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.

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Needless to say, though, you don’t want to get stuck at that stage. Once you’re there, the next thing to go after is all those finer details you’ve been missing. If you’re interacting in the language a lot, listening skills tend to improve on their own, but with or without interaction, there are things you can to to speed up the process.

Try Shadow Reading

Shadow reading or listen reading is the technique of following along with a transcript as you’re listening. If you study primarily from written material, spoken words may not register in your mind as fast as written ones. Using both together helps build your mental connections between words’ written forms and their sounds.

For more common languages, you can find book/CD sets that provide recorded monologues and dialogues with accompanying transcripts. If you’re having trouble finding these, though, you can also print out the lyrics to songs in your target language. Movies with close captioning can help, too.

If you have a teacher or friend helping you, there are a few practice exercises they can create for you. One is to make a gap-fill exercise by delete select words in the transcript so you can fill in the blanks with the words you heard in the listening. To make it easier, the teacher can put the correct words (along with some extras, for a challenge) at the bottom of the page. That way, you have a pool of possible solutions to pick from.

They can also change some of the words in the transcript to similar sounding words. I sometimes did this with a few of my advanced students who bored easily because it really is challenging. What makes it hard is that the transcript puts the wrong word in your head and you have to override that in order to make out what was really said.

Listen Repeatedly

I’m not a fan of using slow-speed audio to learn. First of all, people don’t talk like that in real life. You’ll eventually have to get used to normal speed. Another problem is that native speakers may pronounce things a little differently when they slow down. In English, for example natural weak forms often change to strong forms, so the speaker will pronounce “a” and “the” as “ey” and “thee” instead of “uh” and “thuh.”

So, instead of looking for material thats slow enough to let you understand everything the first time, look for material spoken at a natural speed and listen to it repeatedly until you do understand. Granted, people don’t repeat themselves indefinitely, either, but at least you’re hearing natural pronunciation.

Start with short material so you don’t lose interest too quickly. Record 5 minutes or so of audio from a news report, movie dialogue, comedy skit or whatever else suits your needs. Music is good for this, too. Then just listen a few times. You might be surprised at how much you can understand after a few listenings.

I think part of the reason this works is because sometimes develop or own, foreign-accented ideas of how words “should be” pronounced and that makes it harder to immediately recognized the word even when we “know” them. Hearing words repeated a few times helps trigger the memory, though, as well as get you used to the correct pronunciation.

Keep Developing Your Vocabulary and Grammar Knowledge

Getting the general idea of a conversation really only requires an understanding some of the words and basic grammar. You hear some words and make sense of them as best you can. That’s while you’re liable to misunderstand even when you thought you understood perfectly. What you thought you understood made sense to you, but your “guess” wasn’t accurate.

Naturally, the more words you know, the more you can understand. Focus on common words, though. Try not to get distracted by vocabulary thats interesting or seemingly basic, but not something you’re likely to need often. (How many words for animals or pieces of furniture do you really, anyway?)

Grammar is also an issue, though. When you’re not very experienced with grammar, your brain needs a little more time to first understand the words and then make sense of the grammar in order to extract meaning from what was said. With fast or even normal-speed speech, though, you may not have time to work out each sentence before the next one comes. All you get is a group of words. Too many sentences like that and you’ll get the gist of the conversation, but miss the details.

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1. Songs are enjoyable even when you don’t understand a word, so you listen to the same material again and again…and again. Try that with Pimseur.




2. With so much repetition and because of the slowish speed, you eventually notice a certain “sound patterns” (words, that is). You get curious and look the words up. Obviously, this is a lot easier with some languages than others.




3. If you’re studying, you’re also learning more words from your course book, phrase book or other learning material. You start to pick out those words in songs, too. You might see the names of songs translated and pick up words and phrases that way, too.




4. You keep listening for pleasure, so you’re getting lots of review. You don’t forget the words you’ve looked up. This is the value of the limited vocabulary. You’re also hearing the words in a natural, native context with native pronunciation.




