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Tips to Improve English Listening Skills

As an English learner, is your English listening skill progressing well? If it is still posing a problem, maybe the following tips can give you some help.

First of all, remember that you are not alone. Listening comprehension is probably the most difficult task for almost all leaners of English as a foreign language. The most important thing is to listen, and that means as often as possible.

When you begin to listen, do not translate into your native language. When you translate into your native language, you are taking the focus of your attention away from the speaker and concentrating (集中注意力) on the translation process taking place in your brain. Translation leads to a mental (精神的) block in your brain. It sometimes doesn’t allow you to understand anything at all.

Most of people repeat themselves. Think for a moment about your friends, family, and your teachers. When they speak in their native tongue, do they repeat themselves? If they are like most people, they probably do. That means that whenever you listen to someone speaking, it is very likely that they will repeat the information, giving you a second, third or even fourth chance to understand what has been said.

Use key words or key phrases to help you understand the general (大致的) ideas. If you understand “New York”, “business trip”, “last year”, you can think that the person is speaking about a business trip to New York last year. This may seem obvious (明显的，显然的) to you, but remember that understanding the general idea will help you to understand the detail (细节) as the person continues to speak.

Listen for context. Let’s imagine that your English speaking friend says, “I bought this great tuner at JR’s. It was really cheap and now I can finally listen to National Public Radiobroadcasts.” You don’t understand what a tuner is, and if you focus on the word “tuner” , you might become frustrated. If you think in context, you probably will begin to understand. For example, bought is the past of buy, listen is no problem and radio is obvious. Now you understand, he bought something—the tuner—to listen to the radio. A tuner must be a kind of radio. This is a simple example but it demonstrates what you need to focus on. Not the word that you don’t understand, but the words you do understand.