Well hey there I'm Emma from mmmEnglish!
Today's lesson is going to focus on five tips to improve
your English listening skills.
So often we focus on speaking, don't we? But listening,
understanding someone else is just as important if you want to
be able to communicate effectively, right?
What makes listening so hard is that the English that you hear
is often quite different to the English that you learn.
So I want to share five different techniques that you can use
to improve your listening skills.
Perhaps you've already tried a few of them,
maybe some of them are new. I definitely hope
that you can take a couple of new ideas away
and put them into practice after this video.
When I was preparing for this lesson I asked the members inside
my English speaking community Hey Lady! about what they
feared most when it comes to listening to someone
speaking English, what were the things that worried the most
and I got lots of different responses
but the top three were: Not being able to understand words,
maybe slang, people talking too fast
so of course, that includes linking,
contractions and reduced forms.
Thirdly, not being familiar with or comfortable with the accent.
What do you think? Do you agree?
What worries you the most when you have to listen to someone
who is speaking in English? Let me know down in the comments.
Listening to people is something that we do all of the time.
You're listening to me right now. We listen to podcasts,
we listen to TV shows and movies.
All of this is passive listening, you're absorbing the sounds
and the words, taking what you know
and understanding it, interpreting it.
But today I really want to talk about
how you can practise and how you can improve
your listening skills so that you can feel more confident joining
conversations and meeting new people and
communicating in English.
First up, pronunciation.
One of the best things that you can do to improve your listening
skills is to study pronunciation
but I'm not really talking about
learning and practising individual sounds
but rather focusing on the elements of naturally spoken English.
Things like contractions, reduced forms, sentence stress,
intonation, all of these things, learning to hear and recognise
the sounds of English as it's actually spoken
because English doesn't always sound like what you expect,
does it? Sounds blend together, they change,
sometimes they're completely dropped.
And it's no wonder that your poor little brain is
crying out for help as you're listening to someone speaking English
and it's no wonder that you tend to blame your ears and yourself
for not being able to hear and understand the sounds
but it's not your fault. You haven't been taught
to hear 'What do you want to do?'
that's what you expect to hear, isn't it?
What you actually hear is something like:
Whaddaya wannado?
Learning to recognise these sounds and to start associating
those sounds with the words 'what do you want to do'
is gonna help
right and I have the perfect video to help you practise,
the thirty most common reductions in English.
The link is up here and I'll add it to the end of the video
but if you study and learn the sounds of naturally spoken English,
you're going to be in a much better position to actually understand
spoken English.
Next up is reading and listening together.
Now this really shouldn't be a new idea because I talk
about it all of the time. It is one of my favourite techniques
to help you improve your pronunciation which I just explained
is an excellent way to help
you improve your listening skills, right?
With this technique, you get to see the word as you read
and you also get to hear it as it's being spoken.
So you start to recognise
the sounds and associate it to the words.
Hey quick question. Do you use Ted Talks at all when you study
and you practise your English?
Ted Talks are brilliant resources to help you with your
listening skills in English.
If you go to their website, every video has an interactive transcript
and that transcript allows you to follow the script
as the speaker is talking so it's great for learning new words,
it's great for hearing the natural pronunciation
and you can even use it to pause and to practise imitating
what the speaker is saying. Ted Talks are also a really awesome
way to listen to different types of English speakers
because there are so many different talks that you can listen to.
Listening to those different voices, different accents,
different paces, all of this is essential to helping you develop
your listening skills.
So this is my third tip, listening to different accents,
different voices and in different contexts.
Opening yourself up to different voices and
different accents is so important.
It's not only about accents but it's also the tone of people's voice,
the pace at which they speak and then of course, the context
in which you're listening, background noise,
maybe you're really comfortable talking one-to-one
but when there's a group and there's multiple people talking,
they're talking over the top of each other
it becomes more challenging.
So we have all of these different features to play with.
Playing with the difference in all of these experiences is something
that will help you to develop really strong listening skills.
Now if you choose to listen to different voices,
it may be a little harder at the beginning.
It's definitely going to be something that pays off
for you in the long run because you're going to be able to
understand more people
and you'll feel less fearful as you meet people who have an accent
or a tone of voice that you're not familiar with.
So how do you know when you should look for a different accent
or a different type of person to listen to?
When you're listening to someone, maybe you're listening to me
right now and you're feeling really good.
I can understand most of what she's saying.
I feel relaxed and comfortable.
I'm kind of pleased with myself actually.
Well this is a sign, it's a sign that's telling you
you need to shake things up a bit.
