Listening is not the same as Reading

This may seem obvious but the way that we often learn English in school, the way you may have learned English is with a focus on reading and writing for academic purposes.

Maybe in high school you had to read in English, but maybe you didn’t have as much listening practice in English, or you didn’t know how to approach listening. The way our mind works is with reading we are visual learners.

We are looking at the text on a page in a book, and we are associating the letters with the word, and these shapes that we see on the page, which are letters, we associate those with meaning. When you listen to English, it’s completely different process.

We hear sounds, words, phrases and we need to associate those sounds with meaning. This is especially difficult in English because the way that we write words, the way that we spell is special. We have silent letters, we have diphthongs.

We have words that come from other languages, and pronunciation varies widely. So remember not to listen the same way you read.

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