If you get frustrated listening to a language you’re trying to learn, you’re not alone. Difficulty understanding the spoken word is one of the common complaints language learners have. Fortunately, though, this problem is relatively easy to solve if you go about it the right way.

Forget Perfection
Most of the frustration with listening comes from trying to understand every word perfectly. Sometimes striving for perfection is a good idea. When you’re learning to pronounce a difficult sound or word correctly or when you’re doing focused work on grammar, you want to try to get it 100% right.

With most listening tasks, though, perfection just isn’t practical. Think about what you need to listen to in real life. It might be the TV news, the dialogue in a movie, or what someone’s telling you in person. In all these cases you, have other clues to help you get the gist of what’s being said. With TV and movies, you have visual cues. With live conversation, you have the person’s tone of voice and gestures to help you out.

The problem is listening tasks in most language classes have you listen to someone reading a script and then ask you specific question about what the person said. It’s not a very realistic situation and it’s much harder than most everyday “listening tasks” in real life.

In reality, most people who are conversational, but not yet fluent, in a language don’t understand every word they hear in that language. Yet they can still hold conversations with minimal problems. Not understanding every word doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong. When you’ve just started to learn a foreign language, it’s perfectly normal not to understand everything. So then, if you’re not aiming for perfection, what are you aiming for?

Go for a General Understanding
Instead of trying to hear and understand every single word, just do your best to understand enough words to get the gist of what’s being said. Take the words you did understand and try to guess based on those. Yes, sometimes you’ll “guess” wrong, especially in the beginning. With practice, though, your listening skills will improve.

After you’ve listened to something, ask yourself if you could explain the general idea to someone else. If you can, then you’ve really accomplished something. Then ask yourself somewhat more focused questions. For instance, if it’s a radio talk show, see if you can summarize the speaker’s overall opinion on the topic. As you learn more vocabulary and do more listening, you’ll be able to fill in more and more details.

Listen to Music
The great thing about music is that you can enjoya it even when you haven’t got the faintest idea what the singer’s going on about. When you do understand, it’s a bonus. Music has another plus, too: repetition. Listening to your favorite songs over and over again helps you remember not only words, but also whole phrases.

Eventually, you’ll have a few phrases you remember well that you can use those phrases as examples of grammar. For instance, students of English sometimes remember how to form the second conditional based on the famous line, “If I were a rich man” from Fiddler on the Roof.

You can still go for global understanding when listening to songs.  Just try to understand enough to decide whether the song about love, politics, a social problem or something else? Then see if you can understand the “story” behind the song.

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