

This allows the learner to choose their level to have the site filter to show only the videos that are at the student’s current level.

Their website also very helpfully separates their videos into four different levels: super beginner, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Upon visiting their website, I discovered that Dreaming Spanish makes videos specifically for students who are learning the Spanish language. Eventually, I came across a Reddit comment that recommended checking out the Dreaming Spanish website and YouTube channel.

Improve listening in spanish how to#
A Life-Changing RecommendationĪfter realizing I needed to change my studying focus, I started doing some research on how to specifically improve my listening skills as a beginner, reading several posts across a few different subreddits geared around language learning like r/languagelearning, r/learnspanish, and r/spanish. Those methods are simply too advanced for complete noobs like I was. While those are good recommendations for a student who is already at an advanced level in their listening ability, it is essentially useless if you’re a complete beginner. Many people who haven’t successfully mastered a new foreign language as an adult will give advice like, “start watching movies in Spanish” or “listen to a bunch of music from Mexico”. One of the biggest problems when trying to find good resources to listen to is that most of the resources are geared towards native speakers and those who are already fluent. Though, in reality, I knew my listening skills were likely closer to A1, or even A0, or worse! I took one of those free, unofficial online fluency tests last year, and it said that I was at a B1 level in Spanish.

Like any skill we want to improve in life, I simply needed to focus on spending the hundreds of hours required to improve my listening ability. I realized that I needed to spend a lot of time improving my listening ability and not just reviewing flashcards with no audio input. Understanding the ProblemĮventually, the lightbulb clicked on and I came to the realization that my problem was that I had spent next to zero time working specifically on improving my listening skills. It all came at me too fast and my brain would just shut down once it realized it didn’t understand what was being said. I knew tons of vocab and phrases, and even though I knew how to pronounce them fairly correctly, my brain didn’t register when hearing them spoken by native speakers.
Improve listening in spanish tv#
However, I could barely understand when people would talk to me in Spanish or when hearing it on the tv or the radio. Because my focus up to that point had mostly been on learning new vocab and reviewing flashcards, I could recognize a lot of Spanish words when I would read them. When different language institutes give exams to test a student’s fluency in a given language, they typically test four different skills: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. I had to constantly ask them to repeat themselves and conversations were very painful and slow. Palacio de Bellas Artes, Ciudad de México – via on Unsplash used under a Creative Commons licenseĪfter endless hours of studying Spanish over the past several years, I was frustrated in late 2020 that I could still barely understand anyone when they would speak to me in the language. Published Aug(updated: March 7, 2023) in Language Learning, Road Towards Mastery. From Zero to Advanced: How I Drastically Improved My Spanish Listening Skills After Only 100 Hours – Weston Ludeke Skip to content Weston Ludeke About Reading List From Zero to Advanced: How I Drastically Improved My Spanish Listening Skills After Only 100 Hours
