Developing an ear for Spanish
Hola a todos 
I was wondering if anybody could offer any advice on how to develop a better ear for Spanish. My problem is that I'm really good at typing it, but horrible at understanding it when it's spoken fast and not enunciated or when I don't have a clue what the topic someone is talking about is. Does anybody have any tips for helping me better be able to understand normal conversations in Spanish?
Thanks a lot!
Zac
11 Answers
KevinB said:
Bottom line is practice, practice, practice.
Very, very true! There is no substitute for practice. If you want to listen native speakers, you should check out this website. It's website from the University of Texas at Austin and has activities. It goes from "beginner" to "superior" (I think that's the equivalent of fluent) and each lesson has several videos of native speakers (in Spanish, of course!), a page of related vocabulary and phrases, and a grammar lesson that goes along with the vocabulary.
Hi and welcome to the forum!
There are a ton of threads that deal with this topic if you do a search. I would also suggest that you join us in our Island thread where there are many discussions about developing your "ear" for the language as well as working up the nerve to speak in Spanish. I hope to see you there. You will always get a response....and usually more than one response. 
It's like learning to play a musical instrument by ear. There's no substitute for practice. Start slow and work your way up. Listen to radio talk shows, news programs, T V shows, movies, etc. in Spanish. Rule #1 is Don't translate in your head! You have to be able to have it go in your ears and form images in your head without consciously translating into English. Stop thinking! That just slows you down and screws you up.
Bottom line is practice, practice, practice.
I totally agree with all that has been said above. But in addition you need to build vocabulary. It is critical. Grammar not so critical at first. Keep a good dictionary close by all the times. Keep a paper and pen close by all the times. Write down words you hear during the day and look them up. Try writing a few sentences with each new word. Do the flashcards here. Do the same with the words that are new to you in the flashcards. Youwillnotbeabletobreakasentenceapartuntilyouhaveenoughvocabularytostarthearingwords. Otherwise it sounds like one big word.
If you are serious about learning you should add at least ten new words a day and use them every day for a week. Then drop the first ones for a week or two and then pick them up again.
For me writing simple sentences (thousands of them) helps cement words in your head. Once they are cemented you will stop translating them because you just know them.
Practice, practice and practice.
One way (among many) to get an "ear" for Spanish is to just listen to it for an extended period of time, WITHOUT bothering to try to understand what is being said. That is, just listen -- to anything at hand: Spanish radio, telenovelas, Spanish movies (without the English subtitles), native Spanish speakers talking on the street/in cafes/stores, etc. Do not continually try to figure out what people are saying. Do not worry about grammar, sentence structures, vocabulary, etc. *Just listen a lot and all the time (or something reasonable). In my case, although I took 2 semesters of Spanish in college, it was not until I went to Mexico that my Spanish began to improve. I went by myself, spent months in a rural village as the only English speaker for miles. For the first few weeks, everything people were saying sounded like gibberish -- obviously, my college Spanish was not very helpful. After about 3 weeks, I began to understand some of what people were saying; I could pick out words here and there, and link them to what people did or to things around me. From then on, my Spanish got better, but then my visa expired and I had to return to the U.S. Once immersed back into English-speaking U.S.A, my fledgling Spanish got worse. It is still at a beginner's level, mostly because I still translate in my head. But I now go to Mexico once or twice a month (it helps to live within reasonable distance of the border), listen to Spanish radio and music, podcasts, etc. I find listening to telenovelas better than watching them; it helps me to focus on what they are saying, rather than what they are doing.
I would say immersion helps. I only completed lessons 1 - 12 here in Spanishdict before plunging alone to Argentina, where everyone speaks Spanish. Fortunately for me some service staff still speak English, but when I'm alone in a long distance bus, for example, or walking on the streets trying to figure out what each shop sells and where to get food, I see and hear Spanish all around me. Of course I don't understand alot of what is being said, but the sounds and tones just became very familiar.
Then, I grew to associate words with where they can be found. Like names of foods with restaurants, names of furnitures or fittings with accommodations, city names with the bus terminal, etc.
And eventually, I learn new words by inferring their meanings from the surroundings, like 'estacionamiento' probably means parking lot or carpark. Best of all, the meanings of these new words come naturally to me without the interim translation, because the first time I come across these words, I already associate them with the object instead of with the English equivalent.
32 days later, I came back and listened to lessons 1 - 12 again. And all of a sudden Paralee seems to speak slowly enough for me to understand her without pausing and rewinding the video many times!
So I guess it really does help, all the more since you're a beginner. You don't have to go through the 'corazón = heart = (image of heart)' phase. You could go straight into the 'corazón = (image of heart)' phase.
@Zcompton: This is going to be a long post.
