Prioritize listening

Unless you are deaf, you would have learned your own language by listening. Everyone did! Even books, when they were introduced to you, were read out aloud. We’re all hard-wired, in stereo, to our ears. Listening is important.

So why is it at school, when we’re asked to learn another language, that listening is so de-emphasized? Why is it that we, and our teachers, are so uncomfortable using that medium? I mean, it’s true, isn’t it? I’m right, aren’t I? Or have things changed from when I remember?

I suppose it's that writing feels safer. You can stare at it. You can refer back to it. You can keep it pinned to the page. You can see how it is formed. All those things are hard to do with the spoken word. No sooner does it appear . . . than it’s gone. You can’t show off to the teacher how much you’ve done.

Yes, it takes some doing to get used to listening. It took me quite a time to manage it, even after I had decided on its value, and that I ought to. I taught a one-year English course fairly recently during which I urged people to start listening, but for the duration of that course I couldn’t bring myself to follow my own advice.

Get an audiobook

It was only a decade or so ago that I listened to an audiobook for the first time. I don't know why it took me so long. I've been reading books all of my life.

So why did I start? It may have been that this particular Lee Child book wasn't available except in the audio format. I was impatient to read it, so I listened to it instead.

Initially I was impatient as I listened! As a rule, listening is slower that reading. But then I caught onto the trick of listening through headphones or ear attachments(?) as I did other things.

Walk to and from work, for example. Walking to work in the dark while listening to a spooky story! Now that's an adventure!

As regards learning another language, audiobooks are invaluable. Now they help to process the language more quickly than you read. Thereby, you learn to guess things, skip things, ignore things, and generally not be so anal about needing to look everything up. In short, you learn to relax more in another language.

Oh, and one more thing: you learn to listen! 

Seek input that you can understand

Comprehensible input. You've been there, done that.

When you needed to learn Dutch, you read ‘Ot en Sien’ and ‘Kruimeltje’. Later, when you needed to learn English, you read Superman comics, the Famous Five and Myths and Legends from Many Lands.

You got yourself comprehensible input in the language that you had to learn. 

You chose interesting material at your level.

It’s possible to expand the difficulty limit of the material if you have a way to making it understandable. (Cheating is allowed.)

If you already know the story, that’s good (unless you are disinclined to re-read books or watch movies again and again). But you could get around that by seeking more by the same author, or continue in that genre.

If your listening is at a level where it supplements your understanding, then listen to the audiobook at the same time as you follow along on paper or the screen.

And if you read on screen, you might use an application that gives you the meaning of words when you scroll over them.

  There are means and ways.