I’ve been studying Spanish for longer than I want to admit. After years, I finally understand most spoken Spanish but to be honest, it shouldn’t have taken this long. If I’d known what I know now, I could’ve cut my learning time in half.
The general consensus is just keep listening, or put on subtitles and eventually you’ll get used to the sounds of a spoken language. And they’re right, you will…the problem is that it will likely take you 5 years or you’ll just get frustrated and quit.
Alas, I’ve had to scour the internet, use trial and error, and make guesses so that I can finally tell you what we should all know.
We don’t understand spoken language because: **No one has taught us** ***how*** **to listen**.
We’re so used to listening without thinking about it in our own language that trying to figure out a foreign language is painful and seemingly impossible.
**How to Listen**
Think about your own native language. Mine is English. How do you listen?
1. **Words are just sounds, don’t try to understand them.** You are not going to understand where one word begins and another word ends. In the beginning, everything sounds like a mishmash of incomprehensible noise. Your brain is used to drowning out background noise. You already know that you overcome this with lots of listening over a period of time, but what no one says is **you have to stop trying to understand**. If you stop trying to figure out what everyone is saying, you can actually begin to enjoy the sounds they’re making. Don’t think of it as words that have any meaning at all. Think of foreign speech the way you would think of a dog barking at another dog (I’m convinced they know what those barks mean) or a toddler tugging at her mother mumbling something. Have you ever wondered why parents can understand the unintelligible things their child says? Yeah, they just get used to it. That is what your brain will do on it’s own over time–get used to it.
2. **Words are just sounds, take them at face value.** If I were from Louisiana and told you, “Dat ball bounced side to side.” You wouldn’t try to correct my speech. You wouldn’t say, “Akunamata, the ball bounced up and down” sounds like a more logical sentence. Because you are a native English speaker, you would just accept my words and you wouldn’t correct my pronunciation. You would just understand me, even if you were from a different part of the US. You would also just picture a ball zig zagging, you wouldn’t question if I meant bounce up and down instead, you would just accept what I said. We can’t hear what native speakers are saying because we’re always trying to breakdown their sentence structure and grammar, we’re always trying to translate, or change native pronunciation so that we understand it. If a Caribbean Spanish speaker says Como eta mi amol? (which in textbook Spanish reads: Como estas mi amor), **I accept his/her accent as is and don’t try to correct it.** I understand him because I’ve heard it countless times. **Solution:** Don’t try to understand what you’re hearing. Let the words wash over you. Just accept them as is. Don’t try to change the tone of the speaker’s voice. Don’t say, “Oh he/she meant….(whatever you’re going to say in your non-native learner’s accent and comprehension).” He/she meant verbatim what they actually said.
3. **Stop Translating.** Another thing no one teaches us. Everyone warns us about the dangers of translating but no one explains how to stop doing it. When we hear a word we know in our L2 we tend to isolate it and think. “Pelota, oh he just said ball.” No, he just said pelota. In real time, the person or movie actress is still talking and we’ve missed everything else they’ve said because we stopped listening and changed our train of thought to connect the word pelota to the English word ball. When someone says ball in English we don’t think, “Oh he means that sphere filled with air.” No, we just think ball. That’s why you’re going to stop translating what you hear. **Solution:** To stop translating, let your mind go blank as you listen. You don’t have think anything at all while you are paying attention to the sounds. This is not tuning out or zoning out, it’s just allowing the words to be as is without commentary. Don’t try to understand, just accept the words at face value. If you hear a word that you don’t understand you can look it up later. **But you’ve got to keep going. You need to become comfortable with not knowing what is going on.** Eventually your brain, with repetition, and without a handicap like subtitles, frequently pausing the TV, or translating in real-time will make the connections and understand on it’s own what the conversation is about.
4. **Watch without subtitles or at the very most sandwich your subtitles.** Your brain will always use reading subtitles as a crutch. You don’t learn to hear while reading. When we read, we hear the words we are reading in our head in our own accent. You will never get used to the way people actually speak and all the different tones of voice and accents if you waste listening time reading. Also, reading is slow in a foreign language because we often focus on comprehension, grammar etc. If you are always reading, you will not get used to the speed of spoken language. You’ll continue to complain that they speak too fast when they are actually speaking at a normal pace. **Solution:** People say it’s hard to understand “Como eta” because you’re waiting to hear textbook Spanish “Como estas.” That’s the problem, you’re expecting to hear anything at all. Don’t anticipate words, don’t expect to hear anything. **Hear whatever you hear.** If not understanding is really getting to you, sandwich your subtitles. To do this you watch an episode or movie 3 times. The first time without subtitles, the second with subtitles, and a third time without subtitles again. However, I don’t recommend you do that often. If you are hearing a word for the first time, you might not be familiar with it’s sound, spelling, or even know the definition. It’s okay to pause the TV/video, turn on the subtitles and see how the word is spelled and look up the definition. But you also don’t want to do that too often. I’d suggest a handful of times per an hour episode. It doesn’t matter if there are new words you don’t know yet. If they are important, they will come up again and you can learn them in another movie or video. You don’t want to stop the flow of hearing by always looking up new word meanings/spelling.
