Improve Your Portuguese Listening Skills – Best Practices

Learners of Portuguese must work on their listening comprehension skills if they are serious about becoming fluent. That’s unquestionable. Yet, exposure to spoken Portuguese can easily overwhelm students, especially beginners.

So, how do you go about practicing and consistently improving your Portuguese listening skills without ever feeling discouraged?

Language learners should practice their listening skills deliberately and systematically by tapping into adequate materials that match their language level. What’s more, distinguishing between passive vs. active listening and understanding the benefits of either practice is critical – everyone should deliberately work on both fronts.

In what follows, you’ll learn the concepts of passive vs. active listening (in the language learning context) and the gifts of either practice. Concerning active listening specifically, we’ll look into adequate practice resources and methods to maximize your results.

Why do your listening skills matter?

Your listening skills are key to reaching fluency. From a language learning perspective, a well-trained ear has positive knock-on effects on all other language skills.

To begin with, sharpened listening skills make you more attuned to basic Portuguese language sounds. A good grasp of the Portuguese sound system leads to better pronunciation, which in turn increases your confidence levels when speaking in your target language.

The more confidently you speak in Portuguese, the better the experience is for all involved in the conversation. As a result, you may be willing to engage in talking more often, thereby reinforcing your listening and pronunciation skills. It’s a virtuous cycle.

Now, you have to be deliberate and actively work on your listening skills to advance them. Otherwise, they will most likely lie stagnant or, at best, evolve very slowly.

For the reasons mentioned above, the later your listening comprehension skills start blooming, the later you will achieve conversational fluency. In that case, below-average listening skills become a limiting factor slowing down your language learning project as a whole.

Hopefully, that won’t be your case. Below, I will be suggesting a straightforward 4-step method that will make your listening practice more systematic and effective.

But before we go on to that, let’s distinguish between two different kinds of listening: passive vs. active listening.

Passive vs. active listening

In a language-learning context, it is useful to distinguish two kinds of listening, namely passive and active. Let’s take a look at these concepts to learn their differences and how you can use either to work on your language skills.

Passive listening

Passive listening takes place when, say, you have a Portuguese radio station playing in the background while you’re doing the dishes. 

As a beginner or lower-intermediate student, you might not be able to make out most of what is coming out of the speakers. Sure, you might catch a word here and there, but otherwise, all you will hear is a string of sounds melting together into some indistinct jumble.

Now, however unintelligible it might be, passive listening is highly beneficial to the development of your language skills and you should therefore integrate it into your learning strategy.

See, by simply being exposed to the spoken language you are absorbing Portuguese sounds and melody into deeper layers of your subconscious. This attunement to the Portuguese sound system will eventually show its dividends at a later stage in the form of heightened listening and pronunciation skills.   

The beauty of passive listening is that you can do it from day one. You can tap into Portuguese TV, radio, and other media to work on your language skills, even as a beginner. But you need to shift your focus from semantics to phonetics.

A few tips to make the most out of passive listening.

• Focus on the sounds you hear, especially those that sound unfamiliar to you. Be playful and try to mimic them. 

• Explore and play around with your lips, jaw, and tongue positions when you struggle to reproduce a specific language sound. Does the airflow come out through your mouth or your nose? Are your vocal cords engaged or not? Pay attention to those things.

• Pay attention to and mimic melodic and rhythmic patterns.

While it is worth integrating passive listening into your learning toolkit, you’ll need generous doses of active listening to understand what you hear.

Active listening

Active listening occurs when you intently try to make out words, phrases, and sentences that you hear. It requires full attention and your focus is more on semantics rather than phonetics.

Ideally, you want to practice active listening with quality materials that match your current level of language proficiency – it shouldn’t be too easy, and it should not be too difficult either.

See, you want it to be fairly challenging so that it gives you enough room for growth and development without it being overwhelmingly difficult and off-putting.

The length and topic delimitation of your practice materials are, likewise, important. Desirably, you want to practice active listening on relatively short chunks of text/audio that revolve around a well-defined topic – this makes it easier for you to follow along.

