How to Learn English by Listening (And Finally Understand English Speakers!)

When you learn English by listening, you can understand crazy things like this:

Unnerstandin’English’skindahardsometimes, yaknowhaddamean?

Did you get that?

It’s just the way that a native English speaker might say the phrase“Understanding English is kind of hard sometimes, you know what I mean?”

If you didn’t understand that at first, don’t worry.

A lot of English speakers talk fast and blend their words together.

Not even the best books to learn English can prepare your ears for this!

Luckily, I’m here to help you learn English by listening so that even the quickest, most confusing English speech becomes easy for you.

First we’ll explore the importance of English listening, then we’ll share some tips to practice listening effectively.

To wrap things up, we’ll see how to put these tips into action with a variety of audio resources to learn English by listening (like podcasts, audiobooks, TV shows, movies and more)

Why Is It Important to Learn English by Listening?

Studies show that listening is the most frequently used language skill by students. English listening is important not only in communication, but also in how we learn.

According to these studies, listening is basically how you obtain—and learn—new information. Whether you’re in the classroom or not, listening takes up more daily communication time than other forms of verbal communication.

If listening is at the center of the lives of students throughout all levels of their educational development, why should it be any different in learning a language? In your efforts to improve your overall English, working on your listening abilities must be at the core of your learning practice.

But before you can start learning English by listening, you have to make sure you know how to listen effectively.

Listening effectively is something that very few of us actually do. It’s not that it’s difficult, it’s just that most of us never developed the habits that would make us effective listeners.

As you develop the necessary skills for listening effectively, the feedback you’ll receive on your performance as a language listener will help you correct mistakes and increase your motivation to keep on learning, as well as help you to develop your confidence in using the language.

Learn English by Listening: These Tips and Audio Resources Will Totally Transform Your Practice

Quick But Crucial Tips to Learn English by Listening

You’ve heard it on TV and read it on every language website: “This Is the Perfect Way to Learn English.”

Spoiler alert! You’ll learn in this article that there’s no such thing as a perfect way! What’s important is that you pick a plan, get started as soon as possible and make adjustments along the way.

There’s one more thing you should know about the “perfect” way to learn English:

The perfect plan is the plan that you actually follow through with.

The best methods, strategies and courses don’t mean anything if you don’t actually follow through with them!

Here are six tips to help you effectively learn English by listening.

Tip 1: Start with a Positive Mindset

The first thing you want to learn to do is to listen optimistically.

Why? You have to actually believe that you can hear and understand what people are saying.

I know English listening can be very difficult, especially with speakers who have a strong accent or who talk really fast. But you’ve actually done it before! You learned how to listen and understand and speak a language when you were a baby. Why should it be any different now that you’re an adult? If you listen with a good frame of mind, you’ll see it’s not impossible.

If you don’t believe that you can listen and understand what people are saying, in the words of Jedi Master Yoda from “Star Wars:” “That is why you fail.”

Having a hard time? Focus on actively listening. When people are talking, don’t focus on what you’re going to reply, don’t try to translate what they’re saying, don’t analyze the grammar structure of the sentences… just listen.

Tip 2: Choose Diverse English Listening Materials

Don’t just listen to the same kind of English audio materials all the time.

Don’t stick to listening to only the news, or only watching the same TV shows over and over. Instead, listen to a variety of different kinds of situations and topics.

As long as you find a resource that makes you happy, keeps you learning English by listening and lines up with your goals and interests, you have my full support.

Tip 3: Predict Audio Content

Pretend you’re listening to the radio.

You hear a helicopter in the background, and a speaker is mentioning the names of streets, roads and avenues, and talking about how many vehicles are currently on these roads.

What do you imagine he’s talking about? Most likely, you’re listening to a traffic report.

You can then expect to hear other words like “bottleneck,” “traffic jam” and “rush hour.” You’ll probably also hear the imperative (command form of verbs): “Don’t take the highway” or “Avoid 4th Avenue.”

Based on the context, you can often predict the words and even style of language you will hear. That’s a big first step forward!

Unless you know nothing, like Jon Snow from “Game of Thrones,” your previous knowledge of the world will help you predict what information you’ll likely hear. When you predict the topic of a conversation, all this knowledge and related vocabulary stored in your brain will be turned on to help you better understand what you’re listening to.

Next time you’re watching or listening to an English TV show or the radio, pause after every few sentences. Try to predict what’s going to happen or what the speaker might say next.

