Listening to a language to learn it is a way of language learning known as passive language learning. While this may be helpful in some ways, there are also some strong disadvantages to this learning method. Despite this, there are certainly benefits to listening to a language that you are learning. This post will discuss what listening to a language can teach you as well as gaps that will need to be supplemented with other learning techniques.

How Does Listening Help Me Learn A Language?

Listening to a language is sure to help you learn a language by helping you understand what is being said. The repetition of hearing foreign words will help your brain separate different words quicker, so that you will be able to spend less time working out what was said, allowing yourself more time to work out what the words mean, and formulate a response.

Many of us are time-poor, and so listening to a language enables us to be doing more than one thing at a time. You could listen to your target language on your commute to work, or as you’re making breakfast in the morning. Perhaps, yu could listen to it as you are drifting off to sleep, or completeing a multitude of other tasks during the day. The benefit is that listening to a language is something that can be done at home. In a post-Covid word, this is a great advantage.

The greater your vocabularly, the greater your eloquence and precision in a language. The way to do this in a new language is to improve your vocabularly. Listening to a language is sure to expose you to new words, as well as colloquial words that are more current than you may find in the dictionary. I highly recommend that you make sure that new words are written down somewhere, for example, a flashcard app such as Anki. There are easy ways to import lots of flashcards to the app which can be followed here.

One of the biggest ways that listening to a language can help is through exposure to the culture of your target language. Listen to popular songwriters who are singing in your target language and you will quickly start to get a feel of what they value. Songwriters aren’t writing songs that won’t sell. They’re writing songs that have meaning and emotional connection to the people they are writing for. The more of these songs that you are exposed to, the more you will have an understanding of the values and interests of a wide range of people within that country. You can find out more about learning the culture while at the same time learning a new language in this post here.

What Does Listening To A Language Not Help Me Learn?

Although there are several areas that listening to a language doesn’t help you improve, the biggest gap that listening to a new language cannot adequately fill is improving your ability to read or write. This should be fairly self-evident, in that listening to a language won’t show you how the words look when they are written, or help you reproduce the sentences that are written. This isn’t the only area that listening to a language doesn’t assist with. By extension of not giving you improved reading or writing skills, listening to a language doesn’t fully help your skills in creating organic language.*

*some of this can now be negated with the use of generative AI and its work in creating chatbots to help you learn a target language. You can read more about this below as well as in this post.

What I mean by this is that you’ll be able to repeat phrases and words that you have heard, but mixing those words up to create new, unique sentences, that you haven’t heard in your audio, will be trickier. I propose that this is a lesser-focused aspect of language learning. We often look at the four types of communication; speaking listening reading and writing. By listening to a new language, your listening skills will improve, because you are only listening and not taking an active part in a conversation. However, your ability to speak and produce the language yourself will not really grow.

You will notice that when you are learning a language, often there will be a wider range of sentences and words that you understand when they are spoken to you, but that you will not be able to replicate. This is because listening and understanding a language and creating the language are two different skills.

This is not to say that listening to your target language will be a complete waste of time. You will however need to have reasonable expectations of what you expect to achieve through this listening.

I believe that without a doubt the greatest benefit to listening to a language is to learn the culture as well as any colloquialisms that are used.

Should I Use Listening As A Language Learning Method?

Without a doubt, you should be listening to your target language as part of your learning. This can help you with the pronunciation of words, the flow, and the rhythm of native speakers, as well as get your brain used to listening to another language.

I would recommend that you have a varied approach to language learning such as using flashcards, reading and listening in your target language, and having as many practice conversations as you can. This can help reduce repetition and boredom because it is not the same repeated exercises all the time. It can also give you the language in different contexts and show you how to use the language in different social circumstances as well as in a much wider range of topics.

Overall, you are likely to find that you can go a short way towards learning your new language only by listening, but that you probably can’t learn a language only by listening to lit. Some of the pronunciation will be quick and easy to pick up and you are likely to understand native speakers relatively easily. Your ability to completely learn a language, even aside from writing skills, is likely to be quite challenging, if you were seeking to do this by listening only. This is not to say that listening is a useless activity for language learning.

As our world becomes more intertwined with AI, there is also opportunity to incorporate listening, reading and writing skills into AI. You could have conversations with an AI that will also speak sentences to you, allowing you to combine your reading and listening skills to understand what is being said. This would negatve some of the downsides to listening in a target language, particularly if this was combined with some reading of new sentences.

How Should I Incorporate Listening Into My Language Learning?

It is important that when you start listening to your target language that you’re picking media that has a language level that works for you. The language level will be too hard if you’re not able to understand anything at all, perhaps they are speaking to quickly, all the topic contains too many foreign words so that you’re not able to understand the just of what is being said. You’ll know if it is too easy if you are able to understand everything that is being said with little to no effort.

The middle ground is where gets tricky to know if you are listening to the right content. You need to be listening to the content that contains words that you do not understand, but that you are able to have a pretty good guess at what they mean from the context in which they are used. You may find the different sections of the same media are flipping between too hard or too easy and this middle ground.

You should also make sure that you are actively listening as much as possible and passively listening as little as possible.

The difference between passive and active listening is much as it sounds. Passive listening involves little to no effort on your part, while active listening involves interaction (where possible) as well as making notes on words or phrases that you want to learn or look up later.

If you were teleported to a non-English speaking country and you had to learn to live there by yourself, the first few weeks and months would be very difficult. The initial learning curve of understanding the basics of the language and growing accustomed to the language, not to mention trying to understand and replicate words, would be very slow.

After this initial period, you would notice that your rate of learning dramatically increases, and your ability to communicate with the locals would steadily improve. The difference here is that you actively using your language to try and communicate, instead of passively listening to a language without any ability to have a conversation.

For further reading about listening in your target language, I have written a specific post to discuss the use of subtitles well watching films in your target language that you will be able to read here.