Train your ear: getting used to real English and French
One of the biggest challenges for a language learner is understanding the language when it’s spoken naturally, at full speed, with all its accents, shortcuts and little habits.
It’s especially frustrating at intermediate level. You can express yourself reasonably well, you’ve got plenty of vocabulary, and you can have a perfectly good conversation when you have time to think. Then someone starts chatting away, the conversation takes a few unexpected turns, and suddenly it feels as though they’re speaking another language.
The good news is that this is completely normal. Listening is a skill in its own right, and the more you hear conversational English or French, the more your brain learns to recognise the patterns of natural speech.
We’re also very lucky to have an enormous amount of real-life language at our fingertips. Films, series, YouTube, podcasts and social media mean that we can listen to our target whenever we like. But having so much choice doesn’t necessarily make it easy to work out what will actually help.
So where do you start?
1. Start small
Trawling through 124 episodes of a historical drama may be an admirable objective, but bite off more than you can chew and you’ll soon lose the plot.
Instead, start with a few minutes at a time. Short-form video is particularly useful because you can concentrate on a small piece of language without feeling that you’ve signed yourself up for a two-hour study session. A three-minute interview, a comedy sketch, a news clip or a couple of scenes from a series can give you plenty of listening practice.
You don’t even have to understand everything. In fact, you shouldn’t expect to. The aim is to get your brain accustomed to the sounds, rhythm and patterns of the language.
Later in this article, we’ll look at a couple of handy tools that can help you make the most of this kind of listening practice.
2. Start with accessible real-life content, then branch out
Interviews, short reports, vlogs and other non-fiction videos can be a good way into natural language because you can often see what people are talking about, which gives your brain some useful context.
YouTube is particularly useful here. Look for channels with good-quality subtitles where possible, and choose subjects that genuinely interest you. The best listening practice is often the stuff you actually want to watch.
But don’t stay with learner content forever.
A documentary narrator may speak beautifully clearly, but that’s not necessarily how your neighbour, colleague or friend is going to speak. Interviews and podcasts can take you closer to conversational language, while fiction, comedy and reality TV expose you to more interruptions, unfinished sentences, slang, accents and people talking over each other.
In other words, eventually you need to venture into the wild.
I’ve included some viewing suggestions for both English and French learners at the end of this article.
3. Why does it sound so different?
This is probably the biggest hurdle of all.
Spoken language often doesn’t sound anything like the language you’ve learned from a textbook. When we speak naturally, we shorten words, drop sounds, join words together and use weaker, less carefully pronounced forms. We do this because we’re speaking, not reading aloud to a class.
In English, you might hear gonna instead of going to, wanna instead of want to, or gimme instead of give me. You might hear did you sounding more like didja, or have to sounding more like hafta. These aren’t necessarily forms you should start using yourself in every situation, but you need to recognise them when you hear them.
French has exactly the same phenomenon, although it works differently. Je ne sais pas can become j’sais pas or chais pas, je suis becomes j’suis, tu as becomes t’as, and il y a is very often reduced to y a. The little ne in negative sentences is particularly easy to miss because it disappears so frequently in everyday speech.
The important thing is not to learn a list of rules and try to reproduce them all. It’s to start recognising the patterns. Once you realise that j’sais pas is je ne sais pas, or that gonna is going to, your brain has one less mystery to solve.
I’ve made a simple reference sheet with examples in both English and French that you can download here: Listening: what you read vs what you hear – English & French
4. Subtitles: which language?
If the dialogue is way beyond your level and you switch on subtitles in your own language, you can easily end up reading rather than listening. That can be useful if you’re completely lost, but it doesn’t give your listening skills much of a workout.
If you can, use subtitles in the target language. That way you’re reading while hearing the words, and you can start connecting the sounds with the written form. You won’t catch everything, and you won’t necessarily understand every word, but that’s OK.
One useful method is the watch-twice approach. First, watch a short scene with target-language subtitles and concentrate on understanding what’s happening. Then watch it again without subtitles and see how much more you can hear. You can even go back to one particularly difficult sentence and listen to it several times.
The aim isn’t to understand every word. It’s to gradually make the gap between “I can read this” and “I can understand this when someone says it” smaller.
5. Tools that actually help (plus they’re FREE!)
You don’t need a whole collection of language-learning apps. A few simple tools can make a big difference, particularly when you’re working with short pieces of real language.
YouTube’s transcript and playback speed are probably the most useful place to start. Here’s a carousel showing how to use some of YouTube’s features for language learning:
YouGlish is particularly good when you’re trying to hear how a particular word or phrase sounds in real life. Search for a word and you’ll get examples from real videos, often with several different speakers. It’s a great way to move from knowing what a word looks like to recognising it when someone actually says it.
Language Reactor (free extension on Google Chrome) is another useful option if you want to work more intensively with videos or Netflix. You can interact with subtitles and look up words without constantly leaving the video. It’s useful when you’re deliberately studying a particular piece of content, although I wouldn’t recommend using it for everything. If you pause every three seconds to look up a word, you’re no longer really watching the programme.
Sometimes the best tool is simply the play button.
6. Ditch the tools: watch something you already know
Here’s one of my favourite tricks: watch a film or series you’ve already seen and enjoyed in your own language.
You already know the characters, the story and probably most of the jokes. That frees up some mental space for listening. You’re no longer trying to work out both what is happening and what everyone is saying.
It’s particularly useful when you’re making the jump from learner material to native-speaker content. If you miss a sentence, you can usually keep following the story. And because you already know that you enjoyed it, you’re much more likely to stick with it.
7. Little and often
Whatever you choose, don’t struggle through a two-hour film while stopping to translate every unknown word. Five or ten minutes of focused listening every day is more useful than one enormous session that leaves you exhausted.
And don’t worry if progress seems slow. Listening comprehension often improves in jumps: for a while you feel as though you’re getting nowhere, and then suddenly you realise you’re understanding things that used to sound like one long stream of noise.
The more different voices you hear, the better prepared you’ll be for the real world.
Because ultimately, that’s what we’re practising for: not understanding a textbook, but understanding people.
What to watch and listen to
Here are a few places to start. I’ve deliberately included a mixture of short-form content, learner-friendly material and more natural native-speaker content.
🇬🇧 British English
Sitcoms & series
- Friday Night Dinner – Netflix
- The Outlaws – Prime Video
- Derry Girls – Netflix
YouTube
- Chicken Shop Date
- Easy English
- Taskmaster
Podcasts
- BBC 6 Minute English
- The English We Speak – BBC Learning English
🌍 International English
TED Talks
- TED Talks
- TED-Ed
🇺🇸 American English
Sitcoms & series
- Brooklyn Nine-Nine – Netflix
- Superstore – Netflix
- The Office (US) – Netflix
YouTube
- Good Mythical Morning
- WIRED
🇦🇺 Australian English
Sitcoms & series
- Fisk – Netflix
- Utopia – Netflix
- The Letdown – Netflix
YouTube
- Aussie English
- How To Cook That
🇫🇷 French
Short series & sitcoms
- Scènes de ménages
- Un gars, une fille
- Parents mode d’emploi
YouTube
- Easy French
- Piece of French
- HelloFrench
- Français Authentique
- Konbini
- Brut
Podcasts
- Journal en français facile – RFI
- innerFrench
- French With Panache
- One Thing in a French Day
Found a great show, YouTube channel or podcast in English or French? Share it in the comments. I’m always looking for new things to watch and listen to!
