Skip These Time Wasters and Start Improving Your Spanish Listening Skills ♫ 34

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Bienvenidos. Welcome to the learn Spanish con Salsa Podcast. The show for Spanish learners that love music, travel and culture. Close your grammar textbooks, shutdown the language apps and open your ears to how Spanish is spoken in the real world. Let us show you how to go from beginner to bilingual. Here is your host certified Language Coach, Tamara Marie.

Hola y bienvenidos al episodio 34. Welcome to episode 34 of the Learn Spanish con Salsa podcast. In this episode we're going to talk about one of the most critical skills to develop when learning Spanish and that is listening comprehension. In our last episode, episode 33 I talked about some reasons that you might struggle to understand the fast pace of spoken Spanish. So if you haven't listened to episode 33 I would suggest you go back and listen to that as well. It'll give you some insight into what the reasons are that English speakers in particular can find learning Spanish and listening comprehension much more difficult than other skills such as reading or writing in Spanish.

But today I'm going to go into some ineffective approaches. Some things that you may have actually already tried to improve your listening skills that are really a waste of time. Now, there are definitely lots of activities you can do when you're learning Spanish and some of these things might increase your exposure or they might just be fun to do. I'm not saying to never do these things, but when it comes specifically to improving your listening comprehension skills(that's your ability to both hear and understand spoken Spanish) then you really want to focus your time on activities to really target that goal. So, I want to talk about some things that I've tried in the past that you may have tried as well that really just aren't ideal to improve your listening skills. And this is just so that you don't waste any more time with ineffective approaches and you can know how to move forward with improving your listening skills. And if you are really interested in diving deep into this topic, I do have a brand new workshop available right now. It is completely free. You can sign up at learnSpanishconsalsa.com/listen and the workshop is called How to tune your ear to understand the fast pace of spoken Spanish.

So in the workshop I go step by step through some techniques for how you can begin to improve your listening skills. But today I'll talk about some things that you may have tried that weren't so effective and why. Again, this is really important because we don't have a lot of time to waste. I'm sure you're busy just like I am and you want to maximize Spanish study time. So let's start with the first thing that you may have already tried.

Now you may have been told to just watch movies in Spanish, right? So there's always someone that swears that they became fluent in Spanish just by absorbing the content that they watched in movies. Now, while this might be a fun activity, if you're at a higher intermediate or advanced level, most beginners and lower intermediate level Spanish learners will find watching movies in Spanish extremely difficult.

Movies are long and even a more experienced learner may find it draining to try to keep up with listening to two full hours of Spanish. It can also be really frustrating if you miss something that's incredibly important to the story and a few scenes later you're completely lost. So again, if you're upper- intermediate, or advanced or you really want to push yourself, I recommend watching movies more for fun or even to test out your listening comprehension. But really this is not the ideal way to improve your listening skills in Spanish.

The next thing you may have been told or may have even tried is to watch TV shows in Spanish. So TV series can be a little bit better than movies because they're a little shorter and there's also an entertaining story that you can follow that's spread out over several shorter episodes. This can definitely boost her exposure to spoken Spanish, but it's really not the most efficient way to approach improving your listening comprehension. TV shows can be 30 minutes to an hour long, so you might find them just as difficult to follow as a full length movie. And in general, mindlessly listening to something you don't understand means you'll end up just tuning it out. It will become background noise. You'll start thinking about what you went to eat for dinner that evening or why you're even doing this in the first place. It can also be demotivating when you don't understand what's going on. This leads to frustration and it can make your anxiety around listening comprehension in Spanish worse because you're adding to a string of failures in your ability or inability to understand Spanish and you'll start to feel like you'll just never get it right. So I definitely don't recommend just turning on the TV or watching a movie. You'll have to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours just passively listening this way before anything meaningful starts to sink in.

Now, a good way to test this out is to judge by your own experience. You may have already tried some of these before with less than impressive results. You may be more comfortable with hearing some Spanish sounds. But if I were to give you a pop quiz on what the TV show is about or what happened in a particular episode or even the plot of the movie, you'd probably only be able to give me a vague idea about what's going on.

That brings me to the next thing that I don't recommend that you do when you're really trying to on improving your Spanish listening skills. And that's listening to the radio in Spanish. Now, in general, radio personalities speak off very fast. Think about listening to music radio stations in English or a very opinionated talk show host. They usually aren't easy to understand and many times they use slang or expressions that you'll only hear on the radio. It's simply just not a natural way of speaking Spanish in most cases. It's also hard to find transcripts for radio content, so it's going to be difficult to really review what's being said with any accuracy. Now, one exception to this is podcast, and I'm not biased just because I have a podcast. But some podcasts do actually publish transcripts. So I would say, even if you're going to slug podcast to practice your listening skills or to improve your Spanish listening skills. I've leaned toward shows like Radio ambulante that are made in Spanish for Spanish speaking audience versus a podcast like Duolingo Spanish that's half in English and spoken very slowly for the portions that are in Spanish. So when you're targeting improving your listening comprehension, you'll want to focus on content that is by native Spanish speakers for native Spanish speakers because it's a lot more authentic than listening to a course or sort of a content that's made for Spanish learners.

