Michelle Baumgartner Last updated: Limits and Tips for Passive Listening Language Learning
As a language learner, you have to keep your ears open and your mind actively engaged when you’re listening to your target language.
Most of the time, that is.
Passive listening can help boost your studying—as long as you know when and how to use it.
Contents
- What Is Passive Listening?
- Can You Use Passive Listening to Learn a Language?
- Passive Listening Language Learning Resources
- And One More Thing...
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
What Is Passive Listening?
Passive listening is when you’re hearing audio content, but you’re not really focusing on it. For example:
- Playing music while you exercise
- Listening to a podcast while you cook dinner
- Having a TV show on while you fold laundry
Basically, any time you hear media and you’re not fully paying attention to it, that’s passive listening.
Can You Use Passive Listening to Learn a Language?
The short answer is: No, not really.
The long answer is: Passive listening can still be a useful part of your language learning experience.
The auditory part of language learning is dominated by active listening—you’re paying attention to the sounds, trying to determine which words you’re hearing and making efforts to translate and understand the content.
It’s very clear how active listening helps you learn a language. Passive listening, on the other hand, is more controversial.
That’s because passive listening relies on the subconscious processing of background audio for more “natural” or “effortless” language acquisition.
Maybe you’ve heard of sleep learning, for example—the idea that you can pick up a language during your unconscious hours of the night. Sounds too good to be true right? That’s because it mostly is.
You’re never going to become fluent in a language purely by listening to music, radio, podcasts or television programs in the background of your main tasks, or while you’re sleeping soundly in bed.
However, you can use passive listening as a supplement to your main language learning methods, provided you do so in helpful ways:
- Learning to recognize the sounds of a language. As a beginner, get used to hearing native speakers talk in your target language. This will help you better understand the flow of speech and pick out individual words once you start learning vocabulary.
- Preparing yourself to use the content as an active listening resource. Play a song or video in the background first, then go back and listen carefully, looking up new words and actively trying to understand what’s being said.
- Re-listening to old study materials using passive listening. For instance, if you’re an intermediate or advanced learner and you’ve already actively studied the lyrics of a song, it’ll be much easier for you to internalize them during future passive replays.
Passive Listening Language Learning Resources
So while you shouldn’t rely on passive listening alone to learn a language, you can still use it to your advantage.
Sometimes it’s fun to put something on in the background—like catchy tunes or a funny TV show. So, why not do that in your target language?
Here are a few places you can find audio content for passive listening:
- Spotify: Stream pre-made playlists and discover podcasts in your target language
- Amazon: Buy physical copies or stream foreign language music albums, TV shows and movies
- Online radio stations: Search for broadcasts from specific countries to hear top songs and news
- Your local library: Find CDs and audio files at the physical branch, or see if they offer free audiobook streaming options
You might also use YouTube for a wide variety of music and videos in hundreds of languages. The visual component of most YouTube content will be an added help during the active listening portion of your studying.
If you think finding high-quality content on YouTube is a bit of a struggle, you can also try FluentU, which provides curated videos, learning tools and personalized suggestions.
FluentU takes authentic videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.
You can try FluentU for free for 2 weeks. Check out the website or download the iOS app or Android app.
P.S. Click here to take advantage of our current sale! (Expires at the end of this month.)
If you want to enjoy some passive listening language learning, go right ahead.
As long as you understand the limitations of this technique, there’s no reason you can’t have some background fun with your language learning content!
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
And One More Thing...
If you dig the idea of learning on your own time from the comfort of your smart device with real-life authentic language content, you'll love using FluentU.
With FluentU, you'll learn real languages—as they're spoken by native speakers. FluentU has a wide variety of videos as you can see here:
FluentU has interactive captions that let you tap on any word to see an image, definition, audio and useful examples. Now native language content is within reach with interactive transcripts.
Didn't catch something? Go back and listen again. Missed a word? Hover your mouse over the subtitles to instantly view definitions.
You can learn all the vocabulary in any video with FluentU's "learn mode." Swipe left or right to see more examples for the word you’re learning.
And FluentU always keeps track of vocabulary that you’re learning. It gives you extra practice with difficult words—and reminds you when it’s time to review what you’ve learned. You get a truly personalized experience.
Start using the FluentU website on your computer or tablet or, better yet, download the FluentU app from the iTunes or Google Play store. Click here to take advantage of our current sale! (Expires at the end of this month.)
