How to improve my listening skills?

“Just as there is an art of good speaking, there is an art of good listening”.

When we talk about listening skills in relation to language learning, we mean the ability to understand what we hear in Italian.

Developing listening comprehension skills helps learners to succeed in language learning. This progress in language learning depends heavily on language exposure. Consequently, learners need as much exposure to the Italian language as possible. If you don’t have a chance to communicate with an Italian mother tongue in your everyday life you can however exercise these skills.

Focussing on your listening skills will undoubtedly have an enormous impact on your ability to learn to speak Italian.
You will speak more naturally and confidently and will in turn feel more confident at all stages of your learning.

IMPROVE your LISTENING in Italian with this exercises: these active listening activities will boost your foreign language skills. Listening to Italian is a vital skill for language learning.

1) Listening and writing down. First of all, choose music videos, films, video clips, or programmes online with subtitles. Listen to something that really interests you. Turn off subtitles and play only a small segment. Now, write down in your notebook what you think you have understood, what has been said. Ultimately, you can check by yourself if the words you have written are correct using subtitles.

2) Listening and repeating. Choose a song, speech, dialogue or any other audio clip in Italian with a transcript available. Often podcasts have transcripts or you can use a book that you have in print and the audiobook format as well. Read aloud the words as you listen once or twice, then try to listen without the transcript. Continue using the transcript to help you identify the sounds and words with the goal of work toward being able to hear the audio perfectly without the transcription. Break the audio down into small sections. Focus on the sound you have been struggling with, perhaps the vowels or “r” or “gli” or “chi”. Sit down and focus fully on what you are hearing. Nothing else. Don’t listen for the meaning but just listen for that sound. We recommend using a voice recorder in order to check your pronunciation right after.

3) Catching sound up. Start by listening to a small section of audio (less than one second is possible) and slow down the audio. Focus on the word or a phrase you cannot understand very well. Listen over and over again until you understand it. Sometimes, you need to listen as many as 10 or 15 times. You had to listen until your ears were recognizing the individual sounds. After you can identify the words with slow audio, you should listen 5 or 10 more times at a normal speed audio. You need to train your ears to pay attention to these new sounds so they are recognized as something that has a meaning and needs to be recognized and heard. 

Let’s look at all the processes of listening:

1. Hearing sounds
2. Recognizing the sounds are parts of a word
3. Connecting the word to its meaning
4. Remembering what each word means
5. Understanding the concept of all of the words together

Your brain needs time to digest the new sounds. The first time that you try to understand a new audio, you might feel like you can’t and that you will never develop good listening skills.Try listening to the same audio again or the next day or even better two days later. You will be surprised how much easier it is to understand. You will be able to hear more than the first time you tried to understand it because your brain has had time to process the new sounds.

4) Improve your vocabulary. Your vocabulary size influences your listening skills a lot. The more words you know, the easier it is to fish them out of a recording. If your current vocabulary is, say, 1000 words and you can’t figure out why you don’t understand much, this might be the reason. We know from the literature that for most languages, 3000 words allow you to understand about 95% of most ordinary texts. If your vocabulary size is 200, how many percent of words are you able to pick up? If you want a better vocabulary try to develop a reading habit.

Set aside a little time each day, it only needs to be a few minutes at a time to begin with, as long as you are concentrated on what you are doing. The more often you do it, the faster you can expect to progress. Listening takes a lot of time. That’s just the way it is.

Happy listening!