Do not fret or worry about what the words mean in the immediate; when you try to figure out what the words mean in your native language, you are actually translating between the Spanish you hear and that native language, which I assume is English. This is actually a bad habit to acquire: it slows you down, encourages one to speak incorrectly using forms from their native language, and slows your formation of speech/sentences and slows you from understanding others when they speak. Even worse, this habit is very difficult to break (from my personal experience).
- Instead of trying to figure out what the words mean directly, from the experience of just listening and observing for a while -- days or weeks or, even, months -- you will start to get a feel for the language.
- In addition, use your other senses (vision, touch, smell), in addition to your observation skills, to infer what words mean, and more importantly, what frases / sentences mean.
- You may also want to visualize what people are doing or what objects or tasks are being referred to when you hear certain sounds, i.e. corazon = heart.
- Eventually you will pick up those words and, as Mathslover says, know what they mean rather than simply associate the Spanish word with its English equivalent.
- After you get an ear for Spanish, -- when words make sense (even if you don't know what they mean) and you can recognize whole phrases as well as where one word ends and another phrase or word begins even when a Spanish-speaker is talking fast but you don't know what the words mean --> then try parroting/mimicking what you hear, paying attention to your accent.
- At first, do not try to learn grammar rules, sentence structures, etc. These slow you down, encourage more English thinking and exposes you to English translations which encourage translation and maybe a bad Spanish accent. In some ways, this website SpanishDict is going about teaching Spanish somewhat incorrectly; like most college courses, it focuses on structures (e.g. "Bueños días"), grammar, and vocabulary too early. [We all know people who took college Spanish and other language courses, and while they know a lot of grammar and vocabulary, when immersed in a Spanish-speaking environment, they have difficulty understanding what is being said and they cannot speak the language!] What SpanishDict should really do is have hours and hours of simple Spanish dialogue, perhaps with images (like RosettaStone). Over time, it would ideally encourage people to parrot back what they hear with space repetition (look up space repetition software). Once people start to understand what is being said, and can speak with minimal accent, then they can make what they say and understand grammatically correct. I think that most traditional courses want to speed up the process of learning a foreign language, so they teach structures and grammar and simple conversation first.
- Via immersion or as close to it as you can, you begin to associate what is being said with things in your environment, what people are doing, what tasks are being done, the name of objects, etc.
- Having a dictionary and pen and paper handy helps greatly, but I recommend using those later, after the gibberish starts to sound comprehensible even if you don't know what all the words mean. You want to delay the temptation to translate everything in your head. Another way is to learn the phrases such as "Cómo se dice?" and have Spanish speakers tell you what a word means in a roundabout way.
- For a take on this input first/immersion/delayed output method (that's my name for it), check out this site www.alljapaneseallthetime.com. The author learned Japanese to fluency in 18 months without a classroom just by putting himself into situations that first required him to listen to Japanese -- even though he lived in Utah!, then to parrot it back along with Kanji practice. Note: *I am not associated with that site in any way.**
The main downsides of this "input first/immersion/delayed output" method is that it takes time and may require drastically altering one's habits and environment to make it immersion, or even moving to an immersive environment. Also, its non-traditional approach is very antithetical to established and traditional didactic and pedagogical methods, as taught in schools, colleges, and through language tutors -- so it is still controversial.
One tool that is accessible to all of us at any hour is You Tube. You can find all sorts of material, some of it only a minute or two long, and you can listen to the same material over and over again. Plus that, all sorts of accents are represented.
Keep after it! I applaud your desire to improve your listening skills. It will be worth the effort!
Kevin said:
"Don't translate in your head!"
That is hands down, the best advice, but the most difficult to execute. You are correct that time and tons of practice are the road to achieving this goal.
It is always so amazing the first few times you realize that you have heard a word, or better yet, an expression in Spanish...and without referring to the English counterparts, you know what is being said.
For instance you read or hear "corazón" and immediately think:
....rather than:
"Oh, that means heart.....and then picture this:
My goal is to get rid of all of the in between, unnecessary nonsense ( I mean steps).
I started with reading pronunciation guides. There are articles about listening comprehension that you can find if you click on the more tab and browse through the reference section.
I highly recommend reading the comments of Lazarus in this Interactive Audio Thread No 7 - Hilo de audio interactivo 7 The eye of the Peacock Mantis Shrimp / El ojo del camarón mantis and others, follow the links in the thread.
And then become familiar with a movie and listen intently. I have been watching La última playa, a movie that I download from youtube. I am gonna keep watching it until I understand everything that is spoken without reading the English subtitles. I even practice repeating after them. Its a movie that has been produced in Spanish and it is Spanish as it is actually spoken. Anyway, I'm lucky its a good movie because I am gonna keep watching it.
Have fun my friend.
I suppose that makes sense, and I can see how it would help being immersed in the language if you knew what most of the words MEANT. However, being as I'm a beginner, my vocab isn't the greatest. You're saying that I can still benefit from hearing it all the time?
