The Role of Listening in Language Learning

Being one our main methods of receiving information being able to correctly hear and understand what other speakers are saying is invaluable to human survival. As a language learner, the majority of your time with your target language will likely be through the audio component and if your aim is to have meaningful conversations with natives and other speakers, then you will want to be as good as you can be.

Our listening ability is affected by many factors that we can improve to make listening easier, yet in the end we still need to expose ourselves to thousands of hours. Throughout or time learning a new language the experience of listening will change drastically from sentences sounding like incoherent noise to having instant understanding and even predicted the next noise that is about to come out of someones mouth. 

The time taken to go through these stages is highly dependent on the languages you know and the sounds it uses. I am also highly convinced some languages due to phonology take longer to be able to distinguish sounds, languages ending in mostly vowel sounds such as Italian and Japanese make it a bit easier to tell where word boundaries are. 

There are other variables such as information speed, information density and total number of sounds. Although I could not find any studies based on whether certain languages are objectively harder to hear over others so if you come across such please let me know.

It is highly recommended that you spend a lot of time listening to your target language, just to increase your hours spent with the language. It's very easy to spend a lot of your day listening even if you consider yourself a 'very busy' person, unless you constantly have to talk to someone or be spoke to then you can fit some time in to listen. 

Think of all that time you listen to music just to have some background noise, you can easily replace half of this time and still have time to fit in music. Think of all the time that you may be doing things in silence, commuting, washing dishes, working, due to the way our brains deal with divided attention it is possible to process audio without affecting our physical tasks.

Just absorb the sounds.

Early listening

While it may seem counter-intuitive to listen while your level is still low and you cannot pick out words, it is one of the most beneficial things you can do to help your mind adjust to the sounds of the language. While it might just seem like noise to you, the brain is a wonderful machine of memory and background processes. As you rack up the hours you will notice the wonders of hearing similar sounds over and over, when this is combined with deliberate study it boosts your acquisition speed, as you'll be seeing the words and sounds in the written form giving your brain more chances to develop strong memories.

There are a few strategies for early listening. Firstly you can choose to listen widely or listen repetitively, the former will give your brain more examples to analyse and the latter will give you a stronger memories of the sounds you are hearing. There is no best way although it is recommended to try repetitive listening to some short clips around 2-3 minutes hundreds of times, this can sound boring but it is a good way to peak your curiosity also and you will be hearing the same sound over and over and still have no idea what it means.

Mindset is a very important part of listening a lot, especially in the early stages because you will not understand much of the words. You have to take the mindset that you are not listening to learn words but the sounds, you will find as your comprehension increases that the sounds can help you really nail down grammar properly. 

You also have to have the belief that it will work with time, we live in the age where we have everything so instant that it is hard to be patient, being able to decipher sounds and pick out chunks of noise will take many hours to achieve so to really stick with it you need to understand that fundamental rule.

Your brain is constantly processing information

Improving listening without listening

Earlier I stated there are ways to improve listening without actually listening. The greatest factor in hearing words is vocabulary, simply just knowing a word exists will increase your chances of being able to hear it, once you can hear the words you know it makes them easier to remember. If you solely learn from words or a textbook without the reinforcement of any sound it is very likely you may think natives speak too fast, whereas the student who has put in his time listening will have already slowly adjusted to the speed of the new language and be able to distinguish word boundaries.

Doing deliberate study along side listening helps you link the words to sound and vice versa, some languages have spelling that makes it hard to tell how it may sound just by looking at the word, pretty much every online dictionary or even just googling the word you can find the sound for any word you may come across. If you are study a language like this it may be more beneficial to have the sound in your head before you have even seen the word in it's written form to make it easier to not make up false pronunciations in your head.

Another way to help your listening along is to do some deliberate study of the sounds of the language. Not every language uses the exact same sound and some similar sounds in English maybe be completely different sounds in another language. Let's use a Japanese learner of English who most likely will have trouble differentiating R and L sounds in English.

The brain may be marvelous at noticing patterns and processing information but it may take a very long time before it realises on it's own that these two sounds are separate. By doing deliberate study of the sounds of your target language you can increase your chances of hearing words correctly, therefore be able to pick out words and sounds better.

Example of minimal pairs someone might use for English

Listening at higher levels

Most people by the time they get to advanced levels already have many hours sunk into listening. For those in the early stages this is where you want to be and by putting in your hours in listening throughout your time learning you will be able to get to this level quicker. You will definitely feel the shift in just going from picking out sounds to picking out that one word you don't know and looking it up just from the sound that you heard. 

Vocabulary also has a huge effect on being able to pick out words, the less unknowns in a sentence the easier it is, this is easy to demonstrate in your native language whenever you hear a new word it is very clear to you and every word that surrounds it you've heard thousands of times before. You can already tell which category of word it fits into just by the surrounding words and the grammar used.

Just because you can understand whole sentences now solely by the sound the effort does not stop. Now is the time where you start to ask questions about the sentences you're hearing. Why did they say that in response to this in that way? Why did they stress this word? There is so much to learn even once very advanced and even if you do not feel like you are learning anything anymore your brain is still strengthening connections to every word you heard and helping it to become stronger so that you may be able to say it yourself at will in the exact way that you keep hearing it.

It's fun when you get into it.

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