Embracing Your Low Level Listening Ability When Learning A Language

When you are first starting out listening to a new language …everything is going to be hard and you need to embrace this.

Basically what I am saying is that you need to accept that you are not very good and that is alright. You are still learning, it’s natural that your ears are not too good at things.

I know it’s frustrating, but if you keep going you will get better, don’t give up now just because it’s hard, this will feeling will pass.

Don’t Get Stressed Out If You Can’t Understand Things

When you start listening, everything is going to stress you out. This is totally normally and it is going to take a while for you to adjust and slowly increase your knowledge.

It is very easy to get stressed out and overwhelmed, even if you are listening to something very basic.

Always remember that you are learning, and what you are finding a struggle today, will not always be a struggle.

You will listen to things and maybe only understand one word …this is normal.

You Have No Experience In The Language Yet

You need to remember that you have no experience in the language yet, so of course things are hard.

Everything you listen to is going to be new, even if you know some of the words, they are probably in a new order and it is going to be this way for a while.

Really you are going to lack experience for some time, even if you manage to get a few hundred hours under your belt, it’s still a tiny amount in the grand scheme of things.  

This isn’t a problem, it just means you need to build up your experience and this will take time. If you treat it like anything else you will get there. Start slow and keep things simple and slowly build up.

Experience has to be earned and this just takes time, so you are going to feel the struggle for a while until you build up enough momentum. 

Adults Hate Failure

A lot of the issues around listening comes from the fact that adults hate failure. We all like to think of ourselves as fairly competent, but something like listening to a new language will quickly humble us and make us realise we are not.

The usual response to this feeling is to avoid the thing that caused it …if we ignore it, it can make us feel useless …right …well, it’s true, avoiding it will remove that bad feeling but it will also remove any progress you can make.

You are going to feel like a failure and you need to basically be happy with this feeling. You have to manually override your brain and accept that you are bad at listening. This is the only way you are going to be able to carry on and actually do the work …which will get you the improvements you want.

Fighting through the feeling of suffering is a necessary evil, we just have to accept it.

You Will Be Bad At Listening For A While

The reality is that you are going to be bad at listening for a while, and while this is okay, I think it is good to go through some natural problems you are going to face.

I think it is easier to accept that you are struggling with something, if you know what struggles to expect.  You can look at the list below and thing “oh this happens to me” and kind of realise its normal and while it’s frustrating it is all part of the learning process 

Everything Goes To Fast

Probably the first thing you will notice is that everything just seems so fast. You will just about hear one word and by the time you have processed that, you have missed the next five words.

Natives speak fast, it doesn’t matter the language, we all just speak fast …but really the issue is us, as new learners, we are not used to the sounds and we can’t process them fast enough so everything and anything sounds fast to us.

This will start to fade after a while. Luckily the speed doesn’t get any faster, so eventually we are able to catch up, we just need more exposure for this to happen. 

Word Blending

You will also find that words blend together. This can partly be because of the speed and we just can’t process the two words fast enough, but it can also be the speakers fault.

If we think of English, we say things like “gonna” instead of “going to”. As natives this doesn’t sound too different, but as a learner, this will be intense and a real point of confusion.

This is another thing that will ease with time, the words will start to feel less blended together and you will be hear them as separate sounds.

Things Sound Like Other Things

A huge problem I suffer with is hearing one thing, when another was said. I will either hear something totally different, or not recognise a word I should know for whatever reason, it just doesn’t sounds like how I think it should.

This all comes down to a lack of experience. Your knowledge of the words is just not strong enough so you can’t recognise things properly, or you are easily confused between a word you do know and one you don’t.

You will have to focus on strengthening your vocabulary and this problem will start to fade. Your brain will have more confidence is linking what it is hearing to what you already know.  

You’ve No Idea How To Spell What You Hear

A very frustrating part of listening is when you hear a word and you can make it out, but you have no idea how to spell it.

I guess this will depend on what language you are learning, but I have this really problematic with languages like French where the word often does not sound like how it is spelt.

Basically this makes it very hard to look up words you have just heard and do not know the meaning.

Really this will come down to experience again, the more knowledge you gain, the better you will become at guessing how a word may be spelled out after hearing it.

Just A General Overall Confusion

I think you can boil beginner listening down into a state of general overall confusion. You are going to not understand things, or understand them incorrectly or just not even hear things correctly as I have discussed above.

It is all very frustrating, but also very normal. The whole process of listening is going to seem very hazy for a long, long time. It is not going to be the same as listening in your native language …it can get to this level, it will just not be right away.

(You can read more about – How Much Listening Do You Need To Do When Learning A Language?)

Focus On A Language Parent or Narrow Listening

When you are first starting out it can be a good idea to try either a language parent or a narrow listening, or even both.

This is when you listen to a lot of only one person and you make them your “parent” and you try to learn as much as you can from this one source, and then narrow listening is just listening to the same small part of the language (such as single audio file) over and over again until you are very comfortable with it.

Both of these techniques try and make the language “smaller” for you, so you can hopefully less overwhelmed and hopefully get to a point where you are comfortable and a lot of the issues I have discussed above have started to fade.

Keep Things Comprehensible

One of the most important things you must do, no matter your level, is to keep things comprehensible.

This means you need to be able to roughly understand what is going on. If you can grasp the basic idea of what you are listening to, you will learn from it.

This does mean you are going to have to keep things very simple in the beginning, or at least use methods to make things more comprehensible.

This may mean you go slower than you want, or you have to listen to very basic thing, but remember …you have no experience, so you need to build up from zero …which means some really basic things are what you need.

(You can read more about – How Can You Make Your Language Learning Input More Comprehensible?)

Keep Pushing Through The Frustration

Really the best advice I can give you is to keep pushing. You have no experience and you suck at listening …and that can only be changed by pushing through and doing more work.

The more you listen, the more experience you will have and the better you will become.

It is a struggle, but if you want to learn the language then you must fight through the frustration and pain and keep going. It will get easier, but only if you put the effort in.

(You can read more about – How To Stay Motivated In Language Learning)

Conclusion

Hopefully now you can understand that it is okay to struggle with listening, in fact it should be expected.

The struggle will be real, but you can overcome it, just ignore the frustration and try and keep things simple and slowly you gain the experience you need to actually be good at listening and more importantly, good at the language.

It will happen, you just have to make it happen.  

 (You can read more about – How Can You Improve Your Listening Skills In A Second Language?)