English Listening Skill Practice
Tips for Listening to English
1. Hear out different kinds of accents
English is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. Even if we just look at native-speaking areas, there’s a wide variety of accents! Most English learners use the American or British accent as their base. Once you’re comfortable with one of those, hone your listening comprehension even more by exposing yourself to other accents.
2. Learn homophones
Homophones are English words that sound alike but have different meanings. Some examples would be:
Eye – I
Hear – Here
Ate – Eight
You won’t be able to know which word it is just by listening–you’ll have to look at the context of the sentence! A handy trick is to go through a list of common homophens so you’ll recognize them when you hear them.
https://www.fluentu.com/blog/english/improve-english/
3. Immerse in pop culture
Part of learning English is getting to know the culture. In fact, English pop culture is everywhere, and it’s enjoyable so you won’t even feel like you’re studying.
With Fluentu alone, you can already explore TV series, movies, and music videos—all with detailed translations. Pop culture is a great source for modern, everyday English. This includes casual expressions that might not translate literally, but are key to speaking like a native.
https://www.fluentu.com/blog/english/improve-english/
4. Watch bite-sized videos.
If you already scroll through your social media feed pretty often, take advantage of it by watching bite-sized videos in English! TikTok is a useful platform for this because their videos are catchy and short, lasting for a maximum of 15 seconds.
Two of my favorite English TikTok channels are Andrea Holam English and Lets speak English. For viral videos (which are usually funny), search under the #learnenglish hashtag on TikTok.
5. Pair podcasts with transcripts
Podcasts make for amazing English Listening Practice. Although they might seem intimidating, most of the top podcasts have word-for-word transcripts.
On your first round, practice simply listening to a section of the podcast. Then play it all again while looking at the transcript. Listen closely to the words that you couldn’t understand the first time around!
https://www.fluentu.com/blog/english/improve-english/
6. Do a 30-day listening challenge
I’m guilty of playing one episode of a podcast and then forgetting all about it afterwards, even if I enjoyed it. What worked for me was doing a 30-day listening challenge, where I’d focus on a single podcast or Youtube channel for a month and listen to it every day. This helps with building momentum. After all, with some podcasts for learning English, the episodes are meant to be played in sequence because the difficulty increases with each episode!
7. Adjust the speed of your audio
You can probably relate to being overwhelmed with how fast English sounds a lot of times. A way to overcome this is to slow down your speed when listening to English videos or podcasts online.
If you’re barely making out the words, hit pause and play around with the speed of the audio. I like to start with 0.75 speed and go from there.
https://www.fluentu.com/blog/english/improve-english/
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DVLC was born in early 2011 and we have had many students from around the world and they have successfully improved their English language in Malaysia ever since DVLC is an innovative training center in Malaysia that not only teach how to speak English well, but also to think more analytically
