Listening Skill
Hi every body.
How can I improve my spanish listening skill? I know i should listen listen listen! but what are the methods? are there any special ones that can help me to improve it sooner? you pesonally what did you do for that? or doing? please share your own learning (listening skill) strategy... Thanks .
6 Answers
This site
Has listening sessions from beginners to advanced.
These you can download for free and you can buy the worksheets with all the text as well.
I have sent you a PM.
I second Estaban's recommendation of music. Also, there are a few smartphone apps that will scan your phone's downloaded music library, and then scan a web database of lyrics, and usually come up with text lyrics that are sync'd with your phone's music audio. Very impressive and useful little bit of technology.
Pimsleur has about 100 audio lessons that are good while driving or doing manual work.
And there are tons of podcasts.
For beginners, Coffee Break Spanish.
With more experience, Beginning, Intermediate, and advanced versions of Notes in Spanish, with a much higher percentage of the conversation in actual Spanish (almost 90% by the intermediate)
Spanish Only Spanish is a really good podcast too.
And I think the other one I was listening to was Learn Spanish like crazy.
Listening, maybe even more than all the other skills, is just matter of practicing listening, over and over and over. I go back and re-listen to things that I thought I understood 100% a year ago, and then realize I was wrong, because I got more this time.
I recommend watching movies, without subtitles of any kind, along with transcribing a novel from, in your case, Spanish to Spanish and translate it to your native language.
The combination of watching (the action of the) movie coupled with what you are hearing, coupled with you looking for words to translate to your native language, will make you understand, eventually, that movie in its entirity.
Eventually might be very soon, depending on how much time you dedicate to this.
Please read my blog
To improve my Spanish listening skills, I use Lo Más TV. You can google the site and see free demonstrations. It is a commercial site that charges a little under a $100 per year. It is well worth it. There are many things I like about lomás tv, but one of things I most appreciate is that it provides a wide variety of audio/video presentations from all over the Spanish-speaking world. It uses very good judgment in choosing what is available there, and it is constantly being updated with fresh content.
Also I would recommend acquiring a taste for Latin Music. I frequent a web site called Lyrics Translate dot com. It is totally free. There you can listen to a lot of great Latino groups like Maná, which has been a very popular group from Mexico for decades. There are many YouTube links at this website which allow you to listen to the music and also see the lyrics in Spanish and in English. The goal there, of course, is to learn the music in Spanish and know what it means without mentally translating it to English. Music is good for developing that skill.
I have not done it for a little while, but I was listening to passages in Spanish from the Bible at 1: http://www.biblegateway.com/resources/audio/?book=1&source=16 I also have some listening to do for my class, so that helps too, because usually when I listen, I have questions to answer about the content, and so that helps me to listen for certain things.
Te recomiendo que cada día veas algo por internet. Yo por ejemplo para entender mejor el inglés suelo ver diversos videos en youtube. Me gusta ver entrevistas con actores famosos o programas como Inside the actors studio o Roundtable. A veces escucho la radio por internet y veo series. Creo que esto me ha ayudado muchísimo porque ahora soy capaz de ver una película en inglés con enteder la mayor parte de diálogos. En cuanto al español me gusta ver programas como Callejeros viajeros. Escuchar música también te puede ayudar mucho. Creo que lo importante es que escuches algo cada día.