It is always advantageous to have access to the transcript. At some point during your listening comprehension drill, you may want to lean on it to fill in the gaps.

Finally, make sure that you have a coherent strategy to go about your listening drills. Next, I am suggesting a straightforward 4-step method that will give you the best results. Read on.

The 4-step method for active listening practice

The following method is designed to give you the best results when drilling active listening. It assumes that the materials you are practicing on are suitable for your language proficiency level and include voiceover and transcript. 

Step 1: Listen in one go

Listen! Forget about the transcript for now. At this stage, you want to listen to the audio without any interruption and see how much of it you can grasp.

You will most likely miss some words or even full sentences. That’s fine – it’s supposed to be challenging. Do it over again and see if you can fill in any blanks.

Step 2: Play Copycat

Play it again, but now focusing solely on sounds and mimicry. In your first round, simply shadow what you hear, that is, mimic the sounds as you hear them. Do it in one go.

Pay special attention to sounds that you are not familiar with yet, as well as to melodic and rhythmic patterns you find peculiar to the language.

Play it a second time. This time around, pause the recording at your convenience and spend as much time as you need with it. Depending on what catches your attention, you will be mimicking either single sounds, words, or entire sentences.

Be observant of your lips, jaw, and tongue positions while you’re reproducing the sounds – the more you tune into the physicality of it, the better you will perform.

Step 3: Fill in the blanks

Bring on the transcript. Play the audio and read along to fill in the gaps with the words you couldn’t parse before.

Before you rush to look up new words and expressions in the dictionary, try to figure them out from the context. Only after trying the contextual approach should you fall back on the dictionary.

This contextual (no-translation) approach improves long-term retention and wires your brain to your target language more effectively.

Step 4: Listen one last time

Take a short break before taking this final step. Come back and play the audio one last time (preferably without the transcript). Everything will probably sound much clearer now.

Take a moment to rejoice and celebrate the progress you’ve just made. Well done!

Things to keep in mind

• Sometimes you may as well have access to an English translation (or to your mother tongue). Use it only if you must! In that case, read the translation in one go beforehand to get the gist of it (beginners may find this very useful). Alternatively, read it afterward as a validation that you’ve got it right (especially concerning idiomatic expressions).
• Avoid jumping between languages to compare word by word or sentence by sentence. That will turn your learning process heavy, slow, and ineffective. Always strive for a no-translation approach and to learn new words and expressions from the context.
• Finally, don’t get caught up in details – they’re beside the point. You’re good to move on once you’ve understood the text in its entirety. You can always revisit the material later on.

Resources for listening practice

Mind that the resources I am about to suggest are European-standard specific. Learn more about how the European and Brazilian standards compare: European vs. Brazilian Portuguese – How Different Are They Really?

Active listening

StoryLift

These stories are specially written for Portuguese language learners and are CEFR-graded to match different levels of language proficiency. All stories come with voiceover and English translation, and most of them have quizzes to test your reading comprehension. Learn more about StoryLift.

TV shows with Portuguese subtitles

For more advanced learners, this may be an excellent source to practice active listening. Here’s a guide to Portuguese TV shows with Portuguese subtitles: 22 Online Portuguese TV Shows with Subtitles to Boost Your Language Learning.

Passive listening

It is relatively easy to find sources for passive listening. If you are currently living in a Portuguese-speaking country, then well, it is all around you. Otherwise, just turn on a Portuguese radio channel like Antena 1 or TSF.

Podcasts can also be a good source for either passive or active listening. You may want to take a peek at this article: 16 Podcast Shows to Nurture Your Portuguese Language Skills (and Get to Know More About Portugal).

Hey! If you’ve enjoyed reading this article you might as well enjoy reading these:

• Mindsets and Strategies to Learn Portuguese the Best (or any other language)
• 38 Quick Tips to Improve Your Portuguese
• Online Portuguese Learning Resources that Are Actually Worth Your Time.