By listening to something just once or twice, working through any accompanying comprehension questions or practice exercises, and moving on to the next thing, you’ll go through a lot of material without getting much out of it. Worse yet, you may end up feeling like you’re working awfully hard at improving your listening skills, but not making much progress.

A More Efficient Way to Use Listening Material

Taking a step-by-step approach to working with your listening material helps you get as much as possible from each one. Planning a structured lesson–rather than just passively listening–helps you suck every last drop of usefulness out of every bit of listening material you have so you actually learn and improve your listening skills with all that work you’re doing. That means greater rewards and less frustration for you!

One note, though: the lesson-planning method I’ll describe below works best with material you could understand most of if it were written, but find somewhat more difficult to understand when you hear it spoken at a natural speed.

Of course, sometimes you might want to listen to any authentic material (material meant for native speakers) just to catch whatever you can or simply get used to the sound of the language. Doing this is helpful in its own way, but it’s hard to build a useful lesson around material you find extremely difficult to understand. To use this method, choose listening material that’s at or slightly above your current level.

Step 1: Global Comprehension

Before you listen the first time, set a “prediction task” for yourself. The goal with this is to prepare yourself for the kinds of vocabulary and grammar structures you might hear so you’ll recognize them more easily.

A teacher who’s already listened to the material has a wide variety of possible prediction tasks he or she can give you. When you’re doing this alone, you’re limited in the kinds of tasks you can set for yourself, but you still have a few options. For example:

• If you’re going to listen to the day’s news, write down a few topics you think you might be discussed.
• If you’re going to listen to material on a specific topic (grocery shopping, the state of the economy, puppy care, etc.), write down some words or phrases you expect to hear.
• If it’s an interview, what questions might the interviewer ask?
• If it’s an anecdote or short film, use the title and any accompanying pictures to predict what might happen in the story.

Listen once through and check your predictions. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong, the goal is simply to warm up for more detailed listening. If you weren’t able to tell whether you were right or wrong, have another another listen. When you’re done, you should have the gist of the material and be able to give someone a brief overview of what the material’s about.

Step 2: Discrete Comprehension or Listening for Details

On your next (usually second or third) listening, listen for more detailed information. If your listening material comes with comprehension questions, they’re probably mostly the “listening for detail” kind.

So, when you listen to a news report the first time–aiming for a general overview–you might understand that a bank robbery happened that day. When you listen again for detail, you might try to hear what time it happened, how much money the robber stole, or whether or not the robber hurt anyone.

If you don’t have comprehension questions or other exercises available, focus on anything you didn’t understand. It may be individual words or short phrases. It may also be whole sentences in which you understand all the words, but still don’t quite understand the meaning of the whole sentence.

If you hear a word clearly, but don’t know what that word means, don’t just ignore it or wait until you see it written to look it up in your dictionary. Take your best guess at the spelling and look it up in your dictionary. Getting into that habit can go a long way towards helping you build your vocabulary from listening.

Once you think you’ve understood everything you can from listening, then look at the transcript, if you have. But don’t cheat yourself by checking the transcript after only two or three listenings!

Step 3: Work with Your New Vocabulary and Grammar

Add any new words and phrases from your listening to your vocabulary notebook, if you keep one. Be selective! Choose just a few of the new words you think you’ll be most likely to use, instead of overwhelming yourself with a dozen or more new words.

Then practice using them. Get them into your head and make them your own so you can use them whenever you want. Being able to recognize words isn’t enough if you want to speak and write, too!

Try making up a few sentences using each new word. Create a mind map starting with one of the words. Put a word or phrase into your favorite search engine to see if any good usage examples come up in the search results. (Just make sure the phrases are grammatically correct and acceptable (polite) usage before you bother to write them down and practice them!)

If you noticed a grammar structure you’ve never seen before, look it up in your grammar book, learn a little more about it, and try using it yourself.

Now go and give it a try! If you have a book-and-CD set of listening lessons, use the steps above to expand each lesson to get even more out of it. Don’t have any pre-made listening lessons? Make your own listening lesson out of a radio program, podcast, song, interview or any other recorded audio material you can find.

Related posts:

1. Learn a Language Fast with Audio Courses
2. Authentic Material: Speed up Your Learning Speed and Boost Your Motivation
3. What if You Only Have Eight Weeks? Can You Learn a Language That Fast?

