Success Tip #1: Make Sure Your Phone Always Has English Listening Material
First, you need to download a lot of English listening material to your phone. This way, you can listen to English no matter where you are.
What kind of English material to download to your phone?
Podcasts.
Podcasts are audio shows (English conversations) which you can download from the Internet for free.
To download podcasts to your phone, you need a podcast app.
Go to your app store and search for “podcast app” and pick one with good ratings.
Once installed, open the podcast app and search for podcasts by entering a search term. (Just enter something you’re interested in.)
Success Tip #2: Turn Boring Time into Listening Time
Take a look at the activities below. What do they have in common?
- Riding a bus/train.
- Doing house chores (washing dishes, cooking, etc.)
- Working out.
- Waiting for something.
These activities have one thing in common: they don’t require concentration or deep thinking.
Throughout the day, there are a lot of activities like the examples above. These are the best times to improve your English listening skills!
Make sure to listen to some English during these activities. By doing so, it’s quite easy to listen to English for 1 – 2 hours every day.
Do you see the brilliance of this strategy? This is how you can improve your listening even if you don’t time. Even busy people can do this!
Success Tip #3: Make It Fun & Entertaining!
We all spend time each day on entertaining stuff: playing games, surfing the Internet, gambling, etc.
We spend lots of time on these things because they are fun and addictive.
So, if you want to spend a lot of time listening to English, just make it entertaining. If you do that, it’s easy to improve your listening skills. (And you don’t have to force yourself to do it.)
But how do you make “listening to English” fun?
Let me give you a couple of ideas.
Idea #1: Subscribe to Entertaining Channels on YouTube
Watching YouTube is a great way improve your English listening comprehension.
There’s a lot of English content on YouTube, and the website is designed to be addictive.
Since YouTube always recommends new and interesting videos to its viewers, you don’t have to manually search for new videos to watch. All you need to do is keep clicking on those video thumbnails and enjoy the videos.
This is why YouTube is so addictive, and you can use that to your advantage.
Some of my YouTube subscriptions
Start subscribing to channels that interest you. (Of course, the channels have to be in English.)
Personally, I’m interested in Japanese manga (comics), scary stories, movies, and toys. So, I’m subscribed to channels related to those things.
These channels are always producing new videos, so I always have new English content to listen to.
Another great thing about YouTube are captions (subtitles).
How to enable captions on YouTube
If you have trouble understanding a video, you can turn on captions. Although they’re usually generated by computers, they are pretty accurate and useful.
Note: make sure to only enable captions when it’s necessary. If you can understand 80 – 90% of the content, you should disable captions so that you can focus on listening
Idea #2: Binge-Watch Popular Television Series & Movies
In the past, it was a bit difficult to find American or British TV series to watch.
But that’s no longer the case. With a service like Netflix, you can get instant access to thousands of TV shows and movies!
The best part is, Netflix is super cheap. In my country, Thailand, the standard plan is only $11 per month.
So, for only $11, I can watch unlimited TV series and movies for an entire month.
So, that’s how you can make listening practice entertaining. If you adopt one or both of the ideas, you’ll get to (1) improve your listening skills and (2) have fun. That’s killing two birds with one stone!
What If You Don’t Understand The Material?
What if you don’t understand what you’re listening to, and there’s no transcript?
Or maybe there’s a transcript but you can’t read it because you’re listening and driving at the same time.
What should you do?
Well, you have three options.
Option #1: Do Nothing
It’s not a big deal if you don’t understand some parts of the conversation as long as you understand the main idea. You don’t need to read the transcript just because you can’t make out some words or sentences.
Now you might be wondering, “If I don’t read, how will I learn the meaning of new vocabulary?”
This is a common concern. Some English students believe that in order to learn new words, they must look up those words in a dictionary. They believe that it’s the only way to learn new words.
But that’s not true! The truth is, your amazing brain has the ability to learn the meanings of new words from context (surrounding words). This is how you learned your native language (without using transcripts or dictionaries).
So, don’t worry if you don’t know some words when listening to English. If you hear people use those words multiple times in different contexts, your brain will eventually figure out the meanings of those words.
But what if the material to is too difficult? And you don’t even understand the main idea. What do you do?
In this case, let’s talk about the next option.
Option #2: Listen to Something Easier
When some students start listening to something, they try to finish it even though it’s too difficult to understand. Trying to do so is painful. After a while, these students usually quit improving their listening altogether!
This behavior is ridiculous. There’s a lot of free English material on the Internet. And new English material is created every day. Therefore, there’s absolutely no need to “finish” what you start.
If the material you’re listening to is very difficult (or boring), just delete it and find something else to listen to.
But what if almost everything is too difficult for you? What do you do?
In this case, let’s discuss the next option.
Idea #3: Manual Transcribing Techniques.
Manual process of transcribing requires writing down or typing the text that you are hearing while you are listening. Here are some manual transcription techniques:
Listen to the full recording before transcribing
By listening to the full recording, you can gain a clearer understanding of the speaker’s train of thoughts and what they are trying to convey. This will enable you to have a better grasp on the information being provided so that you don’t make any mistakes in your transcription while writing down what was said.
Read through your transcript
After transcribing, reading through your transcript will allow you to make sure that everything is consistent. You can compare what you wrote before and after you transcribed to ensure that the information provided is accurate. You can also use your transcript to look for errors in your listening, which will help improve your accuracy.
Be aware of commonly mispronounced words
When listening to people speak, try and focus on how they pronounce words. This way, you can be more mindful of the words that are being said and make sure that you’re accurately covering them in your transcript.
Listen with high-quality headphones
Listening to a recording without high-quality headphones will not allow you to hear the words clearly, and this will cause issues in your transcripts. If you have really bad headphones, you may want to upgrade them so that you can be sure of covering all of the information that was said. Also, consider buying a pair of headphones with noise-cancellation technology if they don’t have this feature.
