Have you ever listened to a podcast or song in a foreign language, and thought: I’m not getting anything out of this. I don’t understand a word!

If so, you’re not alone.

I talk with many learners who have the same experience. They listen to native speakers speaking in their target language on podcasts, YouTube videos, movies or songs, but they feel like they can’t understand anything at all.

So what’s going on? What’s preventing these learners from understanding? And how can they get better at listening?

Here’s how you can begin developing better listening skills for language learning.

Vocabulary Knowledge

One of the most common complaints I hear from language learners is “I’m not good at listening.” We might blame this on a lack of vocabulary. Maybe we think that if only we knew more words, we would be able to understand what people are saying. But research has shown that vocabulary knowledge accounts for just 14% of our ability to listen in a foreign language.

That doesn’t mean we should stop learning words altogether. The more words we learn, the more our vocabulary knowledge increases and that can only be a good thing across the board of our language learning, including listening.

But there are many other factors that affect our ability to listen in another language, such as how well we can predict what people are going to say.

Related: The Essential Vocabulary to Learn in Any Language (Your First 200 Words…ish!)

Syntactic Knowledge

Most of us probably remember those long, frustrating hours spent in the classroom or at home, trying to get your head around how French or German verbs work. You know you need a good grasp of grammar and word order for better speaking, but what about listening?

Syntactic knowledge is to do with how well we know grammar, word order, all the ‘glue’ that holds our words together and makes them make sense. In some studies, beginners rely more on this skill, which might go some way to explaining how we can still get the gist of something even if we don’t know all the words. The great news here is that despite that, it’s less significant to our listening skills overall. Semantic (vocabulary) knowledge is more important and relied upon than syntactic knowledge.

Of course, that said, it’s still useful to keep learning grammar of a new language. Get familiar with word order, learn the conjugations you can listen out for, and become more confident in this area as a whole.

Related: 5 Essential French Grammar Tips for Beginners

Discourse Knowledge

Discourse knowledge is all about what you’re expecting from a listening situation. The more you can understand about cultural speaking norms, the better. This helps you to not only apply them yourself when speaking, but also confidently hear clues and figure out context, even when every word isn’t clear to you.

If you’ve ever been confused by the way that someone said something, or had them ask if you were listening carefully enough, this kind of knowledge is essential. It’s the difference between being able to ask for someone to repeat themselves politely, and being unable to tell whether they were making a request or a joke in the first place.

It’s also really worth getting comfortable with pauses and natural speech patterns. There’s no need to get nervous when people pause and feel the need to fill the gap.

Related: How to Speak Another Language Without An Accent (TL;DR: You Can’t.)

Pragmatic Knowledge

Pragmatic knowledge is about how well you understand the intentions of what’s being said (beyond just words). This can be harder for lower level learners, so there’s no need to worry. It will come in time, especially the more time you spend listening in a language. Again, much like improving your discourse knowledge, this is all about learning and becoming familiar with cultural speaking norms, and practicing listening and identifying these as much as possible.

If you want to improve the pragmatic aspect of your listening skills, you should look for ways to listen to as many different types of conversations as you can.

You should also try to learn some of the more common non-verbal cues used by speakers when they’re communicating. For example, in English we often say “yes” while shaking our heads from side-to-side. In other languages this could be the opposite, or it might have a different meaning altogether!

You can learn these through listening practice or through reading articles that explain them.

Prior Knowledge

Prior knowledge. This is an easy one and it’s one we all have already AND a listening success factor that’s only going to get better – even with zero effort! Your prior knowledge is everything you know about everything ever. This could be things directly related to the language you’re learning, your own language, or quite literally anything else. You never know when something will help you figure out what you’re listening to!

L1 Listening Ability

If you are not a good listener in your first language, then you are going to struggle in other languages. If you think of listening as just an auditory activity, then you are missing the point completely. Good listening involves active engagement – understanding what is being said, interpreting meaning and context, reacting to it and making sense of it. Most of these activities take place in your head and if you are not able to do them properly because of a lack of familiarity or interest, then it stands to reason that you will also have problems when trying to listen in a foreign language.

Speaking of prior knowledge, how good you are at listening in your first language also plays a part in your listening success in other languages too. If you think this is something you could improve on, then do further research and reading into being a better listener – outside of a language learning context.

Sound Discrimination Ability

Sound Discrimination Ability is all about how well you can distinguish between sounds of a language. Think about how often words in English sometimes blend into one another, and chances are there’s lots of examples in the language you’re learning too. The good news is there’s lots of ways to get better at this. You can learn pronunciation, word blends, roots, familiar structures (such as verb endings, question markers, negative markers). All of these things will help you get better when it comes to your sound discrimination ability.

Related: Why Music is a Must-Have Resource for Language Learning

Anxiety

There’s also some affective factors to our listening success. Affective factors just means things like moods, feelings and attitudes. The first we’ll discuss here is anxiety. Are you expecting listening to be difficult? Anxiety says hello! A great start to help work around this is to work on changing the perspective that “listening is hard” by encouraging a growth mindset in your thinking around language learning.

Related: How to Become a Better Language Learner

Self-Efficacy

How well do you think you can do this thing? How much do you believe you can listen well in another language? This is the second affective listening success factor: your self-efficacy. When it’s low, it’s easy to block how well we listen to things. The way to improve here? Work on increasing your overall confidence in your language skills and ability (again with the mindset stuff!). The more you keep learning (and documenting your progress so you can easily check back!), the more your self-efficacy will increase.

Motivation

Motivation flows and changes as we learn a language over time. Sometimes it’s higher, other times it’s lower. It’s all good. But in specific listening situations, it’s always worth asking ourselves how much we actually want to do the thing. Do we actually care about what we’re listening to? Does the topic motivate us? Of course, there’s lots we can do to change this. And your motivation often increases when you work on reducing your anxiety and increasing your self-efficacy. It’s also a really useful idea to find something to listen to that you enjoy and are intrested in. And ideally that’s the right level, which could be slightly above your current knowledge, or slightly below, depending on how you feel on a particular day.
Overall, with these last three affective listening success factors, I notice that Higher anxiety ➔ lower self-efficacy ➔ lower motivation.

Related: Mindful Language Learning (+ What It Looks Like)

Metacognition

Think about the listening process and how to respond appropriately in a listening situation.
Plan, monitor and solve comprehension problems, and evaluate your own approach.

How do you do this?

First, come up with a plan: What are you going to listen for? What questions should you ask yourself while you’re listening so that you can monitor your understanding of what is being said? Then think about how you will use what you hear to come up with a response. This is called metacognition.

As you listen, try to use context clues to figure out what the speaker is trying to say. Make predictions about what might be coming next. Ask yourself if there are any words or phrases that are confusing before asking for clarification. Try listening for key words or ideas rather than every single word or phrase.

After listening, think about the following questions: What did I understand (or not understand) from the conversation? Was I able to give an appropriate response? How could I have improved my response? These steps will help you get better at listening in any language, but they can be especially helpful when your goal is to improve your listening skills in a foreign language.