What Is Narrow Listening In Language Learning?

If you have not heard of Narrow Listening, it is a pretty interesting way to learn a language, so let’s get into what it is and how it can help us.

What Is Narrow Listening?

Very simply put, narrow listening is just listening to a small amount of language, and really focusing on that, repeating it until you have basically mastered it.

Usually when you hear people talk about this …they don’t realise they are talking about it. The usual story is that they didn’t have access to much of the language, so they took what they had and absolutely squeezed all they could from it.

This was much more common pre-internet as someone may only have access to one audio CD in their target language and they would just listen this one CD 100s of times.

Usually when you hear someone talk about this now, they are actively doing it on purpose, even if they don’t call it “narrow listening” it is still what they are doing.

We have access to an almost endless supply of audio material on the internet, but some people will choose to just focus on a very small segment of language and just re-listen to it over and over again until they are very comfortable with it before moving on.      

Narrow Listening Is Comprehensible

If you are doing some form of narrow listening, the material is usually a lot more comprehensible.

Well, of course this all depends on what you are listening to and how you are studying, but even if things start out totally incomprehensible, most people will make an effort to change that.

After a few listens of the same audio, you are going to start picking out words you don’t know and look them up, meaning that the next time you listen to the same audio, it will be more comprehensible.

Even if you do this one word at a time, it does mean that by the time you have listened to the same thing a 100 times, you should pretty much know what every word means.

This is exactly the whole point of this method. You will master this small amount of audio and fully understand it and then move on and do it again with a new piece of audio and if you do this enough times, you will start to get a decent understanding of the language.

You Get Repeat Exposure

It should be pretty obvious that if you are going to listen to the same audio 100s of times, this would be repeat exposure.

A lot of language learning really just comes down to repeat exposure. If you can hear a word enough times you will start to understand how it used and immediately recognise the word and more importantly it will become a part of your active vocabulary. 

Narrow listening is going to facilitate this really well. If you focus on a small bit of audio you are quickly going to hear the same words over and over again and they are just going to get etched into your brain.

It Removes Choices

Removing choices sounds like a bad thing, and it can be … but it can also be very helpful.

Just think about when you are faced with the Netflix home screen and you scroll for ages finding something to watch …often you end up doing this for longer than you actually watch something.

This can be the same when you are trying to find something to study. Narrow listening removes this inaction as you know exactly what needs to be done. You don’t need to make a choice. You just sit down and listen to the audio you have selected and you just repeat that over and over again.

I am sure the “deciding what to pick” in the first place may be a bit problematic for some of you, but once you know what you are listening to, you can become more efficient with your time and just get straight into listening to your target language.     

How Do You Actually Do Narrow Listening?

There are no real rules around what exactly is “narrow” or not, but basically you just need to find some audio that you can listen to multiple times.

Ideally you want it to be short enough that you can repeat it easily, but long enough that there is some value to it …but really, just take any video/audio that you think you can listen to multiple times and go for it.

Exactly how many times you need to listen to it is also not set, you just need to do what you feel is right. This really means just listen to it until you think you have exhausted its worth.

You will reach a point where every word just makes sense, and you may even feel like you know it word for word. I would say at this point you have probably squeezed enough out it and you could move on to another audio.        

Doing This With Music

You have probably done this technique with music, I know I have. This isn’t on purpose, I just find that some songs are awesome and I listen to them over and over again.

I have noticed I have done this with some Japanese songs and after a while, I realise I am singing along. This does seem to be a lot slower than it would happen with an English song, but it still happens.

I will look up words as I notice them and I do find that repeat listening does make them stick a lot faster.

 I would say songs are not the most ideal method for this, due to the strange lyrics you often find, but it does still have some benefit.

Use Youtube Videos

You will probably find that youtube videos are going to be the best option for narrow listening.

I personally take a video that is about 10 minutes long and just go though it a number of times until I feel comfortable understanding it.

I actually had a playlist that was about an hour long, consisting of maybe 5 or 6 videos, and I just listening to this playlist every day.

This made it long enough that it contained a lot of language, and wasn’t boring, but it was also short enough that was still “narrow” and easily repeated.

However, as I said, there are no rules, your definition of what is narrow can be whatever you want it to be.   