Set Specific Year-End Goals

“Learn French” isn’t a clear goal and, unless you’re doing it as a hobby, neither is “study French.” What level do you hope to achieve within the year? More specifically, what do you want to do with the language? Set goals for all four communication skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. For example, are you interested in reading newspaper articles, talking shop with others in your profession, participating in online forums? Whether or not a goal is “realistic” depends on the language, your existing knowledge and experience, how much time you have to study and what level you’re starting at. Which brings us to the next step…

Plan in Detail

Write down (as in, on a paper you can stick on your wall) a plan that outlines what skills you want to have by what date and, at least for the first month, how you’re going to gain those skills.

Nothing says you have to plan for the whole year, but if you’re making a New Year’s resolution and you’re fairly clear on your goals, you can “backwards plan” starting from your year-end goals. Outline what you’ll need to have accomplished by the end of each 3-month quarter, each month, and then each week in order to meet your final year-end goals.

If you’re not quite sure where you’re going with this whole “learning a language” thing, try setting a goal for the end of your first month of study and then setting small, weekly stepping-stone goals toward that month-end goal. However you decide to plan, it’s those weekly goals that really keep you on track. If you only have monthly goals, it’s too easy to put things off for three weeks, then try to cram everything into the last week…then slack off for another three weeks. Not exactly an effective learning strategy.

Schedule in some tests, too. These might be tests that come along with your text book, language school level assessment tests or real-life tests like trying to order a meal in Chinese at your local Chinese restaurant. Anything that clearly demonstrates whether or not you’ve reached a particular goal is fair game.

Along with textbooks, university language course syllabi can help you get some ideas of a realistic goal schedule. Here’s a good example of a Russian 101 syllabus (.doc file) with learning goals and a week-by-week plan. Of course, languages vary widely, so you’ll need one–or ideally, several–for your own target language.

Stick with It Daily

Of course, this is the hard part. There are reams of tips out for how to stick with your plans and keep New Year’s resolutions, and I’ve put up a few more language learning motivation ideas, too, but for starters….

Make sure you include some pure fun “study” ideas for those days when the mere thought of another grammar exercise makes you nauseous. Get some movies, music, magazines or anything else you genuinely enjoy. I highly recommened having this kind of stuff on hand at all times. If nothing else, print out some interesting articles from the Web and keep them on the coffee table to read through when you’re watching TV. You don’t even have to understand much; just stay in contact with the language and keep up your habit of daily study in some form.

Make the language a part of your life as much as you can. Switch the language of your email inbox to your target language…and don’t get lazy and switch back again!

If you don’t trust yourself to stay the on track, but can’t afford regular language classes, consider meeting with a private teacher once a week. A private teacher can keep you honest on your weekly goals and answer questions that are bound to come up. A highly motivated study partner is another option, but they may be less reliable since they’re not doing it for pay.

Stay Flexible

If you choose a language you don’t know much about, you may find it much harder or (hopefully) easier to make progress than you expected. Even if your New Year’s resolution is to improve or brush up on a language you’re well aquinted with, you can still hit snags that have nothing to do with your study habits or level of commitment. Your target language may be so much different from anything else you’ve ever encountered that you aren’t able to learn at your usual speed.

Instead of trying to stick to a plan no matter what and beating yourself up for the times you don’t reach your goals on schedule, use set backs to rework your learning plan. If you start feeling frustrated and overwhelmed, stop trying to learn anything new until you get a solid grasp on the material you’ve already studied. You still have to find a balance, though. While most of us can’t expect to reach intermediate level in three months, most us don’t need two years to do it, either.

If you feel like you’re not making any real progress or you’re learning at a significally slower rate than syllabi or textbooks suggest for the amount of time you study, and you really don’t know why, the problem could well be your study methods. There’s a reason intensive courses at commercial language schools are more effective than most high school language classes. If you feel stuck and you don’t think it’s because you’re trying to learn too much too fast, try out some new language learning methods or consult a teacher and thoroughly go over your goals and methods.

Learning a new language is a fairly common New Year’s resolution–or so the management at the language schools I’ve worked for tell me. But don’t let it become a “set and (literally) forget” goal. Aim to have some contact with the language every day and check your progress weekly. Even if you can only manage a few words a day and some basic grammar each month, after a year, you’ll have made real, noticable progress.

Related posts:

1. How to Set Goals for Learning a Foreign Language
2. What if You Only Have Eight Weeks? Can You Learn a Language That Fast?
3. Three Ways to Decide What Language to Learn

Cramming like this may seem logical, but it puts you in danger of learning a lot about the language and developing passive (listening and reading) knowledge without actually being able to communicate well. Especially in the begining, it’s important to build a solid foundation of the essentials that allow real communication. Unfortunately, reviewing the stuff you already more or less understand doesn’t always give you the high of learning something brand new.

To help you stay focused on the essentials, here are some ways to get sufficient review and still keep getting that feeling of accomplishment that comes with learning new things.

