How To Overcome The Fear Of Listening In A New Language

Most people have some sort fear or anxiety around learning a language and for some people, this can involve listening.

Listening can be hard. Words merge together and natives will speak at a 100mph and have thick accents. It can be quite scary if someone is trying to tell you something and you are not comfortable with listening.

Luckily this problem can be overcome.  Your ears can adjust and make sense of the white noise you are hearing. There is nothing to worry about, just give it time and some effort and you will be able to listen to anything that comes your way.

Fear Of Listening Isn’t Often A Problem

Luckily most people are not really scared when it comes to listening. You will have a few people who will get into a panic about not understanding what they are hearing, but overall most people will not be too fearful.

The real issues arise when you ask them to do some sort of output, like speaking or writing, as this is a little bit more involved.

However, if you are worried about listening, this is something you can overcome relatively easy. Listening will be hard at the beginning, but with some practice your ears will tune into what it is hearing and things will be more comfortable with the new language. 

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

Increase Your Comprehension Levels To Lower Your Fears

One of the easiest ways to reduce your fear is increase your comprehension of whatever it is you are listening to.

I often find that if I blindly listen to something, it is a lot harder and simply increasing my comprehension can help massively.

You do not even need to do anything with the audio, you can simply find out what the topic is about before starting. For me, this usually means finding out what the title is. This simple trick is usually enough to give me some context and prepare me for what I’m going to listen to.

The second you know the video you are about to watch is about “shopping for dresses” you can start listening out for words you know and if you are not too sure about something you can make a better guess based on the context.

You could also go and quickly look over you notes on a similar topic and quickly recap some vocabulary. Having it fresh in your mind is going to help you spot in when listening and is more importantly going to help you have more context and understanding.

Basically anything you can do to help you understand it that little bit more is going to help you to reduce your stress levels.    

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

100% Comprehension Isn’t Important When Listening

While I’ve said that the more you understand the better, don’t take that to mean you need to understand 100%.

It’s totally fine if you don’t understand every word, or even every sentence. So long as you can get a basic grasp of what is going on, you are all good.

Of course the goal is to eventually understand everything flawlessly, but as you are learning it’s okay to have a bit of fog blocking your view.

Too many people get caught up in needing perfection, which will come, but for now just grasping as much as you can is fine.

Learn More Vocabulary

Since a lot of the stress around listening is around not understanding what anything means and not being able to comprehend what you are hearing, the simple solution to this is to just learn more words.

The larger your vocabulary is the more chance you will have of recognising the words and you can start being comfortable with what is going on.

The best part is you can focus on the most common words, which are going to show up in pretty much everything you listen to. This can really make the difference and really help to lower any fears that you have. 

Listen To Beginner Material

Since comprehension is important, you should focus on material that is designed for beginners. This is going to be simple, slow and use vocabulary and grammar that you can understand.

This is going to allow you to understand what is going on and it is going to help reduce your stress.  It will still be tricky, but manageable.

You will often get told you should listen to stuff aimed at kids. This can be okay, but you need to remember that most kids are actually pretty fluent, so even things for them can be hard. Nothing will stress you more than trying to watch a kid’s show and realising you can’t understand anything.

You really need to be listening to stuff for babies, which is of course going to be painfully boring and beginner material may just be the answer as its actually aimed at adults, who are learning the language. 

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

Listen More, To Overcome The Fear Of Listening

Really the cure for being scared of listening is to just face your fear and do it …and do it a lot.

Listening really is one of those things that gets easier the more you do it. You will notice pretty quickly that your brain starts to get comfortable with the sounds; it goes from a white noise to a sort of melody. You can start to feel the rhythm of the language.

Of course you will still have no idea what is being said, but it doesn’t sound as intimidating and slowly you will start to recognise words being repeated and you will actually hear the individual sounds of the language.

Listening can kind of be like walking around in morning fog, but as time passes, the fog lifts and things will become clearer.

Listening is not a difficult activity, but it does require you to put some time in. I can honestly say that if you are worried about it, just force yourself to listen more. The more you do the easier it will become and once you start actually learning some of the words you will start to understand what is going on.

When you start to see these little bits of clarity, you should really increase your listening and then your progress will go through the roof.   

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

Conclusion

Hopefully now you can see that there is nothing to really fear when it comes to listening and if you are suffering from any worries, you can now see how to overcome it.

Listening can be hard at the beginning, but it can quickly become on of the easier and more enjoyable parts of language learning if you just stick with it.

Being able to listen to your language is going to bring you some incredible progress so it really is worth putting your energy into it   

(You can read more about – Should You Focus On Listening When Learning A New Language)