How To Improve Your French Listening Skills

French can be a difficult language to listen to. It’s a fast paced, monotone language where everything can get mashed together.

As a beginner it can seem almost impossible to hear certain things, but in time and with hard work, you will improve.

I will go through some ways that can help you improve your French listening, but really the secret is to just listen to more. The more you listen to, the better you will get.

Listen To More French

It sounds so simple, but all you have to do is listen to more French and you will get better at listening.

Basically the whole language is foreign to you, figuratively and literally. The only way to change that is to get acquainted with the language, which means listening to it more.

It really is that simple. The more you hear French, the more your brain will become comfortable with the sounds, rhythm and actual words being said and your general listening skills will improve as your comfort levels improve.

(You can read more about – How Often Should You Study French?)

Listen To Comprehensible French

While listening to anything in French is going to help you get better at listening, it does actually matter what you listen to. If you are able to listen to comprehensible input, it is going to help you a whole lot more and really speed up your progress.

Comprehensible input is basically anything you can understand, or at least get a basic grasp of. 

If you are able to make sense of the French you are listening to, you are actually going to be able to hear more. You may not understand everything, but your brain will be able to use what it does understand to almost fill in the blanks.

If there is only one word you can’t quite hear properly, knowing the surrounding words can help you figure it out.

We do this in English all the time. You might not catch what someone said, but from what you did hear, you can work out what they said. We can do this as we are extremely comfortable with English and can almost predict what words will come next, even if it’s not a sentence we have heard before.

This of course will be harder in French, but the more you listen to, the easier this will become. As your comfort and skill levels increase you will be able to do this.  

Listen And Read At The Same Time

If you can, listen and read at the same time, it is extremely helpful for getting better at listening to French.

Unfortunately this isn’t always possible, but if you can find audio that has text, you should use it.

Having the text allows you to read along and match up what you are hearing with what you are seeing. This doesn’t sound that that impressive but you will be surprised how much of a difference it can make.

French is fast and words often get merged together. It is very easy to not hear things properly and simply being able to follow long by reading can really help you keep up with what you are listening to. Suddenly words you are listening to will become clear as day once you can see them written down.

This will firstly get you to actually hear what you are listening to a lot quicker, since you are telling yourself what it is through reading. However, you will then find when you go back and listen to it again without the text it will still be a lot clearer and you will be able to hear the individual words much easier.

(You can read more about – How To Improve Your French Reading Skill)

Where Can You Get Audio With Text

This can be hard to find, but of course there is still a lot available. Subtitles on videos are of course the obvious and most easy way. Plenty of youtube videos will have subtitles as will most movies on dvd.

If you are listening to music, you should be able to find the lyrics fairly easily, again this can all be found on youtube.

Audio books are also usually available in both text and audio, so you can read along while listening at the same time.

Some audio you listen to will just not have any text available and that’s okay, you can still use this, especially as you advance, but as a beginner you will really benefit from being able see the words you are listening to.  

Focus On Your Own Pronunciations In French

French is not only unnatural to our ears, but is unnatural to our months. When we start speaking it can be extremely difficult to create the right sounds. We really have to learn how to move our mouth in a way that will produce French.

While focusing on all the difficult parts of speaking French, like the vowel sounds, accents, the extra –e on words, the silent letters and the liaisons, is all going to help your speaking skills, it is also going to help your listening.

The better you are at these speaking skills, the better you will get at hearing them and recognising them when they are used by other people, which of course means your listening skills are going to get better.

Listen to French In Small Chunks

It is very easy to get overwhelmed when listening to French. Everything can whizz past you at 100mph and you can easily get lost and never grasp anything.

The best way to overcome this is to break everything down into smaller chunks.

Just listen to things one sentence at a time. Listen to it, pause and re-listen to it. Just keep listening to the audio in to small chunks until you can identify everything that is being said.

This is slow and a little time consuming. You might spend an hour listening to a 5 minute piece of audio, but at the end of it, you can play it all the way through and you should find you can hear everything that is being said rather clearly.

Repeat What You Are Listening To

When I say repeat, I mean this in two ways. You can firstly just repeat the audio and listen to it again, which is great, or you can repeat it by actually trying to say what you just heard.

Sometimes repeating out loud what you heard can help you work out what is being said. I’ve touched on this above when talking about comprehensible input.

We repeat things all the time in English when we don’t quite hear something correctly. Just watch the next time someone doesn’t hear you properly and they literally repeat back to you what they think they heard you say.

When you do this, you usually find that it clicks in your brain what was trying to be said. You are basically processing the information and comparing it with the thousands of similar sentences you have heard before and your brain is basically able to fill the blanks.

This is of course much harder in French as we have a lot less data in our brain to compare things with, but you will find if you do this enough, things might click.

As I’ve said above, the more you listen to, the more you will get better at listening. Your brain is going to get to hear the same patterns over and over again and over time you will find repeating what was said becomes more efficient at working out what parts of the audio you didn’t quite grasp.

Learn More Vocabulary

This is another thing that sounds too simple, but it’s true. The more words you know, the more words you will be able to recognise when you hear them.

If you don’t know a word, it can be hard to hear it properly. It’s basically a totally new sound to you, as well as having no meaning to you. Your brain will be confused by this and will struggle to hear it properly. The more words you know, the less likely that is to happen. Your brain is going to recognise the words you know and pull them out of the noise.

Just think about how if you are in a noisy room full of people talking. You can’t really hear any words, it’s just noise. However, when someone says your name, you will hear it, clear as day. Your brain is filtering all the background noise out, but when it hears a word, or in this case your name, it doesn’t filter it, it tells you to notice it.

As similar thing will happen when you are listening to French, you brain will recognise the words you know and make you notice them, so really, the more words you know, the more words you will be able to hear in French. 

(You can read more about – How To Memorise Vocabulary)

Listen and Transcribe

A really strong technique for getting good at listening and  writing is to listen and transcribe. Literally listen to something and write out what you hear.

This is surprisingly difficult and you will find this hard, both for listening and writing. If you use the techniques I said above, like listening in small chunks and repeating things out loud, you will find this task easier; you just do the above techniques and then write down what you hear at the end.

If you have an audio that has text you can go through it after and see how what you wrote lines up with the original text. You will quickly see if it’s your listening skills that are weak, or if it is your writing skills.

If you do not have text to go with your audio, you can send your audio and the transcription you made to a French friend and ask them to grade you (I know this is a big ask, but if they are a good friend they will help you).

Where To Find French Material To Listen To  

You can pretty much find French audio to listen anywhere and everywhere. Of course the internet is going to be your main source if you do not live in France, but really you can use any of the following:

• YouTube
• Podcasts
• Audio books
• French Radio/TV/Film
• French music (which will be on youtube or the radios)
• Lastly you can ask your French friends to send you audios messages. You can then listen to these repeatedly and they can tailor them to be about anything you want.

If you haven’t got any French friends then you need to get a language exchange partner and start making some connections with French People.

Conclusion

Listening to French is something we can get good at very easily; it just takes the effort to do more of it. Listen to more French and Listen to it for longer as well as more regularly.

If you do this along with the other techniques I discussed above, you will get better. Just give it time and stick with it. You will see improvements.

(You can read more about – Advice For Anyone Learning The French Language)