nonsensical comments will be deleted.
Related Posts
Related Post
Popular
- Arabic and Hebrew: Why Semitic Languages Are Not Difficult (43)
- You Don’t Need To Study Grammar To Learn A Foreign Language (43)
- 12 Prolific Language Learning Bloggers You Should Follow (42)
- 12 Lessons Learned Proposing To An Egyptian Girl Who Only Spoke Arabic (38)
- Learning Arabic? Here Are 5 Books That I Highly Recommend You Own (36)
Dain Yeung
Chris
Mary Jane Burton
Scott
@alwaysspanish
Listening to one recording over and over is not useful, it doesn't work because of natural variation. Nothing is pronounced the same twice, phonemes are ranges of sounds, rather than one precise sound. Listening to one recording won't help you to discover this ranges no matter how often you listen to it.
I disagree.
For example, the Auditory Cortex (the part of the brain that processes sound input) is capable of recognizing the same music note played on many different musical instruments.
For example, a G chord on guitar which sounds very different to a G on a flute is still recognizable as a G note.
The same is true for language phonemes. You might have a deeper or higher voice than I do, but if we both say 'tree' it's recognizable despite variation in pitch and so on.
If what you're saying is fact, how does a baby start to understand spoken language if he/she only hears its mother and father speaking?
No, it's not true for phonemes,phonemes are different in different languages, or even dialects. You can recognize "tree" because you learned the range of phonemes as a child.
Children learn language because they hear hours and hours of speech, not one recording over and over. Children hear many people, not just their parents. But it's not so much a problem of listening to one speaker, the problem is it's one EXACT recording, so there is absolutely no variation that happens in natural speech.
I really have to agree with Mezzoguild on this one. Nobody says you have to listen to just one recording over and over. You do that until you truly understand that excerpt, then you move on to a new recording. The idea is to work with many samples.
By the way, for people interested in Spanish and French, this is exactly the approach recommended on the website http://www.langcal.com where they even provide some free samples of natural conversation.
Hi Donovan –
In my case, listening to songs has been very helpful in learning vocabulary – songs are repetitive, hence phrases and words are easy to remember. But I agree that as far as listening comprehension, this is only part of the story, whereas news, movies, interviews etc. are the real deal.
I really liked the part of your post where you mention the first time you actually understood what someone was saying in a foreign language without you trying to. I can relate. I've been learning Spanish for a while and can be considered intermediate. Speaking and reading still comes easier than listening, but I loved the moment when, while watching an interview on TV, I actually was focused on the message and not trying to understand. It was just happening. I didn't understand 100%, but enough to make me feel great.
Good post.
Thanks for your comment, Pola.
It's a great feeling isn't it!
I'm glad I found your blog too.
What an exciting discussion! As an ESL teacher and language student of many years (and a few languages), I totally get the various opinions expressed. I remember one student, in particular, who wanted to impress everyone that his English was so good (that he didn't need to be in ESL classes anymore). He would begin a conversation with you, and it was like it was all one way. He hardly listened to, or perhaps didn't understand, what your responses were. He just kept going, making point after point. It became so tedious because, of course, his responses to your points often didn't make sense, and his almost non-stop talking was hard to follow!
As for your suggestions to keep listening, I also agree that that's the only way. Each LL has to be responsible for improving his/her language learning and not expect that somehow, miraculously, the teacher will be able to TEACH him/her the language. But this is precisely what many students are NOT prepared to do. Perhaps, this is even more the case with young, Asian students who are used to a teacher-centered learning environment. It takes a lot of work, and time, to try to get the student to accept responsibility for his/her learning, or lack of it. Students like these are prone to blame the teacher if they don't do well on "tests."
There are all kinds of exercises involving songs and movies that really work. I've found that when I make the time to work on my listening – yes, for me it's a chore, too – I find it helpful to watch soaps with either close-captioning or subtitles turned on. It also works for movies that were originally made in English and then dubbed over with the target language. Because I'm already familiar with the content, I can focus on how the same ideas are expressed in the that language. I also find it helpful to repeat some of my favorite lines; when the same line is used in real-life, I automatically get it and can respond.
As for hitting that threshold when suddenly everything is understandable, I find that can go and come. Sometimes it depends on your interlocutor, on the situation, the length of the conversation, etc. Also, if you have been away from the particular language environment for some time, you usually need some (short) time to re-attune your ear.
Great job!
In order to have good skills in listening comprehension in English (or any other language) and to speak it fluently, a learner should practise listening to audio and video aids in English (dialogues, thematic texts and narrative stories) with subsequent speaking. It is preferable to have English transcripts of audio and video material. I suggest that learners practise listening comprehension with subsequent speaking on a variety of topics and with materials for all levels on a regular long-term basis in the following sequence:
1. Listen to each sentence several times. Alongside listening see and read each sentence in the transcript.
2. Make sure you understand everything clearly in each sentence in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar.
3. Without looking into the transcript, try to repeat each sentence (say it aloud) exactly as you have heard it. Being able to repeat a sentence means that a learner has remembered its content.
4. Listen to that particular conversation or text (story) in short paragraphs or chunks, say each paragraph aloud, and compare to the transcript.
5. Listen to the whole conversation or story without interruption several times, and try to tell the content of the whole conversation or text (story) you’ve heard. You can write key words and phrases, or main ideas as a plan, or questions on that particular dialogue or text to make easier for you to convey the content in English. It is important to compare what you’ve said to the transcript.
It is a good idea to record one’s speech on audio aid to compare it with the original audio/video recording.
I believe that for practising listening comprehension and speaking in English it is a good idea to include various practical topics for potential needs of learners with comprehensive vocabulary on each topic. As you know the content of materials matters a great deal.
Ready-made thematic dialogues, questions and answers on conversation topics, thematic texts (informative texts and narrative stories), grammatical usage sentences (in the form of dialogues and texts), and sentences with difficult vocabulary on various topics, especially with fixed phrases and idioms can be used in practising listening comprehension in English.
It’s possible and effective to practise listening comprehension and speaking in English on one’s own this way through self-check using transcripts, books, audio and video aids to provide additional solid practice and to accelerate mastering of English.
I'm trying to learn Spanish (as a third language, Arabic is actually my second language, I am a second generation Arabic speaker and have no problems with that language) and I feel like, if I wanted to, I can relatively quickly get the grammar and vocabulary down. I can watch movies, read the captions, and understand it relatively well. but if the captions are turned off I can't understand very much, especially when they talk fast. This is probably the most difficult obstacle to overcome is listening comprehension. I listen to the radio, etc… and, I think it slowly maybe helps but the process is so insanely slow that it's very tedious and I feel like it will take forever. Not sure how to fix this. I'm not sure how to fix that.