Tips and tricks to improve your listening skills in French

How can you train yourself to understand normal French conversations so you aren’t always lagging behind? 

And how can you invite your French friends for apéro, for a meal, or even just feel good about stopping to talk to other dog owners for example, without the confidence of being able to express yourself clearly?  

Here’s what you’ll discover in this mini-lesson:

• How you can train yourself to understand French spoken at normal speed
• How working on your listening skills can even help you speak French more easily
• How you can accelerate your learning and increase your conversational confidence

But before diving in, here’s what Cathy had to say once she got back home after her Homestay here, and I was helping her throughout the week with her conversational listening skills: 

"Ce soir nous avons dîné avec trois adultes et deux petites filles. Toute la soirée

on a parlé en français. C'était le premier grand test de notre français depuis 

notre ‘Homestay’ et nos amis français m'ont dit que j'ai parlé plus vite.

Pour moi, j'ai le sentiment que j'étais capable de dire ce que je voulais dire.

C'était super."

First set the stage as a learner.

There are tons of ways to help yourself. To start, it’s your “duty” to indicate you are a learner.

In a conversation with a native speaker, negotiate right from the beginning that if you are to participate well, you will be asking them to slow down a bit and to give you the chance both to understand and to confirm you’ve understood. Indeed, there’s no shame in reminding the person or people you are learning this language.

Avoid translation and vary the pace of conversation.

You have just seen you can control the speed of any conversation with native speakers (or not). 

Now, there’s something else you can do to improve your understanding of French. Try slowing the speed of what you hear down if you’re at the computer, as well as in live conversations, working on comprehension activities. That way, you’ll observe all the intricacies, and details of a “normal” conversation entail. After, speed it up as you get more comfortable with it.

Secondly, avoid translation at any cost. Check you’ve understood without translating. Why? Because you’ll lose the flow of the conversation and translating word for word leads to disaster. Instead, use your intuition, make mistakes, and learn from them. 

Slow it down to deconstruct.

Next - play it back at a slow speed, speaking along with it, and again, get yourself to say it the same way at the same speed. Once you have grasped the main idea, the words, and the intonation, you are capable of reproducing the same. The key here is to practice and feedback.

For instance, you could record your voice to check if you are repeating as similar as possible to the original material.

Two required qualities: kindness and patience.

Be kind to yourself - congratulate yourself on your progress - something we don’t seem to do a lot of, for some reason. And certainly, don’t beat yourself up when you switch to some new, random conversation and find yourself out of depth again.  It takes a lot of time and patience. Just look at the toddlers of the world! 

How real French speakers talk. (And how to imitate them).

When you’re listening and repeating, note:

• The liaisons between words and how certain letters are gobbled up in the process;
• How the ends of certain words are not pronounced;

The two points confuse a lot of beginners (or more advanced) because the liaisons connect words and it becomes complicated to distinguish where one word starts and the other ends…

In addition, so many French words are “eaten” with silent final letters. Here are a few examples for you:

• souris (souri) >>> mouse 
• blanc (blan) >>> white
• temps (tem) >>> time  

And there’s more:

• How words can be squished together and sound like something completely different from what you expect. 

Eg:  Un doedanne

Actually, that’s what I heard the first time and it was explained to me. I found out that it’s “Un dos d’âne” - the back of a donkey, the word for a ‘sleeping policeman’ on the road to slow traffic down. 

It all has to come together from different directions - seeing, hearing, speaking, repeating. 

And by articulating them yourself, you are also training yourself to cope when you hear them in spontaneous ‘normal’ conversations in French. 

Apply what you have leant in everyday conversations.

The goal of improving your listening skill is to communicate with people. That is the reason why you need to integrate your new learning into your French conversations. 

Find any excuse to show off your new words and get instant feedback. If you don’t live in a French-speaking country, you could do it with your friends who are learning French. Maybe you have a neighbour who can speak the language? How about your local baker who might be French? Even for fun, you could answer the phone by speaking French and see if your family and friends think you sound French…

Bottom line: find a way to integrate your French into conversations.

However . . . how often are you actually getting the chance to have those daily conversations with specific teacher feedback? It’s priceless!

Imagine being able to test yourself every day and know exactly what could be improved. Oui, being on holiday in France will allow you to hear some French but don’t expect everybody to correct you and explain to you where it’s wrong.

But daily guided conversations with an experienced teacher will take your French to a level you can’t even picture.

The skills you obtain with an immersive homestay.

When you do an Immersive Homestay, all these skills are worked on and integrated into your personal programme. And not just in a few hours a day - intelligently and seamlessly integrated into every activity you do through the day, together with your teacher: 

• Enjoy realistic conversations useful for when you host your own apéro or dinner parties;

• Improve your listening skills as you engage in conversations with your teacher in everyday living as well as native speakers who come to the house or those who receive you into their place;
• Gain precious speaking confidence in real life, daily conversations;

• Have all the lessons you want throughout the stay and your teacher will be there to steer you through your grammatical minefields;
• Feel increasingly confident as you realise how much you can apply in new situations. If you get the chance to immerse yourself in regular French conversations, you’re never quite sure how much you’ve learnt until it pops into the conversation. And you understand! 

How an immersive homestay looks like.

So, on an Immersive Homestay, you are looking at how to can get to speak French all day every day, and have a French teacher ‘over your shoulder’, as it were, to steer your confidence and your linguistic growth - aka how well you speak and how well you understand what you hear in conversations! 

So, at this stage, you know some tips about how you can improve your listening skill on your own. However, the experience of an immersive homestay will be filled with other skills you will develop.

Should you have any questions about immersive homestays, I will be more than happy to clarify things.  I must say, I am happy with the uptake for 2023, so if you're sitting on the fence, wondering if you want to come int he next year, then it's time to get in touch! 

You don't want to miss out!