Reinforce What You Know

Look for ways to get better at using the words you already know. Say you know the word “car.” Can you also say things like “get into/out of a car,” “park a car,” “drive a car to…,” “be in a car accident,” “take a car trip,” and so on? A little brainstorming usually works to uncover common ways you migh use particular words, but if you want to dig further, mind maps are a good way to group related vocabulary and see what you can add. Vocabulary games can also help you practice the vocabulary you already know in a way thats a lot more entertaining that reading from a list of words.

Refine Your Communication Skills

You may be able to understand almost everything you hear, but how well can you use various grammatical features in speach or writing. Phrasebooks and some textbooks are good for getting ideas on topics (eating out, making small talk, visiting a doctor). These may or may not be related to a particular situation. While it might be important to know how to book a hotel room or order a meal, plenty of language skills are far more general.

Can you describe the people in your family? Describe what you do for a living? Give pros and cons for something? Describe a particular place? Give instructions for a process, like making a sandwich? Explain what you’d do in a hypothetical situation? Look for ordinary situations like this and test your skills on them.

Develop Specialized Vocabulary

Even if you’re already working on vocabulary for work, branch it into a topic for pure enjoyment. If you like cooking, collect recipes in your target language. Enjoy photography? Put some photography magazines or websites on your regular reading list. You may find yourself better able to remember vocabulary for these topics simply because it intersts you. This lets you have fun collecting potentially useful words without the stress of feeling like you must memorize them all.

Sign up For an Proficiency Exam

If you have the chance to take an exam that qualifies you for a particular level, signing up for one can help you stay focused on the essentials by giving you specific ideas of what to study and which of your skills you need to improve. Most will provide you with some material that gives you a general idea of the topics the exam covers and more popular exams may have study guides available. While exam-taking skill aren’t always the same as real life, there’s enough overlap to make exams worth it. What’s more, certification also gives you a way to prove your language proficiency to a potential employer.

Related posts:

1. How to Learn a Foreign Language Faster
2. Vocabulary For Unexpected Childcare: “Will You Watch my Kid for a Minute?”
3. How to Get the Most from Your Listening Material

So, who’s right? Is it really possible to at least develop decent communication skills totally online?

What’s Possible Online

If you want to learn to communicate comfortably and maybe pass an intermediate level exam in a language, I think it’s safe to say you can reach those goals learning purely online. After all, every major language skill can be practiced over the Internet.

The standard language class focuses on four communications skills:

• Reading
• Writing
• Listening
• Speaking

The passive skills—reading and listening—are easy enough to manage online. Even in less common languages, you can still find newspapers, blogs, music videos and other interesting stuff to practice with. Writing isn’t too much harder to practice online with a keypal or email-based lessons. That leaves speaking as the main challenge.

Building Speaking Skills Online

The most efficient way improve your speaking skills online is with a tutor or a language exchange partner use a VoIP program like Skype of Yahoo! Chat. The idea behind a language exchange is to swap language knowledge. In most cases, this is great for free, casual conversation practice. It can also help build your confidence if you’re a little shy about talking to native speakers.

If you’re really serious about improving your skills and you don’t mind paying, though, a qualified professional tutor is a better option. Working with a tutor, you won’t have to worry about planning lessons or figuring out how to teach your mother tongue (a challenge in itself).

A paid tutor is also much less likely to show up unprepared or blow off lessons altogether because they had better things to do. Another benefit is that tutor can tell you exactly why certain things are said the way they are, whereas a native speaker may only be able to tell you what “sounds right.” That helps you grasp the logic of the language faster.

The Mindset for Learning Online

The Internet gives you access to almost everything you need to get conversational in a language, but there are a few reasons online-only learning may not be the best option for you.

Even if you’re enrolled in a well planned and carefully managed course, when you’re learning online, you still have more responsibility for your learning than you do in a classroom-based course. When you’re sitting behind your computer, no one is there to get your attention when your eyes glaze over during a listening exercise or ask you why you’re leaving class early. If you’re not really the self-motivated type (no shame in that), you’ll probably do better taking classes in person.

Learning a language online also isn’t ideal if you learn better in a social environment. If you just like to have people around to chat with and mutually encourage, at the very least you’ll probably want to join a local study group and pair up with a motivational partner.

Online language learning resources provide and they’re worth using even if you’re enrolled in a classroom-based course. If you decide you want to go for self-guided online language learning, check out the Faster Foreign Language Learning book for more tips on learning more efficiently.

Related posts:

1. How to Stop Procrastinating and Start Learning: Five Techniques to Try
2. How to Set Goals for Learning a Foreign Language
3. How to Learn Second Language Without Stress