How to Develop Your Listening Skills As A Beginner.

The four language learning skills are a set of four capabilities that allow you to understand and produce language for proper and effective communication. These skills are:

• Listening,
• Speaking,
• Reading,
• Writing

Listening is arguably one of the most difficult skills to learn, but with enough practice, it can be less hard. If you’re a beginner, I have some special pieces of advice for you….

Start By Doing Something Small.

At first, don’t do anything that will discourage you (no podcasts, TVs, radios, etc. for the moment). At this point, you don’t want to focus on improving your listening skills. Your goal is to develop your listening in Portuguese. Once this habit is developed, improving and mastering your listening will be easier. So, here are some simple and easy ways to start developing your listening!

1.     Listen To Your Instructor For Articulation, Natural Intonation, Word Stress, And Accent:
During your lesson, pay attention to how your instructor is speaking, ie, learn how your instructor articulates the sounds, moves their lips, tongue and jaw ; when their voice rises or falls in pitch (high/low sounds) and the meanings these features convey in context or usage;

2.    Listen And Repeat While You Are Taking Lessons
You are starting with Portuguese. You’re a beginner. This is the situation where you need a lot of repetition in order to create the most common patterns in your head ( such as the ones listed above). By doing an active and meaningful repetition with the aid of your instructor, you’ll develop your listening little by little in every lesson and also consolidate structures, phrases and vocabulary!

3.     Listen And Read At The Same Time:
If you are just starting to learn Portuguese, it can be difficult to listen to the spoken language. Reading and listening at the same time can help you understand better. Take, for example, a written dialogue or a text sent by your instructor. Even if the speaker has a unique accent or uses words that are difficult to understand, you can use the text to check your comprehension.

4.     Practice With Dictations

A dictation is when you write down exactly what you hear.  So you listen to someone talking or you listen to something and write down everything that speaker is saying. It might sound a little dull, but this technique has a LOT of benefits. It will:

• Improve your listening skills:  by consistently listening to audio materials in Portuguese.
• Improve your ability to think faster in Portuguese: while you are listening to materials in Portuguese your brain will have to work hard and fast to process new information in order for you to write it down. 
• Improve your writing skills: you will be training your brain to write in Portuguese, as you are writing texts. You will be consistently working and developing your spelling skills as well.
• Help you to better understand grammar:  you will be exposing yourself to various grammatical structures which you will question at times, but you may also better understand them in time.
• Improve your vocabulary: through dictations, you will be probably learning or reviewing new words, phrases and expressions that are still not familiar to you. You will, then, be practicing your listening and improving your vocabulary at the same time!