Which brings me to the last thing I really don't think is an effective way of using your time. When you want to tune your ear to understand spoken Spanish better. And that's watching the news in Spanish. Now, news speak, quote unquote, is not used in daily conversations. It may be good to get informed about what's going on in Latin America or Spain or even in your local community if you have a large Latino population where you live. But news media is generally dominated by a few places that aren't representative of all of Latin America. And maybe the people that you'll run into don't actually speak this way.

I know here in the U S a lot of the media is dominated by people from Mexico just because there's such a large population, they have a much larger media infrastructure. So a lot of the personalities that you may see in the news media generally speak more of a Mexican type of Spanish. Now, of course, that's not 100% across the board, but they do tend to dominate a lot of the media in the Americas. News people kind of speak in a certain way. I mean, think about the way newscasters in English speak. A lot of times you don't hear people on the streets or when you're talking to your friends and family, speaking in the very formal way that people speak at the news. And also the news can be depressing, dull and boring. Now there are some people that are news junkie, so if that's you, more power to you. But there are studies that show that watching the on a regular basis can increase anxiety and feelings of sadness. So watching the news that may not be the best idea if you're really trying to motivate yourself to continue to learn Spanish. And if you just generally want to be in a good mood.

So in general, watching the news, again, it's a great way to get exposure to Spanish, but not the ideal way to really focus on improving your listening skills. So you're probably thinking, what should I do then? Okay, I've exed out a lot of very popular ways of listening to Spanish, that you may have been exposing yourself to the language. So what should you do if you really want to improve your Spanish listening skills specifically?

What I recommend is to find authentic Spanish audio that's appropriate for your level. That means it's not too challenging or too easy for you. So you want to feel that out. So if you're listening to something and it's very slow and you understand every single word, you probably want to find something a little bit more challenging. On the other hand, if you listen to something and it's way too fast and you understand absolutely nothing, not even one or two words, you'll want to look for some content that's a little bit easier for you to understand.

You'll also want to find audio that has an accurate transcript. This is really helpful because otherwise you really don't have a way of validating what you heard. There's one thing to sit and listen to the radio, like I mentioned before, or watch a movie. A lot of times, even if you find movies with subtitles, the subtitles are often inaccurate or they don't match the Spanish.

For instance, if you're watching a Spanish movie and listening to the audio in Spanish and you're also turning on the Spanish subtitles, nine times out of ten they're not going to be exactly the same. So it's going to be pretty hard if you're really trying to make sure that you heard something correctly to rely on sources that don't have accurate transcriptions. Okay? So, those are just two quick guidelines. You want to find something that's appropriate for your level, obviously audio, and you'll want to find something with an accurate transcript.

Now, that doesn't mean that you can't use video, but I would caution against it for one reason. When you're watching a video, you're able to pick up what's being said by a lot of the context and as the images and visuals that you see. And while I think that's great for learning vocabulary to give your brain another association where you're learning new words and to really be able to learn how to use the language in the real world, because you're often not listening to Spanish in a vacuum, there often is some context around it. That's true. However, I think the video gives you a little bit of a crutch, right? So even if you didn't understand the word" rojo" for example, for red, and you see someone pointing to a red book and they say" libro rojo", you'll kind of pick up that that's what it means. And again, that's a great way to build vocabulary, but it's not always a way to validate that your listening skills are on point. So again, you can use video. I would recommend using videos that are simply just the transcript sort of in video format. But I wouldn't recommend using a whole lot of video because, again, you can kind of cheat that way and you can figure out what's going on by watching what's happening. So that just isn't true listening comprehension in my opinion.

So I would focus on audio sources with an accurate transcript and something that's appropriate for you. Now, if you want me to walk you through exactly how to do this, as I mentioned earlier in this episode, sign up for the free workshop, How to tune your ear to understand the fast pace of spoken Spanish.

It's only going to be available for the next few days. So if you're interested, make sure you sign up right now. Go to learnSpanishconSalsa.com/Listen that's learnSpanishconSalsa.com/Listen and again it's completely free. The workshop is online so you can participate from wherever you are. It's an on-demand workshop. It will have three different parts while go into detail on some different things you'll want to take into consideration when you're planning out how to really start to improve your Spanish listening skills. So I'll walk you through all of that in the workshop and again, it will only be available for this week.

So if you want to improve your Spanish listening skills quickly and stop wasting time doing things that really don't help move the needle when it comes to really hearing and understanding spoken Spanish, go ahead and sign up for the workshop. I look forward to getting your questions to giving you some more feedback on what you're doing now. In some ways you might be able to improve that and apply this to your Spanish study right away. All right, so that is it fo this episode, as always, I hope that something you heard today will take you one step closer from beginner to bilingual. I hope to see you in the workshop as well. Remember, learnSpanishconSalsa.com/Listen¡Adiós!

Thank you for listening to the learn Spanish con Salsa podcast at learnSpanishconSalsa.com.