Sure, some people may say it’s because they don’t have time to study, but what that usually means is that they haven’t organized their learning plan well enough to take advantage of the time they do have.

That’s where audio courses come in.

Use Every Free Minute

Audio courses help you make use of the little scraps of free time you have through out the day. Put the course on your MP3 player or Walkman and it’s ready to go

It also lets you keep your hands free, so can go for a walk, make coffee, clean the house, or just about anything else while you’re studying. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend getting too deeply involved in something else because it will distract you from what you’re trying to learn and reduce your retention of the material.

The up side, though, is hands-free study will take away the feeling that there’s “something more important” you should be doing instead of sitting on the sofa with a textbook in your lap.

The Best Audio Courses

If you’ve read a few articles at FasterForeignLanguageLearning.com, you’ve probably noticed that I’m a huge fan of Pimsleur. The reason I like them so much is the course is very well organized to help you actually remember what you hear. It’s not just someone reading a list of words followed by a few dialogues.

The only downside, however, is that Pimsleur is rather expensive. If you’re not ready to splash out $200 or more, give Living Languages from Random House a try. These courses do come with books that include vocab lists, example phrases, and quizzes, but the audio alone is still useful.

Make you Own “Course”

Not having a professionally designed audio course available doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage audio to improve your language skills. The internet gives you access to a huge variety of audio in the more common languages, but you’ll probably be able to find something in all but the rarest languages. This includes talk radio, interviews, music clips, movies, and even ads.

While it’s true this audio material won’t be neatly organized for language study purposes, you’ll find that just listening—daily—will help your listening comprehension enormously. Keep adding your seven (or however many) words a day and you’ll find yourself able to understand more and more of what you hear. The repetition will also help get the words into your long-term memory.

One caveat, though: if you’re the type of learner who needs to see new words in writing or write them out yourself before you can remember them, an audio-only course may actually be slower for you than a traditional textbook-based course.

Related posts:

1. A Real Answer to “How Fast Can I Learn a Language?”
2. Three Things You Need to Learn a Language Fast
3. What if You Only Have Eight Weeks? Can You Learn a Language That Fast?