Reading? Nah, you can skim and guess, work your way through with a dictionary, determine meaning by context, and so on.
Speaking? You can always just keep your comments simple, practice and memorize speeches and useful phrases. Hard, but possible.
Writing? If you take your time, work your way through what you mean to say, and stick to vocab you know, you can do it.
Listening? Hmmm...
This blog post (WARNING: The author uses some profanity) discusses why listening is so hard, and what you can do to get better at it.
In summary, he says that "The only way we train our ears to distinguish sounds in foreign speech is by lots and lots of exposure. Listen, listen and listen some more. And this takes time." So what's the solution, besides time? Increase your own exposure, and control the level of repetition. You can do this by:
Speaking? You can always just keep your comments simple, practice and memorize speeches and useful phrases. Hard, but possible.
Writing? If you take your time, work your way through what you mean to say, and stick to vocab you know, you can do it.
Listening? Hmmm...
This blog post (WARNING: The author uses some profanity) discusses why listening is so hard, and what you can do to get better at it.
In summary, he says that "The only way we train our ears to distinguish sounds in foreign speech is by lots and lots of exposure. Listen, listen and listen some more. And this takes time." So what's the solution, besides time? Increase your own exposure, and control the level of repetition. You can do this by:
Take a good movie in the language you’re learning and find a short scene that you like. Make sure it’s a short, clear dialogue.
If you can get the subtitles for it and do what I mentioned here with a flashcard app like Anki then it’s even better.
Use a free program like Audacity to record the scene to an audio file (you can set Audacity to not record from the microphone but rather from the speaker output). If you’re not the technical type and have no clue how to do this, you can easily just use a voice memo app on your smart phone by holding it up to the speakers and hitting the record button.
Now you’ve got your favorite foreign movie scene for easy listening while you’re driving, walking or doing the house chores.
Listen to it as repetitively as you would a song – dozens and even hundreds of times. If you find it hard to make out certain words, try using Audacity to slow down the speed of the sound file so you can hear it better.
You’ll notice that the more you do this, the more the individual sounds become clear instead of just being one long string of mishmashed sound that you can’t understand. Remember that spoken sentences are made up of lots of individual words but they sound like one big connected sound to an untrained ear. It’s up to us to be able to spot the gaps and identify those individual words.
One more thing: becoming a better listener and becoming a better speaker are connected. Want to become a better listener? Speak more. Want to become a better speaker? Practice listening.
Feel free to share your experiences or tips in the comments. Good luck with your practice and study!
Feel free to share your experiences or tips in the comments. Good luck with your practice and study!