Swift Stardom How to Improve Your Foreign Language Listening Skills in a Flash

Swift Stardom How to Improve Your Foreign Language Listening Skills in a Flash Swift Stardom: 5 Tips to Improve Your Foreign Language Listening Skills in a Flash So youre cruising down the highway with some good friends when suddenly your favorite song comes on.The atmosphere instantly changes. What was just a moment ago a dull discussion about weekend plans has foamed into chaotic sea of flying hands and ridiculous yelling. The car floor can barely hold out against the rhythmic stomping.And, of course, every passerby is looking in and thinking youre all insane.Fast forward a year or two and now youre in a foreign country. Maybe youve already got the language down a little or maybe youre  just beginning.But after being there for a while youve begun to miss some things. Like understanding the lyrics when  a song comes on the radio or being able to catch the news in your car on the way home.Listening is incredibly important in making our everyday life satisfying, and is in fact the most used language skill.Yet, in our native language, we receive no training in it. Which might leave you wondering just how in the world can you get better at liste ning in a second language.Thankfully though theres nothing all that complicated about making quick progress in your foreign language listening skills. With a few quick tips for how to improve listening skills in a foreign language, youll be well on your way to wowing your foreign friends at karaoke. Swift Stardom: 5 Tips to Improve Your Foreign Language Listening Skills in a Flash1. Mentally Prepare YourselfOne of the biggest hurdles to listening skill mastery can be our own perceptions.Poor mental frameworks can  cause us to pursue time intensive but unrewarding tasks, give up quickly when were faced with a challenge or simply not achieve as much as we would like to.For listening one of the most damaging perceptions is this idea that you have to understand  everything. Your language exchange partner is talking to you at a thousand miles an hour, you feel like you have no clue whats going on and a sensation similar to sea-sickness is beginning to take hold.But  thats okay.When wer e listening to anything, whether it be a conversation with a friend or a television drama, when were starting out we should consider ourselves successful as long as we understand the gist of what were listening to.Another unfortunate belief that has stolen many an hour from language learners is that you can learn from passive listening. By passive listening I mean things like having the radio on in the background while youre focused on writing an essay or listening to music while trying to study for a brutal science test the next day.The audio is there, the sound waves are physically entering your ears,  but its not being processed.Think about all of the times youve watched a foreign movie in a language you havent studied with subtitles. Even if youre physically hearing Chinese when youre watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you probably didnt improve your Chinese listening skills any by the end of the movie.Hence, we must be active listeners.What is active listening? Giving you r full attention to any audio material that youre using to study.For instance, if youre going to watch a drama you should be focused on trying to figure out exactly what is happening in the shows plot line through the characters speech. No talking on the phone. No cleaning your room. Just focus.And if you really want to push your active listening, try writing a summary midway through what youre listening to and then again at the end of it. Or, listen to an audio clip, write down five questions about things you didnt understand and then listen to the file again while trying to answer your own questions.Both options will help you to keep your attention focused on the task at hand.2.  Play with Audio PacingListening is notoriously difficult for a lot of people learning a new language. Unlike reading, the other receptive language skill,  you usually cant do it at your own pace.However fast people want to talk to you is what youre going to get. There are exceptions of course (hopefully y our language partners slow down when they talk to you), but for the most part this is true and often proves to be a substantial hurdle.Thankfully, technology has provided us with a solution to our problem. Now with programs like Audacity,  you can take any audio file and slow it down to something more your speed. Suddenly listening is more like reading.Just find some audio files or movies that you can convert into MP3s, which  you like and dont mind listening to several times. Take the speed down as low as you need to so that you understand everything thats being said. Then gradually adjust the speed until its back to normal.This can be a fairly intensive study method, so if youre using a movie its probably best to break it up into segments and do a little each day.If downloading a program and converting files sounds like too much trouble, you can also try the transcription method.With this method you dont alter the speed at all, but simply try to write down as much as you can of wh at the speakers in the audio file are saying. When you start out there will almost certainly be big holes in your transcription. Thats okay!Replay the audio file and pause often until you can get most of the transcript down. As you practice with more and more audio files, youll find you wont have to replay them so much.3. Listen Everywhere, All the TimeIn language learning