Listening skill-building tips

Practice makes perfect!

Yes, if you want to improve your dancing skills you have to dance more. If you want to better understand spoken English, you have to listen as much as you can.

There are certain tips though:

1 – If you simply turn on the music, TV show, news or any other spoken English media as a background it will stay a background. If you want to understand it – pay attention. Yes, it requires some effort.

2 – If you want to make the most of it, better find it in written first, find all the unknown words, settle any grammar doubts, and than – listen to it.

3 – Music is the best! Yep, the trick here is that our listening skills are strongly linked to our articulation. To boil it down, the better pronunciation you have the better you can comprehend the speech. And music gives you the great opportunity to train this link because you can not only listen to it but also SING. And this is the game-changer. So, get yourself the album of your favorite singer/group, translate one song after another, and one after another add them to your repertoire. Thus, you can not only improve your English listening/comprehension skills, grammar, vocabulary but also enjoy the music you like and impress your friends or strangers. Beware though, sometimes songs in English sound better when you don’t have an idea what they are about.