The Most Powerful Language Learning Skill Nobody Talks About

How focusing on listening first can transform the way you learn, understand, and speak a foreign language

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I see that you have read Part 1 of How to Start Learning a Language and are now wondering what to do next.

In this article, I will go over the path I would personally take based on my preferred communicative skills:

Listening and speaking.

So, if these are also your preferred skills, then this article is for you. If not, it will still be useful when the time comes to develop them.

Here is what we will discuss:

• Why is listening so relevant?
• What are the three stages of listening development?
• What are realistic development times?

Why is listening so relevant?

Most learners see listening as a passive skill, but it is actually one of the most active processes in language learning.

It trains your ear, shapes your pronunciation, builds your understanding, and prepares the ground for every other communicative skill.

I suggest that my students start by developing their listening skills, as it is a skill we are naturally good at, yet tend to forget how to use it.

It is the skill we rely on the most when acquiring our mother tongue.

We spend roughly six to seven years listening to the people around us and gradually creating meaning from what we hear.

As a consequence, and because we are natural imitation machines, we begin to develop our speaking skills.

Speaking does not appear out of nowhere. It is built on thousands of hours of listening.

The quality and structure of our listening shape the quality and structure of our speaking.

The better your listening foundation, the easier it becomes to develop clear pronunciation, natural rhythm, and accurate speech patterns.

We also tend to remember for longer what we hear than what we read.

Think about a song you love or a phrase your parents used when you were a child.

Those memories stick with you because they were reinforced through listening.

When learning a foreign language, listening is the skill that shapes your pronunciation.

Photo by Bruno Martins on Unsplash

More importantly, it helps reduce the influence and interference of your mother tongue’s pronunciation.

By this I refer to that inner voice you hear when you read.

But if listening is such a fundamental skill for language learning, why do most people start with reading?

The amount of visual stimulation surrounding us has led us to prioritise visual input. We prefer seeing and visualising things rather than listening, creating meaning and building mental images from what we hear.

Reading is also a skill in which you are fully in control of the input. You can slow down, stop, re-read a sentence, or go back to a previous paragraph whenever you want.

In listening, however, you lose some of that control. You are at the mercy of the speaker. If you do not understand something, you often have to ask for clarification.

Unfortunately, many learners avoid doing so because they perceive it as a sign of weakness. This can lead to misunderstandings that affect both communication and your affective filter (how you feel when learning and using the language).

Got it!

So how can you effectively develop your listening skills?

Focus on training on the following process and mastering these three listening subskills.

Recognition, Meaning Association, and Assimilation

These are the three listening subskills I believe you should focus on developing.

Stage 1: Recognition

Your main objective is to recognise similarities and differences from your mother tongue, phonetic sounds, intonation, rhythm, speed, and recurring language patterns.

At this stage, meaning is not your main concern.

Your goal is to expose your brain to as much of the target language as possible for at least two to three weeks.

During this phase, avoid grammar rules, translating every word, or worrying about producing (speaking or writing) in the target language. Simply focus on becoming familiar with how the language sounds.

Try to imitate an Italian, Russian, or Chinese native speaker, even if you do not speak any of those languages.

Stage 2: Meaning Association

Once your brain starts recognising patterns, you need to begin assigning meaning to what you hear.

How?

Listen to content in your target language while reading a transcript or translation in your mother tongue.

If you are learning Spanish and your mother tongue is English, listen in Spanish while reading in English.

This allows you to anchor meaning directly to the sounds you hear instead of relying on word-for-word translation and memorisation.

I have to credit the creator of this technique and method, Vera F. Birkenbihl (R.I.P). It is known as the Birkenbihl Method.

Discovering her work was one of the many professional benefits that learning German brought into my life.

Stage 3: Assimilation

Assimilation is all about passive and extensive exposure to content you already understand.

The objective is consolidation.

At this stage, you continue reusing the auditory content from the previous phase while gradually introducing new material.

Listen repeatedly until you can anticipate what the speaker is going to say next.

When this starts happening, it is a strong signal that your brain is no longer processing the language word by word. Instead, it is recognising larger patterns and chunks of meaning automatically.

This is where listening begins to feel natural.

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

How long will it take to develop this skill?

If you dedicate between 30 minutes to one hour per day (excluding weekends) it might take you approximately three to four months.

This means that you will spend between 35 and 86 hours developing one skill.

On average, a language course level is 35 to 40 hours per level.

Nonetheless, take it with a pinch of salt. It all depends on factors such as language difficulty, consistency, and previous language-learning experience.

The important thing is that your focus remains on listening during this period.

By doing so, you avoid carrying spelling-based pronunciation mistakes from your mother tongue into the target language. You also allow yourself to build a more natural pronunciation system from the very beginning.

Once you have developed a strong listening foundation, we can move on to reading.

And for that, I have another article for you.

Happy learning!

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