circles,  extensive reading is a well-known strategy. If you want to be able to read and comprehend lots of text quickly, you have to read a lot of stuff all the time.Just as important, but less often mentioned is extensive listening. Extensive listening has  a host of benefits ranging from improving how quickly you can comprehend the spoken word to fine tuning your understanding of pronunciation and intonation.There are two key principles to instituting an effective extensive listening plan. Firstly, the things you listen to should be enjoyable. If theyre not, you wont be listening to them for long.Secondly, the things you listen to should be as diverse as possible. You should have newscasts that you can  listen to in the car, movies ready to watch at night, podcasts loaded and ready to go for your coffee break, limitless numbers of songs to make your exercise routine more educational.The more effort you put in to squeezing listening practice out of every available moment, the sooner you can stop worrying about missing important pieces of what your foreign friends are saying to you.4.  Use Visuals for Extra ImpactMovies have never been more popular. Movie festivals have sprung up across the world, many even in small towns. And with that proliferation of film it has become easier than ever to access foreign films.Which is good, because movies are an irreplaceable language learning tool.The visual nature of film serves to support our listening  comprehension and even our vocab recall ability of new words we learned during the film. In other words, you learn more by watching a movie than you w ould have if you just heard an audio clip.Whats more, movies provide significant motivation to language learners. Many people want to learn a new language entirely because of foreign films theyve seen.If your language-learning plans incorporate things that are pleasurable and that you dont feel like you have to force yourself to do, youre much more likely to succeed in the long run. Consequently, a broad selection of movies and TV shows in your target language consumed on a regular basis makes for an excellent listening diet.To ensure you get the most out of your movie viewing time, try to get your hands on the transcript of the movie you would like to watch. Simply Scripts has movie scripts in a variety of languages so its always a good place to start. After that, there are a couple of different ways you can go.First, you could simply read the transcripts, or certain sections of it, and look up any of the vocab you dont know.Then when youre watching the movie and the new words come up, youll be able to recognize and associate them with whatever is happening in the scene youre watching.Another, perhaps more challenging option, is to print out the script, shuffle the pages and then try to put it in the correct order after youve watched the movie.For those of you watching from the computer, there is also the option of pausing the movie when you hear a word you dont understand, taking a screen still that has a clear association to the new word and then using that as a study cue later.Sites like Memrise allow you to upload images for each vocab word youre studying, so it would be easy to incorporate this into a regular spaced repetition study program.5.  Dont Forget to ReadWhile reading and listening may both be receptive language skills, most people might assume their connection ends there.Surprise! Theyre  as closely connected as any sitcom family you can think of. In the conclusion of one group of researchers, reading can actually be more effective for improvin g listening skills than listening itself!Of course, if youre a beginner, youre still going to need lots of listening practice to really get those new sounds and the intonation hammered down, but never fall prey to the belief that each language skill is tightly compartmentalized and should be studied in isolation.Reading, especially extensive reading, is imbued with so many benefitsâ€"perhaps most importantly with increased vocabularyâ€"that it would be criminal to ignore practice with printed texts, even if your goal is nothing more than to talk to other people.So do a little reading. Have some fun with foreign movie nights. Slip foreign language music into your running playlist. Play the news slow and fast, slow and fast until you get the hang of it.A little tinkering here and there to learn how to improve listening skills in a foreign language, and youll have nothing to fear when it comes to listening. And One More ThingIf youre digging these techniques, youll love using FluentU. FluentU makes it possible to learn languages  from music videos, commercials, news and inspiring talks.With FluentU, you learn real languagesâ€"the same way that natives  speak them. FluentU has a wide variety of videos like movie trailers, funny commercials and web series, as you can see here:FluentU App Browse ScreenFluentU has interactive captions that let you tap on any word to see an image, definition, audio and useful examples. Now native language content is within reach with interactive transcripts.Didnt catch something? Go back and listen again. Missed a word? Hover your mouse over the subtitles to instantly view definitions.FluentU Interactive TranscriptsYou can learn all the vocabulary in any video with FluentUs quiz mode. Swipe left or right to see  more examples for the word you’re learning.FluentU Has Quizzes for Every VideoAnd FluentU always keeps track of vocabulary that you’re learning. It uses that vocab to give you a 100% personalized experience by recommending videos and examples.