If you're feeling comfortable, then you know it's time to push
the boundary of your comfort zone a little.
Not a lot, let's not go crazy but a little.
And when you feel a little bit of discomfort or that fear
when you start talking to someone and you realise
that their accent is quite different
or maybe they're speaking really quickly, you just want to notice
that fear, that resistance that you have
of not being able to understand someone you're worried about it.
That is telling you that this is the type of situation that you need
practice with. The more you listen to someone,
the more you understand of them, right?
So again Ted Talks are really great tools to help you with this
because people who are presenting, they're often speaking a little
more clearly. You have the transcript to help you practise with
and you get to ease into different accents, different paces,
different tones.
Let's get on to my next tip.
Write what you hear.
This is my absolute favourite one. I can't wait to share it.
So we're not talking about sitting down to a YouTube video
and writing out the entire thing, everything that you hear.
That is not going to work, it's not going to be fun.
It's going to take you a bloody long time.
So I have some really specific steps
to follow if you want to practise along in this way.
Step one is choose a really small section of a video,
a podcast or a Ted Talk,
just thirty seconds only.
Step two is just listening to that section a couple of times.
You're not writing yet, you're just listening,
you're getting used to their accent, you're getting used to the tone
and the pace of their voice.
You're also becoming more familiar with the topic or the context
of the conversation.
Step three.
Okay now you're ready to pick up your pen and to write.
So you want to listen to the first sentence,
pause, write down what you hear.
Listen to the next sentence, pause,
write down what you hear.
Now you may want to slow down the speed of the audio a little.
It's really easy to do that with Ted Talks, with Audible
and on YouTube. We really don't want to make this an impossible
task. If slowing down the speed a little
helps you to get through the practice
there is no harm in doing that at all.
So what about when you don't quite catch something,
maybe there's a word that you don't recognise, you don't know the
meaning of, you can't recognise it, maybe the sounds
have kind of all squished together
and so it doesn't make a lot of sense to you.
That's fine, leave a gap, keep listening,
write down what you do hear.
Do this all the way through to the end of that little section
that you're listening to
and go back to the start, listen again,
try to fill in some of those gaps. Look at the words around the gap.
Can you try and guess what could go there
or what should go there?
So tell me, what is so great about this really simple technique
to help you improve your listening skills?
Any ideas?
Unlike all of the other tips that I've shared today,
this one helps you to actually discover what you're not hearing.
When you're listening, you are always taking in information.
You're taking in everything that you understand
and you're leaving the rest behind
but the parts that you don't understand, they're the parts
that are going to help you to learn and to grow.
So filling in those gaps is going to help you to understand
and it's going to help you to improve your listening skills.
And lastly, watch without subtitles.
Okay quick poll.
Who watches movies or TV shows without any subtitles?
Answer honestly here. I really genuinely want to know.
Share it down in the comments.
Watching a movie or a TV show in a language that you're learning
without subtitles is really hard work
especially if you're sitting down to do it at the end of a long day,
you're sitting down to watch your favourite show,
you just want to relax.
Yes watching without subtitles is harder. It's going to teach you
how to listen. When you listen to people in real life,
there are no subtitles right, there are no captions in real life
so we have to build that confidence and that awareness
with our listening skills.
You've got your favourite TV show, you have a notebook handy,
you've got it sitting next to you on the couch
just so every time you sit down to turn on the telly
you've got it there ready.
You want to turn off the subtitles and start paying attention.
Remember we're just focusing on the first one minute,
when you watch that one minute through,
pause,
take out that notebook and write down a few notes about
what you saw or what you heard in the first minute of that video.
So, for example, you might write something about
one of the characters.
Paul seemed really frustrated by
Annie's decision to book a holiday with her friends
and not to ask him first.
So then go back, turn on the subtitles, of course in English,
and read them through for the entire minute making sure
that you understood everything exactly as you wrote down.
The ideas are all clear and true. That is the active listening practice
that you need to keep improving your skills.
So there you have it!
They were my five tips, five different techniques that you can use
to practise and to improve your English listening skills.
Of course, you can do it on your own.
You can do it with a study buddy
but I recommend that you just choose one of the techniques
we talked about today and put it into practice over a whole week.
Try and do it a few times see if it sticks.
See if it's something that's working for you,
something that you enjoy.
I've left some links to some really great Ted Talks
down in the description. You can use them to get started
and if you want to focus on natural pronunciation
then check out this video right here, the one about
common reductions that I mentioned earlier
or this entire course that I made here on YouTube
that's about linking and natural pronunciation.
I'll see you in there!