PRACTISING LISTENING

One of the problems that everyone has when learning a new language is listening, that is to say, the ability to listen and understand what you are listening. Specifically, the problem is that we do not recognise the words. However, if we are reading those same words, we understand everything and know the meaning of what we are reading.

To make the connection between the written word and the spoken word, the best activity that you can do is to listen and, at the same time, read what you are listening. I mean, you should listen reading the transcripts.

One of the best resources is to watch movies or TV show in English with the subtitles in English. When you start doing this, it would be very difficult but as you continue with the activity, it will become easy.  A good webpage to watch TV show is ORORO.TV. You have limited minutes each day. If you pay for the membership, you can watch as many chapters as you want. Anther good thing that this webage has is that you can filter the shows using different criteria. One of those criteria is "difficulty" 

(If you click on the image, you will access the webpage)

Another good webpage to practise is BBC 6 MINUTES ENGLISH. Here, you will find lots of 6 minutes conversations in English about a variety of topic. You have different options: you can listen and read online or download to your electronic device both the recording and the transcript. Also, for each of the conversations you have a glossary of vocabulary for each of the conversations.

(If you click on the image, you will access the webpage)

Finally, I have received via email a very useful youtube channel where you can practise to. The channel is called "EnSimplesPalabras" and, among other resources, you have some videos featuring talk by different people. The person making the videos teaches us some words and expressions that are going to appear in the talk and then trnscribes the talk in English, so you can read while you are listening. From this lines, I woul like to thank "EnSimplesPalabras" for his (or her) wonderful job. 

(If you click on the image, you will access the webpage)

I will increase the list of resources when I find more useful resources to practise listening. If you know any, you are most welcome to share them in the comments sections. Thank you for reading! 

*23rd April 2016:  I'm editing the post to add a new listening resource. this webpage is called TED talks and it is also a very good webpage to practise listening. 
You can see a lot of talks related with very different topics subtitled in several languages, English among them. Also, you have the option of downloading the video (subtitled or not) and the audio recording. 

  (If you click on the image, you will access the webpage)