5. Eventually you know enough words that you can pick out whole phrases.




6. Listen some more and you have those phrases memorized. Heck, you may even have whole songs down pat. You can even sing along and work on your pronunciation.




7. By this time, you probably know little chucks of grammar like “for you” (pronoun in the dative case), “your eyes” (possessive), or “I love you” (present tense verb and a pronoun in the accusative case). The form and correct, native usage is well ingrained in your mind.
   
   When you do crack open your grammar book and look at the part on “pronouns in the dative case,” you already know how to use “for you.” Dative schmative–you know what it really means. The grammar book is just providing clarification of something you already instinctively know.

But Songs Can’t do it All

First of all, you need music you genuinely like, not just tolerate. Otherwise, you’re not going to get enough repetition. Depending on your taste for the culture’s music, finding those songs may be an uphill battle.

Even if you find them, you won’t learn from passive listening. It takes curiosity and at least a little effort. At the very least, you have to actually look up those words you pick out. It’s hard to overstate this: be curious!

Another problem is that we don’t speak the way we sing. The intonation is different and singers sometimes shift the stress on words to fit them into a rhythm. Just because you can understand songs doesn’t mean you can understand speech at a natural speed.

And, of course, if you stick with pop music, your vocabulary will be pretty much limited to romance. Despite these drawbacks, because songs make such and easy and enjoyable way to memorized chucks of language, though, they make a handy way to start.

If you haven’t yet found songs you like in the language you’re learning, keep looking. Browse YouTube, listen to online radio and note the singer of each song you like, and ask around for suggestions.

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Understandable as it is, it can still make you feel a little slow-witted. You wonder if you really know the languages as well as you think or your ability to fluently switch from one to another.

Don’t Worry, You’re Normal

Rest assured that having trouble switching between languages or mixing vocabularies (heck, even grammar structures) is not a sign of some linguistic incompetence on your part. It’s completely normal and just about everyone does it. As for the so-called “amazing” ability of bi-lingual kids to separate languages…it’s not so amazing. Multilingual kids can mix languages like nobody’s business and not even realize they’re doing.

Pros do it, too. I once saw a Candid Camera-type show in which two people played a joke on an interpreter. One person spoke Spanish and the other English, with the interpreter between them. In the middle of the conversation, the Spanish speaker switched to English and vice versa. The interpreter didn’t notice. She kept on “interpreting”…Spanish into Spanish and English into English. She was concentrating on the meaning of what was being said, not the way it was expressed.

One Idea, Lots of Labels. Not Wonder Your Brain’s Confused.

It happens because when you’re speaking a language you’re comfortable with, you’re thinking about the ideas you want to communicate, not about “vocabulary” and “grammar.”

You want to tell someone you’re feeling chilly, you mentally call up words to express that idea and depending on what languages you’ve been using recently, your brain might come up with “I’m cold,” “Mir ist Kalt,” “Mne holodno,” “Samui desu” or some other way to express the same thing. But on a subconscious level, it seems like the mind just doesn’t see the point of picking one over the other.

Fluently Switching Languages Takes Practice

I think of being “ready” with more than one language at a time like having different windows open on a computer. You’ve got your Web browser, your word processor, and your music player. They’ll all up and ready to react to input withing seconds. But if you need to edit some photos, it’ll take a few seconds to start up Photoshop.

Likewise, if you’re in an environment where you’re constantly switching between two different languages, you won’t need to make any extra effort to understand or speak one or the other. But if someone suddenly starts speaking a third to you, you’ll need a moment to start up your “program” for that language.

In fact, even if you could have understand had you been expecting that language, the words might register as gibberish just because you automatically filtered them through “programs” for completely different languages.

How to Practice On Your Own

All it really takes to get used to switching back and forth is practice not with the languages themselves, but with switching between them. If you don’t have much opportunity to practice both languages frequently, try writing or just thinking in one language while listening to the other.

Better yet, turn on the TV or radio and talk back to it in the language other than the one your thinking or writing in. Talk to the TV in one language and your dog or your fern in the other. It might sound a little funny, but if you’re trying to prepare for an environment where you’ll need to switch fluently, it really can help.

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