Every language has its own set of sounds, like a spoken alphabet. Your new language likely has sounds not in your native one. Our brains learn to ignore unfamiliar sounds, so you may struggle to hear new ones accurately. With practice, you can retrain your ears, improving listening skills and your accent and speech.
Parent Skills:
Child Techniques: Transcription, Listen Looping, Sound Study
Every language has its own set of sounds, like a spoken alphabet. Your new language likely has sounds not in your native one. Our brains learn to ignore unfamiliar sounds, so you may struggle to hear new ones accurately. With practice, you can retrain your ears, improving listening skills and your accent and speech.
Train your ears to hear new sounds
Improve your listening and speaking
Ear training is a broad category of various techniques which all have to do with training your ears to better hear the language. A common example of ear training is "minimal pairs training" where you practice distinguishing between two very similar sounds that don't exist in your native language.
A little bit of ear training goes a long way. It can be done at different points in the learning process, but ideally you start doing it from the beginning. Training your ears early in the process helps avoid having to relearn things later.
For languages that have very different sound systems from your native one, doing a solid 15-20 minutes of ear training per day for a few weeks can be really beneficial. But if your target language has a sound system that isn't too different, watching a few videos or doing a few minutes of training per day is more than enough to get the benefits.
Our brains literally learn to ignore sounds that aren't important for our native language. This means that there may be sounds you cannot hear the difference between. Trust the resources over your own ears and with time, you'll learn to distinguish them.
Age plays a role in learning new sounds. It doesn't mean you're doomed to never being able to hear the sounds of your target language if you're over 40, but it does mean you'll need to pay special attention and do more practice than a teenager (damn kids).
Specific ear training methods vary between different languages and learning styles. Some methods/tools to look into are Fluent Forever, The Mimic Method, Tone Training, Minimal Pairs, or check out the Sound Study activity.