Improving your listening skills in a foreign language often feels like an impossible task. You get to a point where reading feels easy, maybe even effortless, but the moment you try to listen to a podcast or watch a show without subtitles, you can’t understand a thing.

It’s like you’re listening to a completely different language.

That’s because it is. Kind of. Listening requires a completely different set of skills from reading. Even worse, when you search for advice about how to learn how to listen on the internet, you find advice like: “Just drop the subtitles, you’ll figure it out eventually.”

But that’s uncomfortable. So uncomfortable, in fact, that a lot of learners give up because it’s just too hard. They drop the subtitles for a few minutes, only to turn them on because it’s just too difficult.

Luckily, you don’t have to jump headfirst into listening and grit your teeth until you understand it.

The Best Way to Improve Your Listening Skills in a Foreign Language: Intensive Listening

There are ways to ease into listening and practice your listening skills, and one of our favorite strategies for this is something called intensive listening.

To sum it up, you “work out” your listening skills by listening to media in your target language. When you don’t understand words, you’ll re-listen to them until you do, or look them up if you don’t understand after re-listening.

When doing this exercise, you’ll probably discover that you understand a lot more than you think you do. It’s just that your brain just needs some extra time to process what it heard, especially in the beginning. So by giving yourself a few more tries to hear something, you’ll be surprised by just how much you do understand.

Here’s an in-depth video about how it works with a demonstration of the technique:

How to Do Intensive Listening to Improve Your Listening Skills

I 100% recommend watching the video above to see intensive listening in action and see a step-by-step tutorial. However, for easy reference, here’s the Cliff Notes of how to do intensive listening to improve your listening skills.

Here’s what you need:

• A metalayer to make lookups easy (ASBplayer, Language Reactor, Etc.)
• A piece of content that has matching subtitles or a transcript.
• A comfortable environment where you can focus.

Once you have that all set up, here’s how to get started:

• Pick a show that you know has matching subtitles or a piece of audio with a matching transcript.
• Watch or listen to your piece of content without text (turn off subtitles, put the transcript to the side).
• Watch/listen until you can’t understand a word.
• When you encounter a word you don’t understand, re-listen to it 1-3 times and see if you can understand it.
  • If you can understand, move on.
  • If you can’t understand the word, check the subtitle files and look up the word if you have to.
  • Listen to it again before moving on.
• Repeat throughout the episode.

Ready to Level Up Your Listening?

Hands down, intensive listening is one of the best ways to improve your listening skills. However, in order to truly break through the listening barrier, you’ll need to reevaluate your entire language learning routine. The same skills you used to learn to read will not work with listening because the skills are so different.

So if you’re having trouble navigating the seas of listening, we created a month-long course to help you build your listening skills from the ground up! In the course, we cover listening exercises like intensive listening, listen looping, chorusing, transcription cards, and more! It comes complete with daily lessons, assignments, tutorial videos, and a fully-stocked resource database! Want to learn more? Click here to learn how to Level Up Your Listening in just one month!