What Are The Common Challenges You Will Face While Listening To A Second Language?

Spending time listening to your target language is going to be extremely important for your progress, but it isn’t always the easiest thing to do.

You are going to come across a lot of different challenges when you start listening to a new language and I will go through some of the most common ones here, as well as how you can overcome these.

I really cannot stress how important listening is when it comes to language learning …it is vital that you keep pushing yourself and do all you can to overcomes these challenges. Listening really is the key to the language, so it will be worth the effort.

Your Processing Speed Will Make Listening To A Second Language A Challenge 

The biggest challenge for language learners when listening to their new language …is simply your processing speed.

Your brain will not be able to process what it is hearing fast enough to keep up. You will hear a word you recognise and a light will go off in your head and you will excitedly tell yourself “Ohh that means X” …however, by the time that this has all happened …the speaker is now onto the next sentence and you have missed a big chunk of what they have said.

This process is all automatic in our native language. You cannot “not hear” something. You hear someone talk and it is instantaneously processed in your brain. There is no delay.

This doesn’t happen in our new language. We really have to process what we hear, usually consciously when we are right at the start of our studies, and this just really slows us down and it makes listening a real challenge.

The good thing is that the more we practice our listening, this delay becomes reduced and we can start to do more processing subconsciously and eventually there will be no delay at all.   

(You can read more about – How To Get Faster At Listening In A New Language)

The Language May Be Spoken Quickly

A large part of the problems around listening comes from the language itself. Usually it is spoken to quickly, especially by natives who are just speaking “normally”.

When you pair this with the above point about our processing speed being bad …we end up with a real disaster and we can’t hear anything in the language, it just becomes noise.

It can take a long time to speed up our processing abilities, so in the meantime, it can be easier to slow the language down. Listening to materials that are spoken more slowly is really going to help us with our listening abilities at the start. 

Spoken Words Will Merge Together

Not only is the language spoken quickly, but you will find that words tend to get merged together which can make it very challenging for us to hear the individual words.

Often this is a result of fast speaking, but often it is a sort of mix of speed and slang combined to create almost a new set of shorthand words.

If we look at English, we can see this all the time. phrasess like “I have got to see this” get melted down into “I gotta see this”.

To us it doesn’t looks strange, but if you have been studying English and reading text books where everything is written properly, you are going to be so thrown off by “I gotta”.

Even if it is spoken slowly, you are still going to be confused. It might sound like a few words mashed together into a new one …because that is exactly what is going on!

Little things like this can make your listening experience much harder and it will be a real challenge to start figuring things out when this happens.

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

Grammar Can Sound Different When You Are Listening In A Second Language

Carrying on from the above, you will find these merged words bend a lot of the grammar rules and this can really make listening to the spoken language a challenge.

French has a great example of this. The phrase “ I don’t know” in French is “je ne suis pas” which follows all the correct grammar rules for making a negative statement …However, these rules are broken in spoken French and everything is melted down into “j’sais pas”.

A lot of the enunciation of whole sentence is gone and technically it is now grammatically wrong, but this is how people talk. If you have been studying textbook French …this is totally going to confuse you when you hear it, you will really doubt if you heard a negative statement or not as the classic negative marker “ne” is missing but the “pas” is there …so did you hear a negative or not?     

However, it’s not just this. Often the grammar may be correct, but it may just be very different to how it works in your own language. If you look at Japanese, everything in a sentence can seem back to front. You will hear part of a sentence and it will sort of make sense, but then the end of the sentence will end with a verb, and that word order will just seem weird.

Having the verb come after everything can really throw you off and you will probably try and reverse everything in your head, and then you get confused.

This is just more of your inexperience with this type of grammar, but it can still cause some real challenges when you are listening and it will take you a while to get some experience and just feel comfortable with it.

All you can do is keep practicing and these weird grammar patterns will eventually seem normal to you.

Accents Can Make Listening A Challenge

Accents can make any language more difficult to listen to, including your own.

Personally I have this problem all the time. Other English speakers can’t understand what I’m saying as I have thick accent and speak fast, so it is only going to be worse if you are not really comfortable with the language you are listening to.

Really the only solution to this problem is to get more exposure to the accent you are struggling with. Your ears will quickly adjust to the different accent and it will not take you long to see past it.

A lot of accents can be made more confusing as people often use local slang and colloquialism, but I will touch on this below. 

