A great way to improve your Spanish listening skills and overall fluency is repeated Spanish listening exercises. When you listen to the same content over and over, your brain gets more and more adjusted to the flow, rhythm, and structure of that audio and can thus understand and absorb more and more. I love when I find a song in Spanish that I enjoy because I know I’ll be able to listen to it many times without getting annoyed by it, which will mean more learning and improving.
A great source of audio to listen to over and over is the Pars Omni Spanish Voices software. Its library of stories gives you an array of authentic Spanish in the narrative form. These stories and conversations have varying lengths, difficulty levels, and themes, giving you the ability to find content that you enjoy, then sit back and listen your way to improved Spanish.
Like the tip pictured above says, it’s a natural tendency to want to go through stories over and over. We watch reruns of our favorite TV shows, even if we’ve seen the episode a million times. We watch the same movies during the holidays, year after year. I remembering wearing out our little green cassette tape of the soundtrack to “The Lion King” as a kid because my brother and I wanted to listen to it constantly. This repetition can be a valuable learning tool, so tap into it and make the most of it.
While it may be hard at first to enjoy audio content in Spanish because you don’t understand it, trust the process and your abilities and give it time. A great way to support this process is to read through a transcript of what you’re hearing before you listen, while you listen, after you listen, or all three during the first or subsequent times you listen. This can help your mind process the audio input and convert it to recognizable words instead of just a jumble of sounds. It can also be helpful to have an English translation of the text to support your brain in processing the sounds into meaning. Again, you can use the translation before, during, or after you listen or all three. You can do this the first time or later times.
The main thing is starting with solid language learning and language acquisition principles, like listening multiple times, and then tweaking things until you find the right combination for you as an individual, based on the level your at, what works best for you and your current language needs. There are many ways to learn, and people may debate which way or ways are better or best, but none of that matters if it doesn’t work for you. There are certainly things that are fundamental and universal since we are all human, but we are also each unique and must consider that in many aspects of life, including language.
Spanish Voices provides audio content as well as the essential tools and supports you need to make that content work for you. Download it for free today and improve your Spanish fluency as you listen and enjoy.