5. **Listen a lot, even when you don’t understand and stick to one accent at a time.** You should be listening for hours everyday, without pause at worst and all the time at best. Stick to one country at a time and then after 4 – 6 months you can move to another accent. Don’t juggle more than 2 or 3 accents until you’ve mastered understanding them. Eventually you will understand other accents you haven’t even studied because you will get used to the flow of the language.
ETA: Repetition is your friend, pressing the back button, rewinding a video or listening to something again is helpful.
ETA: Do not beat yourself up if your brain still has a habit of translating, that disappears with time.
ETA: Listening is not a catch all, especially if you are a beginner. You can/will/should disengage from listening to do other things that help with comprehension. Some commenters have mentioned Dreaming Spanish YouTube channel and Stephen Krashen’s emphasis on comprehensible input. I think these are great, great points and resources.
ETA: Every couple of days you may consider mimicking/shadowing/parroting what you hear from time to time (don’t try to make sense of it and don’t worry if you’re even right) and/or try to count the syllables that you actually hear, not what you think the textbook word actually says. This will keep your brain active. Another commenter pointed this video out by Idahosa Ness. This helps explain syllable counting. I have posted it in comments below.
ETA: AJATT has a post on Why you should listen when you don’t understand where he gives his opinion:
[http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/why-you-should-keep-listening-even-if-you-dont-understand/](http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/why-you-should-keep-listening-even-if-you-dont-understand/)
**TLDR:** A baby is the perfect listener. They know nothing about the world. If you listen with pure acceptance and without judgement, every day, and for hours/much of the day, like a baby is forced to then your brain and ears will catch up and you’ll understand Spoken Spanish in 1 – 2 years or less.
The moment I felt like I was truly proficient was when I was flying out of Mexico City and heard some airport announcement (a flight leaving from a certain gate or something) and then they repeated it in English. At first I thought, “didn’t they just say that?” It took my brain a second to realize I’d actually heard it in Spanish first
Real tl;dr: become a student of Dreaming Spanish haha
I think this mostly applies to things not sounding like word salad. There’s a lot that goes into a baby’s immersion and subsequent understanding of a language that goes with symbolism, impressions, concepts that aren’t understood except for how they are being presented. So in a sense what you’re saying is correct, but you won’t just suddenly understand a language because you stop trying to understand it. That doesn’t make sense.
Being able to distinguish words in sentences is about all that you’re going to get from this. You are correct about this: stop translating and then attaching a word from your native language to the concept being introduced in the target language. It doesn’t help at all, it just makes it harder and you understand less at the end.
Anyway, just wanted to point out that what you’re saying is not going to turn out to be the miracle cure you’re prescribing. I think that immersion is important, but telling people not to use subtitles at all is also misleading and not at all correct.
I refer again to the fact that you’re targeting listening, but a big part of listening happens to be the ability to parse the information correctly beyond simply being exposed. You’re more likely to make a positive and lasting association if you have subtitles on in the same language as what you’re listening to, reading along, and actively picking apart what they’re saying. This is a LOT harder for Asian languages, but it’s easy for Germanic/Latin languages by comparison, and just kind of in general.
Sorry to come in and shit on your idea, but this is primarily my experience mingled with others I’ve listened to/talked to.
You are saying that it will take you 5 years if you will just listen to the language but at the same time you’re saying “Listen a lot, even when you don’t understand and stick to one accent at a time. You should be listening for hours everyday”
I think you give good advice but it boils to just listen to the language.
My 2 cents. Babies learn in chunks. Parents will repeat the most useful words and sentences multiple times throughout the day. Afterwords they will use variations of them and sprinkle in new words. So you should try to do the same. Which isn’t easy but the next point might help you with that.
Your idea to listen to one accent is good but it’s even better to listen to the same person. I, sometimes, can’t understand some folk even though they’re just speaking in a dialect, now add the fact that your listening to a new language, this will be very frustrating. So pick some youtubers or twitch streamers you like and your brain will get used to their voice and pronunciation very quickly, another advantage is that they will have a limited vocabulary (instead of movies that might have very different vocabularies + invented words in case of fantasy movies).
