Why understanding spoken French is harder than speaking it

Speaking intelligible French is challenging enough, a correspondent recently wrote to this newspaper; but even harder, she said, is understanding when people speak to you.

They jabber away at high speed, running their words together, cutting corners wherever they can, leaving out first and last letters, and lapsing into slang and dialect whenever it suits them.

Yes, it is difficult, but it is not all down to being an anglophone foreigner. Even fluent, native speakers sometimes fail to get the gist the first time because of accents and the lack of articulation. That said, there are ways to improve your listening.

Language teachers often neglect to teach listening because they assume it to be a natural ability that improves automatically through practice.

“You’ve got ears,” they seem to exclaim in frustration: “It’s not my job to teach you how to use them!”

I am a part-time English teacher myself and I know that listening is a skill that can be taught.

If you are struggling to understand what is being said to you and around you, let me pass on my experience in the classroom.

Why you stop understanding

The first step is to work out why you are not registering meaning in a foreign language. There are two common reasons. One is self-consciousness that causes you to freeze in panic and embarrassment and to withdraw into yourself for safety.

You expect not to understand. I have been there many times. You can get locked in a vicious circle in which the more you do not understand, the more you become convinced you will never understand.

The best cure for “ear-tied” syndrome is to admit your vulnerability and make a joke out of it. If you have the listening ability of a French toddler, accept it and know that it is only a passing phase.

It does not have to be humiliating to ask someone to repeat what they have just said. You can turn it into a positive. Make the other person feel that you really want to understand what they have to say and you will get them on your side.

If someone is impatient with you, you can also, very politely, indicate that communication is a two-way process and that if they want you to get the message they should make the effort to slow down and find simpler words.

Switching your brain into French

The other reason for not understanding is that you forget to switch the language ‘chip’ in your brain to French. I know this sounds crazy but you may be listening in English, visualising words and waiting to hear them said as you think they should be said, as you would say them yourself.

The solution here is to treat the spoken language as being entirely different from the written language. Forget how words look and get used to the way they sound, which may have nothing to do with their spelling.

Names like ‘Reims’ and ‘Auch’, for example, cannot be pronounced from the page: they have to be heard. It is the same in English, by the way, so the French have this problem in reverse.

A breakthrough will come

Once you have mastered any emotional blocks you have – or at least become aware of them – you can move on to some practical steps. In the next article I will set out my suggestion for a beginner’s personalised French listening course.

If you stick at it, I promise there will come a moment of aural illumination, when your French ear suddenly clicks into gear.

It will probably happen when you are so absorbed in what is being said that you forget to feel inadequate and embarrassed.

From that point on, the amount of recognisable French will snowball and you will only have to make rare requests for repetition or clarification.