Listening every day
How I listen, what difficulty I aim for, and what I do when progress stalls.
⏱ About 3 min read
Listening was my slowest skill to improve. It was also the one that changed the most.
If you only have time for one thing each day, I would pick listening.
Two kinds of listening
I split listening into two types, and they do not substitute for each other.
| Active listening | Background listening | |
|---|---|---|
| Attention | Full | While doing something else |
| Value per minute | High | Low |
| Time cost | Has to be scheduled | Almost free |
| What it does | Creates progress | Keeps your ear used to it |
There was a stretch where I got lazy and only put a podcast on during my commute, then told myself I had "studied today". Two months later I had not moved at all.
Background listening does not replace active listening. It only keeps your ear used to the rhythm and sounds of the language while you do something else.
Picking the right difficulty
The best material is what you understand most of, but not all of.
How I check
Play two random minutes and score yourself:
- You follow the thread, but a few sentences slip past → right level, stay here.
- You understand almost everything without effort → too easy, go up.
- You only catch isolated words → too hard, go down.
How to use subtitles
I have tried all three:
- No subtitles — hardest, but this is what real listening practice is.
- English subtitles — acceptable. But it easily turns into reading rather than listening.
- Vietnamese subtitles — I dropped these entirely. The brain always takes the easier route, and the easier route is reading your own language.
What I do now: watch once with no subtitles, then rewatch with English subtitles to see what I missed.
When progress stalls
Plateaus are normal. I hit mine hardest somewhere around the 200–400 hour mark.
If one drags on too long, I check four things:
- Is the material too easy? If I understand all of it, I am maintaining, not learning.
- Am I stuck on one accent, one topic? Change speakers, change genre.
- Is vocabulary the bottleneck? If I hear every sound clearly and still don't know the meaning, the problem is words, not ears. That is when I read more and do more Anki.
- Or the reverse — you know the words but don't recognise the sounds? If you turn subtitles on and the sentence is made entirely of words you know, this is not a vocabulary problem. It is sounds being linked and swallowed, and I wrote a separate piece about it: When you know the words but can't hear them.
The exercise that fixes bottleneck 4 fastest is dictation — one minute of audio a day, written out word for word and then checked against the transcript.