Also, movie subtitles are pretty much useless if you’re very new to the language because they differ a lot from what’s actually said. Can’t say if youtube does a very good job with the subtitles but at least it should be word for word.
Would appreciate if anyone could give their experience but I’ll start to follow my own advice and watch some youtube in addition to my twitch consumption and share the experience later.
I can’t help but feel like you might have it flipped. Are you certain “taking the words at face value” is what caused you to become proficient, or could it be that becoming proficient meant you could take the words at face value? Maximum listening input in is definitely a good idea, but not sure the other aspects work consciously.
Honestly I think the thing that helps the most is actual interpersonal interactions with a native speaker, even if you don’t feel good enough yet. Just the action of conversing, with body language and pointing and sending and receiving messages in real time with immediate feedback is so helpful.
this is very helpful :,) it was so funny that this popped up because i was just talking to my bf (his first language is spanish and he’s still not the best with english) about this xd
> or put on subtitles
The subtitles almost never match!
“we all speak faster than we read” – yeah, no.
If listening comprehension seems nearly impossible after years of practice, you might want to get checked out for Audio Processing Disorder. After taking Spanish classes in middle school, high school, and college, I can read, write, think, and speak in Spanish pretty easily, but listening is still a challenge. Trying to improve my listening skills made me realize that I have a lot of the same issues with English (my native language). Since my diagnosis, I use subtitles in English/Spanish whenever possible, and it’s much more pleasant than trying to force my brain to do something it isn’t physically capable of doing.
It’s more likely that someone who struggles with listening comprehension just needs more practice, but it’s worth looking into if you notice similar issues with your native language.
Duolingo has helped the most for me. I did martial arts for quite a while and learning Spanish is a lot like learning martial arts. First you learn the moves (vocabulary), then you spar (Talk to another person in Spanish), then after doing it for so long you no longer think about the words and it becomes pure relflex.
Do you try hard to focus on the whatever content you’re consuming? I often find myself zoning out while they’re speaking and I’ve wondered if it’s still productive to listen to the stuff in the background.
im in spain and try to surround myself with as much as possible with native spanish speakers, letting it wash over me, hoping to learn by osmosis, parroting phrases they use … but also do background study to make sense of what they said
thanks for your tips on trying to calm the brain down – the natural instinctive response is to make immediate sense of it, rather than just letting it enter the brain and percolate, give your brain a chance to process it in the background. trying to hard to always translate is like counting steps when you’re learning to dance, not helpful!
This is so helpful! Thank you!!
The most important trick I’ve learned with listening comprehension is: never, ever, _ever_ listen to recording of people talking slowly.
Yes, it is easier to understand when you’re starting. But the problem is, people pronounce words differently when they speak slowly. When talking at a natural pace, we take all sorts of shortcuts with our mouths for the sake of convenience and comfort, and that causes all the vowels and consonants to shift all over the place. So the “teacher voice” tends to have quite different phonics from how people actually speak.
A native speaker won’t notice it because they’ve spent a lifetime developing a neural network that’s well tuned to deciphering it. As a non-native speaker, you want that, too. But you won’t get it if you listen to slow, easy recordings, because you’ll be exposing your brain to _the wrong phonics_. So you’ll end up with a neural network that’s been optimized for a version of the language that nobody actually speaks, and of course it’s going to serve you poorly and lead to a frustrating experience when you try to graduate away from it. Your brain’s going to have to have to go back and re-wire itself, and that will take some time.
Personal anecdote: Spanish is my first language I’ve tackled since I had this realization. I’m still new to it, only about 8 months studying on and off, and _maybe_ A2 level at best. But I’m also quite comfortable watching (and comprehending) a decent variety of YouTube videos by and for native speakers, without subtitles.
Even Chinese native speakers read subtitles. Everything has subtitles in Chinese media. Tonal languages are quite hard in this aspect.
I listen to music the way you mention, but as singers change the tones while singing, you need the lyrics to fully understand what is being said.
Besides, my listening skills suck. It’s been almost two years and I still don’t get tones right. :/
Interesting, I’ll give your method a shot.
This is related to some of what the spiritual philosopher Alan Watts talks about. Often, we get in our own way by trying too hard. We don’t trust our own nature, and so we don’t allow it to take over.
Recently I’ve really enjoyed the Españolistos podcast. I don’t understand a lot of what is said but I just enjoy the sounds and relax. I can tell my brain is getting much better at identifying and recognizing words, and the best part is that it’s effortless. I don’t have to focus and try so hard for my brain to identify words.
Just don’t be dogmatic about any one method. Always switch things up.
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