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submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works to c/languagelearning@sopuli.xyz

How do you improve your listening skills to get to listening to native content with ease, assuming vocabulary and grammar are not the issue?

Here's what I've found does not work:

  • Slow/easy language podcasts. Yes, it's important to get started with stuff like that, but it's extremely boring and limited, and it does not get me over the listening hump. The listening hump is all the phonetic and semantic and grammatical changes made to language when it is spoken at speed. By definition, I am NOT exposed to that in slow language podcasts and so listening to an infinite amount of slow podcasts will not teach me.

  • Re-listening to work I know. I've found working from transcribed shows that I can understand them all, but it's from a freaky ability to recall the dialogue, not from a newfound ability to DECODE the dialogue. The flip side of that is if there is something I don't understand the first time through, it doesn´t become more intelligible on multiple passthroughs. So I read the transcript and then it becomes yet another thing I remember.

So I'm wondering if there's an entirely different approach. Like, maybe if I tried reading aloud more often, I'd naturally fall into these elisions and ways of speaking, and having produced them naturally myself, I would hear them better? Because right now, my language production is zero. In fact, my language consumption is entirely passive.

Tell me what you did to get over the hump.

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[-] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

With English, TV shows/movies helped a lot. It's not perfect yet (I still struggle with certain accents, badly mixed audio and TBH sometimes I even struggle with content in my native language), but I'm definitely able to have a conversation without missing half the words. TBF I spent a LOT of time on it, it's not a good approach for a less common language or one that's more difficult for you than English was for me (my native language is also Germanic).

[-] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 weeks ago

Do you have method for listening? Subitles? That sort of thing.

I'm learning French; plenty of great material out there. I wouldn't say it's phonetically too challenging, it just gets a little weird when spoken.

[-] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 3 points 2 weeks ago

Subtitles help a lot, especially in the beginning, but I notice that I often get lazy with it and focus on the subtitles rather than trying to understand spoken words. Better to leave them off by default and only turn them on when you're rewinding and analyzing an especially difficult passage, and of course they need to precisely mirror the spoken words which isn't a given.

this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2026
26 points (100.0% liked)

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