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By Kevin
Now, I want to give you some
practical practice exercises to help you
improve your listening skills. So first, what I want you to do is to start
watching content without captions and
subtitles. It's going to be harder, but it's going to teach you how to listen, or to actively listen, even though it's harder.
But harder is good because it actually stimulates real life. And, you know, we're practicing English to be able to succeed in real life. And in real life, unfortunately, there are a no captions.
So you want to watch content without subtitles as much as possible. When you hear a part that is not clear, try before
you go into, you know, the captions or the transcript, try listening to it again and again and again, and guess what it is that you're hearing. There's a lot of room for guessing here, right, and for
intuition. And it's within a larger context, so you're most likely to be
right. You just need to trust the fact that even if it's not 100% accurate, you need to get the gist of it. So, you want to teach yourself how to listen to something again, and again, and again.
You want to be very, very particular about what it is that you're hearing. But you also want to teach yourself to get the idea and run with it, and continue with it without understanding every single thing. Right? So, back to the practice, watching something without subtitles. And then listening to a part that is unclear again and again and again until you get it right, or you get most of it right. Another great exercise is to transcribe a text. So, you take a minutelong audio, and you play it. You listen
to it a couple of times, and then you start writing out everything that you're hearing. So you want to write every
single word that you're hearing. And the parts that are not clear, you just leave
empty or you guess the word. And then
I want you to look at the transcript. This is why using You Glish or TED talks is really great, where you have the
transcript built-in. You want to look at the transcript and see what you got
wrong. And try to guess why you got it wrong. What confused you there? Was it a specific sound? Was it a reduction, maybe a phrase with a few words that
were reduced completely, so you kind of like missed it? Maybe it was a phrase, a combination of a few reduced words
that completely went over your head,
and you couldn't understand it or hear it.
Right? And then, you know what your pitfalls are, you know what confuses
you. Right? So this is a really great way for you to understand your weaknesses
when it comes to listening. And I would recommend doing it even everyday -
just listening to a minute-long audio and transcribing the text. I also highly recommend opening yourself up to different voices and different accents, and different people, and different
situations, different circumstances.
Don't just listen to teachers on YouTube that have sort of the same accent. You
want to open yourself up to people with foreign accents. You want to open
yourself up to people with different
dialects. Because the more you hear
accents, the more you become aware of the different... of the variety of sounds.
And then you start understanding the substitutions. So you can do this
exercise, of you transcribing the text
with different dialects, right? And even
though it might be hard at the beginning, it's going to pay off big time. Because
you'll be able to open yourself up and to understand more and more sounds, and more people. And here's a tip. When you hear someone and you feel this resistance, and you're like, "No, no, no, no. I can't understand that person ",that
is the person you need to work with and try to understand even more. Because
again, the more you listen to someone, the easier it becomes for you to
understand them. Right? And when
there is a challenge, you have to face it, so you can overcome it and then it's
going to be easier for you to hear and to understand even other people. Right?
When you really face something that is challenging for you. Okay? So when you feel resistance towards how
someone sounds, that should be an
internal clue and cue for you to keep going and actually do it despite the
resistance. Because it just shows you
that there is something that needs to be resolved there. And actually, that's the case for everything, when it comes to English - when you're trying to avoid something. That's probably the one thing that you need to tackle and to overcome the most. With some exceptions. Okay, not always. That's not always the case.
Another tip is that if you like reading books, I recommend reading it with the audio version. Because the brain
processes both the written word, but also how it's spoken and how, you
know, it's pronounced. And it's really
good to connect the two things together.
Because these are not two different languages, it's the same language. And
sometimes it feels like it's two different
languages or two different places in our brain. And we want to do it together
because it really does help us not only with our listening skills, but definitely with our pronunciation, how we think and see those words. And the last tip I have for you – and that's relevant for
everything else related to English when you're practicing your listening skills - do it with something that makes you
enjoy doing it, that is fun for you, that you love. And not something that is boring, or tedious, or uninteresting. Okay? So, that's it.
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