Active Listening - More Thorough Introduction
DURATION: 5 MINS
If you are not interested in why this course is so efficient when compared to other (on- and offline) courses out there, you can simply skip this lecture. You would do yourself a favor though IF you read what I have to say about this topic as your mind will be more at peace with you investing so much time into learning German instead of doing far more pleasant things. And never underestimate your mind's desire for pleasure and it's dislike 🤮 for working hard.
Active listening will help you fine-tune 📡 your listening skills. The better you understand what others are saying, the more secure you will feel with them and the greater the beneficial effect on your speaking skill. There are two kinds of listening: Active and passive listening. We will talk about passive listening later in this course. Most German learners would like to have a conversation in German at one point, but real life rarely provides us with ideal conditions for conversations. We have to be able to understand others in a loud environment, via the phone, or Skype which often is far from optimal. To be able to understand spoken German, you must learn how to recognise relevant key words. In the beginning, everything sounds just like one big blur.
How to Improve your Listening Skills
Simply listen a few times to the audio of the text that you have been working on before. Pause frequently to let sink in what you have just heard and to see whether you can already make sense of it. The second time you listen to the audio, try to pause less frequently. The third time even less and so on. Listen until you feel you understand most of it when playing the audio in one piece. Do not overdo it though. Always remain aware of your exhaustion and frustration levels. I will talk about how to improve one's self-awareness in a later chapter.
On the next page you'll listen again to chapter 01 of this course's story. Whenever you are ready.
The Rationale
To be able to recognise individual words, you must at first “cognise“ them, know them. This is what you have been preparing for with the help of all the steps before. By now, you should be a bit more familiar with the meaning and the sounds of most words that you are listening to. But take things easy. Do not expect to be perfect too soon. Understanding words that you don’t know yet will remain a challenge for months to come 💪 before you can comfortably follow a casual conversation among Germans.
☕ ️It is crucial to pause after a certain amount of input as your brain should have the opportunity to digest what it takes in. If you don’t pause, new information might disturb your memory trying to save just learned information and saving old information might prevent new information from sinking in.