How To Get Faster At Listening In A New Language 

When you listening to a new language you will find that you are very “slow” at listening, which can sound a little strange. How can you be slow at listening, surely you just listen and that’s that …which is true.

What I really mean by “slow at listening” is that you are slow at processing what you are hearing.

Your ears are not tuned into the language and while you are not actually slow, it will certainly feels that way, it’s a strange feeling, but you can overcome it.

Really you just need to practice a lot and you will eventually find that you can listen and it will be “normal”.

Why Are You Slow At Listening?

As I have sort of touched on already, you are not actually slow at listening; you are slow at comprehending what is being said, along with potentially the speaker going quite fast or using words you don’t know.

Native speakers will talk pretty rapidly and have huge vocabularies, so if you are not at their speed or level of understanding, your brain can feel like it’s going slower than it should be, even if you are listening to slow speech.

This is usually because you are translating what you are hearing back into your mother tongue, which takes time. You also need to sort of multitask this process as you need to keep listening to the next words that are being said, while still trying to translate the ones you just hear as well as try and work out what the words are that you don’t know.

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

This can very quickly become overwhelming and you can get left behind and lost extremely quickly. Its things like this that gives you the feeling that you are “slow” at listening.

However, if you can speed up your processing, usually by stopping translating, you can understand what is being said in real time, rather than always being one step behind.

(You can read more about – Why Is Listening To A New Language So Difficult?)

Learn More Vocabulary

The first thing you can do to speed up your processing ability is to learn more words. The bigger you vocabulary, the more you will understand what is being said.

This might not speed your processing up, but you will still find it easier if you actually are able to identify all the words you are hearing.

When a large portion of the words are not known to you, you are almost trying to fill in the blanks, as well as translate what little you know. You can see how that might not end well for you, and at least if you can understand all the words you have a better chance of having success.  

Start Thinking In Your New Language

Thinking in your new language is going to make a huge different. The act of translating back and forth is so time consuming and if you can remove this step things just happen so much faster.

This is difficult to do, but you will gradually start doing it naturally. Eventually you will hear some words so often that they will sort of take their own meaning in your brain, you will not need to go and look for a translation, you will just understand them.

Basically your brain will become very comfortable with the sounds and just start using it as an actual language. Learn your vocabulary very well and listen to a lot of the language, if you do this, you will find yourself thinking in the language. It will start to happen after a while.

(You an read more about – How To Think In Another Language)

Repeat What You Are Listening To

Listening is all about repetition. You will hear the same words pop up all the time and it will feel like the most common ones are constantly there.

This is great for your brain and repetition is what helps us learn. However, you can make this whole process even easier and more efficient by listening to the same thing over and over again.

If you want to be sure that certain words keep showing up, then you can guarantee this by repeating the same audios.

How you do this is up to you, you can listen to the same things 10 times in a row, or spread it out over a couple of days. It doesn’t really matter, but repeating things will help. You will be really surprised how much you pick up the second or third time that you didn’t before.

You can also try this without the transcript (or subtitles) the first time, then using it the second time, again it will make a difference.

Repeating things can get boring, which is why I prefer to space them out for a few days, but this process will make you better at listening and it will make you faster at recognising what you are hearing.

Listening More Often Will Make You Faster

If it wasn’t obvious, you should be listening more. You need to be listening to as much as you can without exhausting yourself. 

The more you can listen to throughout the day the better.  A massive amount of exposure to the language is going to speed you up whole processing system and you are just going to get comfortable with the language.

The more comfortable you are, the quicker you will brain can function. The height of this is when the process becomes automatic. If you think about listening in your own language, you can’t really turn it off, it happens automatically. You hear something and you just know what it means.

If you listen to enough of your new language this will start to happen too and the process of listening and understanding will become automatic and therefore very fast. 

(You can read more about – Listening Resources To Help You Learn A Language)

Listen At The Right Level

It is also important to make sure you are listening to the right level. Basically you need to understand roughly what is going on.

To listen to something where you understand zero is not going to work. You won’t understand it. You will not make any progress. You can do this for 25 hours a day, 8 days a week, it will not help you one bit.

The same goes if you go in the other direction and listen to really easy material. While this will not harm you, it will also not force you to improve as you are not covering anything new.

You just need to find the sweet spot where you can understand a large amount of what is going on and still have room to grow.

Of course as you progress you will find that your average level of comprehension goes up, so that gray area where you are not sure about things always gets smaller, but that is fine as at some point you should be able to listen to anything and it will not bother you, exactly like how you can in your native language.      

(You can read more about – What Is Comprehensible Input In Language Learning?)

Practice Writing Transcriptions

A very powerful way to speed up your listening skills is to do transcription exercises. This is when you listen to an audio and then write down what you hear. This is slow and difficult, but it really makes you strain your ears and focus.

You will be surprised at how difficult this can be, but the act of writing down what you think you heard will make you ability to just listen get stronger.

This exercise is worth the effort, it will make your ability faster.   

(You can read more about – How To Develop Your Listening Skills Through Transcription)

Read More To Get Faster At Listening

Reading and listening are both closely linked. They are both forms of input which means they both expose you to the language.

Reading will not directly affect your listening, but it will expose you to more for the language which is beneficial for you. You are likely to come across more new words and just generally see the common words multiple times when reading.

All this extra exposure through reading will help you feel more comfortable with the language and you will find there is a cross over with listening, you will hear words that you read and vice versa.

This will help you become faster when you are listening. The words you hear will register in your mind faster as you have experienced them more, through reading and of course your previous listening.  

All of language learning is interconnected, so even if reading doesn’t seem like its helping, it will be.

(You can read more about – What Are The Common Challenges You Will Face While Listening To A Second Language?)

Conclusion

Hopefully now you will see that it is normal to be “slow” at listening in the beginning but with some simple techniques and plenty of practice you can faster at processing the language.

You will be able to listen to fast pace speech with ease soon enough. This is something you can achieve even if it feels impossible at the moment. Just keep practicing and you will get there.

(You can read more about – How To Practice Listening In A New Language)