EnglishSprint

How To Understand What You Hear - Transcript

Let’s talk about a problem you might have when listening to English especially when
watching a movie. You don’t understand what you hear, and this is not because you don’t know the
vocabulary. If you read the transcript or the subtitles you will understand the material just fine. So,
you already know the words being used, you just don’t recognize them when listening. So, what
should you do? According to many research studies an effective way to deal with this problem is to
practice listening through easy to hard training. In one study participants were trained to perform a
task related to hearing and there were three levels of difficulty, easy, normal, and difficult. The
participants were divided into two groups.

The first group was trained to perform only the difficult version of that task. The second
group, however, started with the easy and normal versions first before performing the difficult
version. The researchers wanted to know which group would perform the difficult version better. So,
what was the result? Well, despite having less training with a difficult version, the second group
actually performed better. Practically speaking this fighting suggests that if you have difficulty doing
something, instead of just keep doing that it’s more effective to start with something easy and then
slowly increase the difficulty as you improve. So, how you can apply this knowledge to improve your
listening? I’ll tell you, first you have to make it easy in the beginning. For example, if you listen to
podcasts in English on your smartphone find an app that lets you change playback speed, so that you
can slow down or speed up what you’re listening to. If you listen on your computer there are
programs that can do that as well. Then whenever you have trouble understanding, use the app to
slow down the audio like this. So now it gets easier, right?

You have more time to think, you have more time to make out words that aren’t
pronounced clearly. You have more time to guess the meanings of new words and phrases. The idea
here is to make it easy in the beginning, listen at slower speeds, listen to speakers that are easy to
understand, listen to easy stuff like podcasts, and interviews as opposed to movies. Start small, but
you’re not done yet.

Easy to hard training requires you to go from easy to difficult, so once your listening skill
improve you have to gradually increase the difficulty. For example, if you’re listening to a speaker
that speaks slowly and you can understand everything, instead of listening at the normal speed,
speed it up like this. Now after you speed it up you must do be able to understand the content, but
you should feel a little uncomfortable. This will help you become more familiar with listening to fast
speakers. The idea here is to keep pushing yourself if you keep listening to something easy, your
listening skills will stop improving. So, you have to keep challenging yourself so listen at faster
speeds, also don’t keep listening to the same person, listen to different people with different
speaking styles, and then start watching movies without subtitles. If it’s still difficult you can slow
down the movie by 5 percent or 10 percent or you can slow it down even more if you don’t mind the
slowness. Once you get used to it, you can then start watching movies at normal speed.