How To Develop Your Listening Skills Through Transcription

Developing your listening skills in your new language can be quite hard as it can be very a passive skill to train, you just sort of have to sit there and listen and you will eventually get better over time.

Trying to speed this up can be difficult, but there are some techniques that you can use, that are a little more active and will force your listening skills to improve faster.

The best technique for this is called transcribing. I will go through how it works below, but he warned, it does take some effort, although the results you will get are totally worth it.  

(You might also want to read – Can You Learn A Language By Just Listening?)

Developing Your Listening Skills Through Transcription

The general concept of this method in pretty simple, you listen to something and then write down exactly what you hear.

It sounds easy and not very worthwhile, but give it a try. You will quickly see that it take a lot of effort to listen to every word and then write it down correctly.

It will mainly be your listening that is being tested, but you will of course also get to practice your writing skills. It’s maybe not a true test of your writing ability as you are “copying” what you hear, but you do have to make sure you are writing down the right words and spelling them properly, so it’s still good practice.    

Transcribing can also be quite a slow and time consuming activity as you may need to listen to something multiple times to catch it exactly before you write it down. However this is okay, there is no need to rush and there is no time limit on how long you have to complete it.

Is This Dictation?

Transcribing is pretty much the same thing as dictation. If you don’t know what this is, your school life was not miserable.

Dictation is when your teacher would stand at the front of the class and say some stuff. Your task was to then write down exactly what you heard them say and they would then check what you wrote down afterwards.

They were basically testing your ability to spell when doing this, but you can see it’s basically the exact same process as transcribing, it’s just now that you are doing it with a recording and it’s in a different language.     

Who Should Use This Transcription Technique?

Nearly everyone can do this, no matter what level you are at in the language.

However, if you are total beginner I would wait a little while before you try this. You need to be at the point where what you are listening to is not just complete noise.

You do need to be able to pick the individual words out in the sentence so you can actually attempt to write them down. However, it doesn’t matter if you do not understand or know all the words, just being able to pick them out is usually enough.

If you are not sure of a word you can guess how it might be written. You will probably get it wrong, but when you check afterwards you can learn from this.

What To Listen To When Developing Your Listening Skills?

To make sure you get the most benefit from this technique you need to be listening to something that you can mostly understand.

If you are a beginner you can listen to simple audio that would be suitable for small children and as you advance, start listening to more advanced audios.

The reason for this is because if you are listening to something too complicated, you are not going to recognise enough words and won’t be able to write them down.

If the first time you have heard a word is in an audio recording, you will have no idea what the word looks like. You will really struggle to visualise it and you will be very lost.

I know some of you are reading this and thinking you could still manage to write down a word fairly accurately, even if you had never heard it before. This might be true for some words, but you will find this very difficult when you start doing it in another language. 

I once had problem like this, but it was caused by a name. (It was actually the same name as my sister) I wasn’t expecting a name to be said and then the pronunciation and accent just totally threw me. I couldn’t work out what was being said even though it was a common name that I should have recognised.

I couldn’t even guess what was being said as it sounded so strange to me. When I checked the available transcript afterwards, I was so shocked.

It is okay if you there are a few words you do not understand. This is always going to happen. As you write things down you will start to think what the word might be. A lot of the times you will actually know the word, it has just been pronounced in a way that you didn’t recognise. This is great though. It means you are training your ears to hear these words better for next time.

If you find out you didn’t know the word, that’s fine too. You can look it up and now you have just learned a new word. 

Listening To A Language With A Transcript Available

Transcribing from an audio here there is a transcript available is going to be the easiest and probably the best approach.

It doesn’t matter what the video or audio is, so long as that it has already been transcribed by a native. Basically this means things like subtitles or thing like that where you can see what is being said in a written format.

All you need to do is start listening to the audio and totally ignore the transcript for now.

Listen to the audio as much as you want and just write down everything you can hear. Once you are finished you can then look at the transcript and use it as your answer sheet to check how you did.

Hopefully the two should line up perfectly, but if not, then you can go back and listen to the audio and see exactly what you got wrong. Often when you go back to listen and have the actual transcript in front of you, you will hear what you should have heard.

You can also of course check your spelling and punctuation as often you may have written the correct word, but not spelt it correctly.

Listening To A Language Without A Transcript

If there is no transcript available you can use this technique, but you will require the help of a native speaking friend.

Basically you can use any video or audio and you treat it the same way. You listen to it and then write down what you hear.

The difference is that you now need to ask someone to check this for you. This could be a friend or language exchange partner who is fluent in the language or you could even ask a tutor to check this for you.

The main problem with this is that it is quite time intensive for this person. They need to watch/listen to the audio while reading your text and see if it lines up and then make any corrections for you.

I’m sure your friends are happy to help, but you must appreciate their time. I would maybe only do this for very short videos so they can quickly check your work and it will not take up all of their time.

I really think you are far better doing this with an audio that already has the transcript available, such as a movie, then you can do this for 2 hours on your own without bothering anyone. There is enough transcribed material to keep you busy and it is also easier to evaluate and check the answers by yourself using the script.

Using Audio From A Language Partner

You could also do this technique by getting your language partner to record you an audio. You goal is to then reply to this by writing out exactly what you heard for them to check.

You could then return the favour and record an audio in your native language and they can reply to you with what they think they heard.

This can be a lot of fun going back and forth like this and is of course great practice for both of you.

Why Don’t More People Use Transcription To Develop Their Listening Skills?

You are probably wondering why you are not hearing more people talk about this method. Well the honest truth is that is its difficult and people avoid it.

It is a high effort and intense task and people prefer the easier option of just listening to the audio while reading the already available transcript.

Learning a language like this is far more passive, and it will work. If you do enough immersion you will be fine. However, doing this transcription method is very beneficial for you and will make your progress faster.

As you go through the audio you will realise that you actually misheard a lot of things, or you will recognise a word but can’t think what it means or can’t remember how it is spelt.

Basically you can fine tune your listening skills by forcing yourself to write out exactly what you are hearing.

(You can read more about – Frequently Asked Questions About – Listening In A Language You Are Learning)

Conclusion

This method can be very intense and time consuming. However, it will really improve your listening along with your reading and writing pretty quickly.

You can do it as often as you like and for as long as you like, it is a very versatile method.

If you haven’t tried it for yourself, you really should give it a go.

(You can read more about Signs You Are Making Progress In A Language)