Do you have trouble understanding native English speakers?
Do you find it difficult to improve your listening skills, or feel like you don’t have the time to practice?
If you have these problems, keep reading.
Why Most People Fail to Improve Their English Listening Skills
There’s only one reason people fail: they don’t listen to enough English.
Makes sense, right? If you spend 1,000 hours listening to English, your listening will definitely improve.
Unfortunately, here’s what many people do to improve their listening:
• Watch a few movies in English every week.
• Listen to something in English 3 – 5 times a week.
• Listen to English for 15 minutes per day
These actions are weak. They aren’t significant enough to make a difference.
Think about it. If you listen to English for 15 minutes a day. One year from now, you will have listened to only 91 hours of English.
This is not enough! It will take you many years to see an improvement.
People Who Listen to English a Lot Also Fail!
Some people spend several hours a day listening to English. They know that to improve their listening , they need a lot of practice.
Unfortunately, these people usually fail to improve their listening as well.
Why is that?
Here’s what usually happens:
1. At first, they’re motivated to improve their listening. They decide to listen to English for 2 hours every day.
2. After a while, they have trouble finding time to practice.
3. Finally, they lose motivation and give up.
4. Because they quit too soon, their listening skills didn’t improve.
This is how many “motivated” English students fail. They practice hard in the beginning, but then they quit soon afterwards because they can’t maintain that kind of practice.
Here’s the lesson to be learned: for your English listening skills to improve, you must listen to English regularly over a long period of time.
Listening to English for several hours per day “for a month” is not enough. You need to do it for many months (or over a year).
How to “Successfully” Improve Your Listening Skills (Even If You Don’t Have Time)
Want to improve your listening “successfully”?
If you do these two things, your success is 100% guaranteed:
1. Listen to a lot of English every day.
2. Do it for a long period of time.
But how do you do that if you don’t have time?
Let me share a few tips to overcome this problem.
Success Tip #1: Make Sure Your Phone Always Has English Listening Material
First, you need to download a lot of English listening material to your phone. This way, you can listen to English no matter where you are.
What kind of English material to download to your phone?
Podcasts.
Podcasts are audio shows (English conversations) which you can download from the Internet for free.
Success Tip #2: Turn Boring Time into Listening Time
Take a look at the activities below. What do they have in common?
• Driving.
• Riding a bus/train.
• Doing house chores (washing dishes, cooking, etc.)
• Working out.
• Waiting for something.
These activities have one thing in common: they don’t require concentration or deep thinking.
Throughout the day, there are a lot of activities like the examples above. These are the best times to improve your English listening skills!
Feeling bored? Listen to something in English!
Make sure to listen to some English during these activities. By doing so, it’s quite easy to listen to English for 1 – 2 hours every day.
Do you see the brilliance of this strategy? This is how you can improve your listening even if you don’t time. Even busy people can do this!
Success Tip #3: Make It Fun & Entertaining!
We all spend time each day on entertaining stuff: playing games, surfing the Internet, gambling, etc.
We spend lots of time on these things because they are fun and addictive.
So, if you want to spend a lot of time listening to English, just make it entertaining. If you do that, it’s easy to improve your listening skills. (And you don’t have to force yourself to do it.)
But how do you make “listening to English” fun? Let me give you a couple of ideas.
1. Subscribe to Entertaining Channels on YouTube
2. Binge-Watch Popular Television Series & Movies
