Listening is perhaps the most difficult of all the parts of English to improve, with the wrong kind of practice such as just watching subtitled videos having little effect. This article gives common-sense advice on how to solve the most typical issues with understanding spoken English, including choosing the right kinds of learning materials and doing the right things with them.
I can’t catch the key words when I’m listening/ I can’t catch the key information when I’m listening
This should be fairly easy to do in English, as the key words with the most important new information are stressed more strongly, meaning that you can mostly ignore the more weakly-stressed words before and after. If the problem is that you are trying to catch every word, you should stop doing activities like dictation and shadowing where that kind of unrealistic listening is necessary. Instead, you should do tasks with simple comprehension questions like “Where is the man going?”, for which short answers with just the key words are okay. It can also be useful to do a little bit of shadow reading during which read the sentence, try to guess which words are more strongly stressed, listen for the real stress pattern, then try to copy that stressing of important words more strongly.
Although graded listening texts such as the audio with graded readers are very valuable, you should also sometimes try listening to something much more difficult such as a short news bulletin. This will mean that you can’t possibly understand everything and so will be forced to concentrate on just the key words.
I get tired after a few minutes of listening
This is usually a sign that you should stop, do something else like learning your vocabulary list, then come back to listening later. You should then be able to listen slightly longer week by week, until you are at least up to the length of a 10-minute length radio programme or podcast. If the length of time that you can listen doesn’t go up, it may be a sign that you need to do listening practice at a different time of day, e.g. early in the morning when your brain is fresh and not full of other things. It may also be a sign that you are listening the wrong way, for example trying to understand every word (see above).
If you soon have an exam with a long listening section like IELTS, you need to take the opposite approach of always listening to a whole paper all the way through, changing approach if your level of tiredness isn’t decreased each time that you do so.
I could understand it if I was reading, but I can’t understand when I listen
If you have read English much more than you have listened to it, listening problems are often because you are expecting the pronunciation to be like the spelling. If that is the case, you should learn and use the phonemic script to write down the real pronunciation of new words and words which are difficult to recognise and/ or pronounce. Work on silent letters and spelling rules like Magic E can also help with this. The next step is to study how sounds change in fast “connected speech”, for example by closely copying how native speakers say sentences like “What’re you doing?” at natural speed.
I find particular accents more difficult to understand
For most people, it would be best to avoid those accents until your listening skills are better, then try again. If that isn’t best for you, you obviously need to do more practice of listening to those accents, e.g. watching Australian movies or listening to the BBC South Asian news podcast i. However, you might want to first check that you do really have a problem with that accent, because it can sometimes be just one particular example (e.g. an actor doing a really strong and/ or unrealistic version), or not the accent that you think it is.
I lose concentration when I’m listening
Tips above which also help with this problem include always using comprehension questions, listening for a shorter time, and listening when your brain is fresher.
Although it can be a good idea for people who don’t have this problem, people who often lose concentration should get out of the habit of having things playing in the background without really listening to them. For example, you might want to reconsider having an English podcast on while you are making breakfast.
Another possibility is to do pronunciation work instead of just listening, as that is more active and is often more useful for listening than for speaking. The boredom tips below could also help with this.
I get bored doing listening practice
If it is okay for you to change what you listen to (as it is for most people), you could try songs, comedy, stories with twists in the plot such as murder mysteries, podcasts with topics related to you like your hometown, and more controversial topics such as talk radio debates.
If you have to listen to a particular thing such as recordings of academic presentations, you could try doing it in more stimulating locations such as outside in a park and/ or while doing exercise.
I heard that it’s good to listen to the same thing again, but I find it too boring when the content isn’t new
You lose all the benefits of listening practice when you can’t focus, so there is no point in listening to the same recording four times if you are hardly listening after the first or second time. Waiting longer before listening again so that you have forgotten more can help with this, or you can listen to something similar such as the next in the series or a different news story about the same story.
I can understand a small number of speakers, but get lost if there are more people in a meeting etc
It is natural to have this problem, and I would estimate that in foreign languages I find it twice as difficult to follow a conversation for every one person who joins it, making it four times more difficult to chat with three other people than it would be to talk one to one. If it is possible, you should stick mainly to the number of people who you are comfortable with, and slowly increase times you spend with more people. It is also possible to prepare for such situations by finding things to listen to that are similar, for example watching panel comedy shows instead of standup comedians.
Background noise makes it impossible for me to understand
This is similar to the problem above, and you can also try similar solutions such as slowly accustoming yourself to more and more background noise (for example moving a conversation exchange to a café and then later to a pub). You could also find listening materials which have natural background noise such as reality television and dramas which are filmed in that style.
I still can’t understand even after I read the transcript
This shows that the problem is not actually listening, but rather comprehension more generally. This is usually because of a lack of vocabulary. You should therefore make sure that you check the transcript and memorise the new vocabulary in all listening materials, including writing the pronunciation with phonemic script.
I find it too difficult to understand the things that I (have to/ try to) listen to
This is dealt with in another whole article on how to make listening easier.