An excellent exercise for improving your listening and speaking

skills

We all want to learn to understand and speak a new language at a fluent level. It takes time, hard work, motivation, discipline and an effective strategy.

An effective exercise is dictation. I explain the steps below:

1. listen to a short audio/video of a native speaker in the language you want to learn (let's say English). It can be a podcast, a video on youtube, whatever you want.

2. make sure there is a transcript available. A free site where you can listen and get the transcript is listenaminute.com. Each dictation is 1 minute long which is a good length.It has a rangevof topics which keeps it from being boring. But there are other sites as well.

3. play the audio, listen and write down what you hear - pay attention to the words, sounds etc. If you can't understand what the person is saying, you can play it back as many times as you want. It's okay if you don't know a lot of the words being spoken. The idea is to exercise your listening ability and improve. If the person is speaking too fast and you can't understand at least 70 per cent, try a different audio.

4. Once you have listened a few times and written what you have heard, you can compare what you have written with the actual transcript. This gives you important feedback. Listen again while you read the transcript.

5. Look up words you don't know. DeepL or Google translate and other sites can help.

6. If there is a phrase or sentence that you like, repeat it in a loud voice a few times so you can internalise it. Listen to the person saying it and try to mimic them.

If you do this regularly, you can really improve your listening and comprehension, and speaking.

Hope it helps. I wish you great success😊