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

Lacking Vocabulary Will Make Listening Challenging

The larger your vocabulary, the easier you will find listening.

When you hardly know any words, everything you are listening to is going to be new sounding and it will be hard to differentiate everything. You will usually find that everything is just a blur of sound, then out of the confusion you will hear one word you do know, and it will really stand out.

I found this in Japanese, the few words I had learned where so clear compared to the rest of the sentence.

This really means that you just have to increase your vocabulary and as it grows, you ability to hear all the different words will grow, simply as you can recognise them. Even if you can’t remember the meanings of the words, you will still be able to hear them a little better when you are listening, so this is an easy to increase you listening ability while also increasing your general ability in the language.

(You can read more about – Techniques That Will Increase Your Vocabulary)

Slang Words Can Make Listening A Challenge

Slang words are going to be much more common in spoken language, so you are likely to hear them when you are listening and they are going to make things more difficult.

You are either going to have no idea what they mean, or just think they mean something completely different. Just think about how the word “sick” in English is used as a slang for calling something good …if you don’t speak English, you are going to assume whatever is being talked about is unwell …and this will confuse you.

Slang is also heavily linked with accents as you will find some languages have a lot of colloquiums that are almost even a regional dialect and these can really throw you off.

You will usually find that these slang words show up time and time again, so they will be pretty similar to any other vocabulary and it is just matter of repeated exposure and time that will make them feel normal to you and then you will not struggle with them.

(You can read more about – Why Do Natives Speakers Seem Different To The Text Books?)

Spoken Words May Not Match The Spelling

In some languages, the spoken pronunciation of a word may not match up with the spelling of the word. This is usually due to silent letters, or just strange grammar rules that request you sound a word a certain way.

This is very challenging if you have seen a word written down and then hear it spoken later on. The two will not match up in your brain and you won’t realise they are the same word.

The best way around this is to look up the pronunciation of the word when you first encounter it. If you are reading and you spot a new word, look up the meaning …but also the pronunciation.

This is going to be especially important if you know the language you are learning can have differences between what is written and what is spoken. We have a lot of this in English …but we are all just used to it as native speakers. But this shows that just being aware of the strange differences will fade over time and eventually you will see a word written one way, but pronounced another.

Not Being Able To Predict The Next Words Will Make Listening Challenging

A huge challenge with listening in a new language is just the fact that we do not have much experience with it.

This creates the problem that are brains do not really having a good understanding of how things work, or how they flow and you can see this in action by our inability to predict the next words.

When we look at our own language, we can usually predict what is going to come next in a sentence to a fairly high degree of accuracy. This isn’t a super power, we are not mind readers it is simply because we have seen so many sentences in our life and we are so comfortable with the language that we can predict what is likely to come next in a sentence.

We can hear part of a sentence and usually guess what sort of grammar or words may follow on from what we have already heard.

This isn’t possible in our new language as we don’t even know most of the words, let alone understand in what context they might be used or where they usually fall in a sentence if they were.

This lack of being able to predict does make listening harder, but it is also something that will come with more listening. The more we can give our brain to process, the more it will start to pick up on the patterns and gradually we will be able to do this and our listening ability will increase at the same rate.

(You can read more about – What Strategies Can You Use To Overcome Anxiety Or Nervousness When Listening To A Second Language?)

Finding Decent Material To Listen To Can Be A Challenge  

When it comes to actually sitting down and studying and listening to the language, it can be hard to find material that is actually good.

This will of course depend on what language you are learning, but for some, it can be difficult to find good material.

You may find that it is just stuff for very small kids, which is far too simple, or it is just full blown native level that is way too difficult for you to follow along with.

Ideally you want to start with some material made for learners, it is usually slow and simple, while also interesting.

If you can’t find this, you will just have to jump into full speed native level listening and use some techniques to try and help you go through this type of material.

It can be tough, but you can do it and your listening skills will really improve after dealing with this sort of material. 

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

Conclusion

 As you can see, there are a lot of different challenges you will face when trying to listen to a new language.

A lot of them can certainly cause frustration and slow your progress down, but there is nothing I have mentioned that will stop you. You just need to keep pushing and try to work around the challenges.

You should really put a lot of effort into listening. The more you can listen to, the quicker you will start making progress in the language. It really will be the secret to your success so make sure you give it everything you have.

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