Getting Into Listening to French and Spanish

Building your vocabulary through extensive reading should keep you busy for a while. But sometimes, you might want to mix in some listening, or you might be at a point where you’ve done enough reading to feel ready to spend most of your language learning time on listening for a while. To help you succeed in listening to French or Spanish whenever you’re ready, this post will give you some good tips on the difference in difficulty of different media, keeping your expectations realistic, and how to gradually increase the challenge level of what you listen to. Specifically, this post will go over:

-            Different types of listening material that are easier or more challenging

-            Setting realistic expectations: keep learning for 20 minutes each day and get a little better each month

-            Advanced listening challenges: faster play speed, trying movies and music

Different types of listening material

Various media in a foreign language has different degrees of difficulty, not just in the complexity or obscurity of topics, but in things like the pace and clarity of speech. When just beginning to listen, it’s a good idea to listen to more formal, polished media like podcasts, newscasts, and documentaries. Music and movies are fast paced enough and have enough distracting background noise that they are more advanced things to listen to.

Another good source of listening media for beginners is children’s shows. One particular show that I recommend for early listening is Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, which has many videos available on YouTube in both French (le Village de Dany) and Spanish (Daniel Tigre en Español). The spoken language is generally very clear and not too fast, and the video component helps to provide clues for understanding the dialogues throughout the episodes.

Other listening media will also be listed in the next post, along with a simple assessment of strengths that each of these sources offers to help you become used to spoken French or Spanish. A common strength of all of them is that they will expose you to a high volume of different words (quantity, not loudness 😊) in spoken language, which is a key ingredient to mastering any foreign language.

Setting realistic expectations

As I’ve said in many posts before but cannot say too many times, setting realistic expectations is critical to the success of your language learning journey. With listening, as with reading, 20 minutes each day is plenty of time to give your brain a good workout in the language and make good progress over time. If you have time to listen for 30 minutes a day instead of 20, that’s great, but don’t get carried away with so much that you burn out and lose desire to keep learning. Focus on moderate quantity of exposure and high quality, undistracted focus with the intent of forming a habit to dedicate this time to learning well.

Regarding the pace of learning you should expect of yourself, my experience with learning to listen to a foreign language is that I notice myself getting a little bit better about once a month. Of course, I’m improving every day, but about once a month is when I suddenly notice that I’ve gotten a little better at it than I thought I was. These improvements are tiny, and it takes several of them over several months to make significant progress. Factor this into your expectations on getting better at understanding spoken French or Spanish; give yourself at least one year of listening at least two or three times per week to reach a place where you feel like you’re getting “good” at it.

Advanced listening challenges

Once you reach a point where it’s comfortable to listen to a source and you can understand it well, it might be time to try more challenging media. One other thing you can try with the existing media is increasing the playback speed, so you have to keep up with a faster pace of speech. Playing easier media at a faster speed could be a good way to segue into media like music and movies that is less easily intelligible to the untrained ear. If you know someone who speaks French or Spanish and is interested in speaking in the language with you, trying to understand their natural speech can be a good test of how well you can function in that language if you were in a French or Spanish speaking country.

Conclusions

Whether you listen to a foreign language before getting into reading, in parallel, or after you’ve read quite a bit, learning to listen to the language takes the same basic approach as learning to read it: a sustainable, reliable process that you can complete each day for weeks on end, without missing more than one or two days per month. Set reasonable expectations of how fast you will develop the ability to understand the spoken language. Don’t be in a rush and choose easier materials to start, progressing to more challenging ones as you find yourself getting better at hearing words, then phrases, then sentences, then whole ideas expressed in your target language. With patient, persistent practice, you will get good at listening to French and Spanish using a sustainable daily process that turns into a habit!