How to Improve Your Italian Listening Skills
Many Italian learners fall victim to the classic mistake of devoting their time to speaking and reading without giving adequate time to listening comprehension. Why? Let’s not beat around the bush, here—listening is hard!
Getting your head around different accents, regional dialects, noises and slang is a mental workout that makes many want to throw in the towel.
But if you ever want to learn Italian effectively, listening is a must. Listening is key to understanding, and improving your listening comprehension has a lot of benefits. It exposes you to a ton of new vocab and grammar, provides practice with a variety of accents and introduces you to new topics of interest within the Italian world.
It even improves your pronunciation. When you hear a word spoken a number of times, you eventually mimic the way it’s pronounced. Just like a baby learns! So get up, dust your shoulders off and get back on your horse. You can do it! Take these tips to heart and don’t just learn to speak, learn to communicate.
How to improve your italian listening skills?
Here are some suggestions:
Italian Podcasts
Using Italian Podcasts is the best way to get acquainted with the real language and catapult you towards Italian fluency.
This will be more difficult than listening along with TV and movies because you won’t be able to see the speakers’ mouths moving. This removes an important contextual element and gives your brain an extra challenge. Remember to keep a notebook handy so you can jot down new words and expressions.
TED talks in Italian
Use Ted talks in Italian to get inspired and train your Italian at the same time. The videos often include subtitles.
Italian YouTubers
Blend your interests with Italian language learning: the rule of thumb of smart language learning is surrounding yourself with exciting and meaningful Italian learning content.
Let’s say you want to learn about ceramic or macrobiotic cooking? Why not learn in Italian on an Italian Youtube Channel?
All you need to do is looking for an Italian channel that discusses your topic of interest. The best about this strategy is that the language is not the aim anymore, but the tool you access and enjoy your very interests.
Audiobooks
They are a great resource because you can learn while you listen to an actual novel. However, the selection of titles available for free in Italian is restricted to novels whose copyright has expired. That is the reason why you find them for free on the web. This is nonetheless very useful for those of you who have never read specific literature classics or for those of you who want to read them again in Italian.
Tv-Series
We all know that movies and tv-series are one of the best tools to learn a language. Even teachers at school use them for their classes because you get access to real spoken language. The Italian broadcasting company RAI offers a website where they stream films, programmes, and tv-series (we call them fiction in Italian) that they have aired in the past, or are airing as we speak. This service is called Rai Play and it works fine if you live or are in Italy.