Watching Movies

A really good way to do narrow listening is with movies. You can do this by watching one scene, or the whole movie.

Movies are going to have a lot of dialogue, so you will pick up a lot of language from repeating one movie over and over again.

This was actually done by language youtuber, who watched a Spiderman movie 50 times in Spanish.

He talks about this in this video:

He doesn’t actually call it “narrow listening”, but this is what he is doing. He also took the video and chopped it down so it was only the audio, which is pretty clever.

If you haven’t seen this guys videos before, you should sub to his channel, Lamont has a lot of great information about language learning and he knows what he is talking about. 

(You can also read more about – Can Watching Movies In A New Language Help With Learning?)

Does Narrow Listening Actually Work?

I guess you could argue it will depend on what you are listening to, but either way, I would say Yes, it does work.

Even if you took a very short and basic video and repeated it, you would end up gaining from this. You would be receiving repeated exposure to comprehensible input and while it may only be a few lines of the languages, it still is helping you acquire that small section of the language.

If you did this with multiple videos, over time, there is no reason why this cannot work on a larger scale.

I don’t think you will ever get someone who can watch just one video over and over and be totally fluent and know the language completely …that is going to be impossible …but as I said, do this technique with a few different movies for example, and you will probably cover all the common words and will have a very solid foundation in the language.

I would argue that taking a movie and watching it 50 times and then moving on to the next one …and doing this with 10 different movies is going to get you results. You will have had maybe 500 hours of comprehensible input doing this and this will have benefits.

Of course you could argue it may be better to watch 500 different movies, and get 500 hours of input in that way …and this would work too. This is the beauty of language learning, there is more than one way to go about things.

There Is No Output 

The obvious issue with narrow listening is that it is all input, there is no output.

You are not practicing any speaking or writing, but if you are just trying to get an understanding of things, this method will give you results. 

Once you have an understanding you can move on to try and do some output and use a different technique to help you with this area of the language.  

It’s Boring

I know some of you are going to say it’s crazy to watch the same thing over and over again and it will get boring fast, and for some people, this is what will happen.

I think this does come down to what you select to watch and how difficult you find it and what you can actually comprehend.

I think if you find the right video and focus on the fact that you are trying to master the language as such, you will be able to repeat a video a good number of times.

The reality is that you will get a little bored after a while and maybe this is your sign to move on to a new audio, or maybe you just ignore this. There is no right or wrong way to do things, but I would encourage you to just give the audio a few more listens, even if you are getting a bit sick of it, it will help your language goals. 

Is Narrow Listening The Same as A Language Parent?

This is a good question. Narrow listening and language parents are not exactly the same, but there can be some cross over and actually mixing the two is actually a good idea.

A language parent is when you take one video creator and just focus on their videos. This allows you to get really comfortable with their accent and pace of speaking and even general vocabulary. 

You could argue that this is narrow listening, you are only listening to one person, but really if you are watching 100s of different videos from this one person, it’s not that narrow.

However, if you actually study how people talk and the general language they use in day to day life, it is usually is quite “narrow”. There is some statistic that says we only use about 2000 words most of the time, yet the language is made up of like 100,000 words or something like this.  

 I’d still argue that 2000 words is quite broad, but in a sense it is also narrow.

Really If you wanted to take advantage of things I would find a language parent and then focus on a few of their videos at a time and really go over these lots of times before moving on to their other videos.

I would maybe say I did this with French. I maybe only watch 2 or 3 channels, and I really repeated a lot of the same videos from these few channels. Maybe you could say I have a “language family” where I did sort of “narrowish” listening.

As I mentioned before, there are no rules with any of this, so you can really do what you feel is right, but I would suggest you maybe consider narrowing things down and seeing if that has any benefits for you.      

(You can read more about – What Are “Language Parents” and Do You Need One?)  

Conclusion

Hopefully now you have a better understanding of what narrow listening is and how to go about it. Would I recommend it? …sure, why not.

I don’t think everyone is going to enjoy it, but I think you should all give it a try see what you think. I think if you can commit to putting the effort in, you will see some results.

However, you could really say that about any method, so at the end of the day, do what you enjoy and put the effort in and the language will come.    

(You can read more about – Is Immersion The Best Way To Learn A Language?)