For instance, the words “avenue,” “vehicle,” “jam,” “bottle” and “neck” all have their own separate meanings, but when you hear them together, they form the context of a traffic-related conversation.

A powerful way to practice this is by creating mind maps. Whenever you learn new words, try to group them with other words used in a similar context.

Tip 4: Listen for the Big Ideas

At first, you should resist the impulse to try to understand every single word people are saying.

It’s more important to keep up with the conversation and try to understand the main ideas.

English is like a road. As with any road, there are “signposts,” which are words that help us follow the sequence of what’s going on—in this case, they help us understand what we’re hearing. These words link ideas and help us understand what people are talking about. They’re especially relevant in talks or presentations.

For example, if a university professor giving a lecture says, “I will talk about three reasons supporting…” be on the lookout for expressions such as “first of all,” “moving on to” and “in summary,” that link the ideas and indicate the next parts of the lecture.

Focus on keywords like these to grasp the most relevant parts of a conversation. Once you relax and make it a priority to understand the main idea, you’ll have the freedom to complete your comprehension with the details and clear the air later by asking questions.

Tip 5: Listen for the Details

After you’ve focused on the big picture, now look for specific details that will help you understand better.

When listening for details, you’re interested in very specific information such as a name or a number. Ignore anything else that doesn’t sound relevant to what you’re listening for. This way, you’ll be able to zoom in your search and get the details you need to understand the message.

For example, if you’re interested in knowing the age of a person, pay attention to any words related to age like “old,” “years,” “born in” or even a number, which could be that person’s age.

An excellent way to practice listening for details is to decide what kind of detailed information you want to practice listening for and then listen to radio shows where you would get this information.

Let’s say, for example, that you want to practice listening for details about the weather. You could listen to a weather report and focus on the names of cities and the temperatures in every one of them.

You can also focus on other kinds of details. Instead of listening to the words, focus only on intonation or stress.

Intonation is a very important part of speech that we usually don’t focus on. If you’re interested in making your intonation more natural, you should focus on it specifically.

Similarly, try focusing only on stress. When you use stress wrong, English speakers have a hard time understanding you. It can even change the meaning of what you’re saying. That’s why everyone should invest some time focusing on it.

Tip 6: Listen and Write

As an English learner, your main focus should be turning the sounds you hear into words, and then turning those words into a message.

Many of the exercises described in this article help you learn listening skills by performing English listening comprehension activities. But writing what you hear forces you to decode individual sounds.

Transcribing (a fancy word for “writing what you hear”) gives you a surprisingly fun way to improve your listening skills. Listening and writing down what you hear helps you not only learn new vocabulary but also improve your pronunciation.

You can learn by listening and writing down every single word. You can learn new words or discover that certain words are pronounced very differently than you thought.

There are plenty of websites where you can listen to short audio recordings and write down every word that you hear. Make sure to keep going back and playing each sentence again and again until you’ve transcribed the whole thing.

Tip 7: Practice and Listen Repeatedly

Finally, the best way to learn English by listening effectively is to simply listen to English as much as possible.

There’s no magic fix, but you should be sure to listen to things that interest you. If you don’t, it’ll be be difficult for you to continue. You’ll get bored and eventually stop.

You can take advantage of the spaced-repetition technique to improve your listening skills. Listening to the same thing allows you to listen more deeply. When you listen to new vocabulary for the first time, you should repeat it several times.

Go back later the same day to practice again. Repeat it again the following day. Come back to it in a week. And again in a month. What you’ve learned should be ingrained in your brain by then.

Put the Tips into Action: Incredible Audio Resources to Learn English by Listening

Now that you know the right ways to learn English by listening, let’s go through all the ways and places you can listen to interesting English audio.

English TV Shows

Watch a show in English that interests you. Watch it from beginning to end. Follow the plot, the storylines and all the characters. Unsure about what to watch? Don’t worry: FluentU’s got your back.

How does this help? Watching a TV show is a great way to practice consistently for a long time.If you enjoy the show, you’ll easily spend hours watching it, continually hearing English.

What should you do? Choose a particular scene or a short part of the show and repeat it line by line. Try to match tone, speed and accent.

The cool thing is that FluentU makes this whole process a lot easier than just watching regular TV.

FluentU teaches you English through real-world English videos, including hundreds of TV clips as well as music videos, funny commercials, inspiring speeches and more.