For many learners, listening is one of the most challenging language skills to learn. Unlike with reading, after words are spoken, they disappear right into thin air, which means it helps to be ready to hear language, and hear it right, the first time. Listening is also especially helpful when it comes to connecting to the culture of the language you’re learning, which makes it one of the most rewarding language skills to improve! Whether you’re diving into a podcast, watching a movie, or having a conversation, listening skills can unlock endless possibilities in your new language.

Here’s how we teach listening at Duolingo, what the science says about how listening works, and the best ways for learners to practice it.

Collage of images representing reading, listening, writing, and speaking: a pencil, book, Duolingo Story, name tag, laptop with a Duolingo lesson, a dropped pin, headphones, an audio button, and a cell phone with a Duolingo lesson
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By the way, if you have hearing impairment and want to do fewer listening-based exercises or skip them entirely, we have accessibility features that let you customize your experience!

How Duolingo helps improve listening skills

To practice listening, our courses include different kinds of audio exercises right from the beginning, so be sure to turn your sound on whenever you can! We scaffold, or structure, our listening exercises to gradually get you used to listening and understanding, without relying on reading. This helps you build the skills you need to listen to music, FaceTime with friends who speak the language, or watch your favorite gamers on Twitch! To start listening like a pro, we encourage you to make use of all these tools in Duolingo courses:

Listening exercises
In your lessons, listening exercises early in each unit show up with the written words to help you make connections between the writing and how the language sounds. As you level up, you’ll get more audio exercises without any text at all.

Screenshot of a Duolingo lesson with the instructions “Tap the matching pairs” and one column of buttons with speaker icons, indicating to tap and listen, and a second column of buttons with the English words “bread,” “hello,” “and,” and “please.” Screenshot of a Duolingo lesson with the instructions “Listen for the missing word.” Duolingo character Oscar is shown saying a German sentence with one word missing. Beneath him, two buttons with speaker icons are presented as options. Screenshot of a Duolingo lesson with the instructions “Type the missing word.” Duolingo character Vikram is shown with a speaker icon and a turtle icon next to him, representing the options to listen to the phrase at normal speed or more slowly. Beneath him is a German sentence with one word missing.

Learning the sounds in new writing systems
If you’re learning a language with a different writing system from your own, you’ll see exercises that focus on linking the sounds of the language with how they are represented in writing. This is also a good way to learn the difference between some of the sounds that don’t exist in your own language!

Screenshot of a Duolingo lesson with the question “What do you hear?” A blue speaker button is at the top of the screen, and four different options of Korean segments are presented as choices. Screenshot of a Duolingo lesson with the instructions “Tap what you hear.” A blue speaker button and a blue turtle button are at the top of the screen, and various tiles with different Korean characters are presented as choices. Screenshot of a Duolingo lesson with the instructions “Tap what you hear.” The user has completed the exercise by selecting two Korean characters, and a green banner at the bottom of the screen reads “Awesome!”

DuoRadio
If you’re learning Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Portuguese, DuoRadio lessons are built into your learning path, which means the vocabulary is the right level for you. These audio-only lessons are perfect for ramping up your listening practice with short, podcast-like episodes hosted by one of Duolingo’s world characters.

Screenshot of the Duolingo Japanese course. The user has selected a DuoRadio icon called “Breakfast Routine,” and the options presented are “LISTEN +25 XP” and “DO THIS LATER.” Screenshot of a DuoRadio lesson. Duolingo character Lucy is sitting at a desk while a speech bubble with a woman’s face on it floats above radio equipment, indicating a call in progress. The instructions given to the user are “Select 2 words you hear.” Underneath is a speaker icon and a progress bar, showing the audio partially in progress. The user has 3 Japanese words to select from.

The Practice tab
Your Practice tab lets you target specific skills, and includes listening-only lessons, as well as vocabulary lessons where you review the words you’ve recently learned—some of them by listening to them spoken aloud! You can get to the Practice tab by tapping on the barbell icon at the bottom of your screen.

A screenshot of the Practice tab. The lesson options are divided into two sections, “Skill practice” and “Collections.” “Skill practice” includes “Words,” “Speak,” and “Listen,” and the “Collections” consist of “Mistakes” and “Stories.” Screenshot of the beginning of a listening lesson. A green, blue, and purple Duo the owl leans in from the side of the screen and has a speech bubble that says, “Put your ears on alert! You’ll listen 10 times in this practice session.” Screenshot of a listening lesson. Duolingo character Lily has a speech bubble next to her, but instead of words, there is an icon of a speaker and an icon of a turtle, indicating the options to play the audio at regular speed or more slowly. The instructions for the exercise are “Tap what you hear,” and several French words appear as options at the bottom of the screen.

How does listening work?

Listening is a receptive skill, which means you receive the information in the new language (and someone else did the speaking!). Listening can feel more challenging than reading (the other receptive skill) because after you hear those words once, you usually can’t go back and listen again. You also can’t pick out spaces between words like you can when reading, so listeners have to be ready to identify the words they know from a fast stream of speech. But listening to the language you’re learning is also rewarding and informative, because you can learn so much through how people talk in addition to what they might say.

Listening relies on being able to quickly access words and meanings from memory (a lot like reading!), and strong listening skills also require being sensitive to a lot of different sounds and rhythms in the new language. We don’t only speak with an accent in a new language—we also hear with an accent, too! We start learning the sounds of our first language(s) in utero, before we’re even born, so learning sounds in a new language involves re-training your brain and your tongue, after decades of fine-tuning your hearing to your own language.

Practice with the language’s sounds also improves your ability to learn vocabulary and recognize the individual words you’re hearing, which you have to do fast! That’s why learners often feel like the new language is being spoken so much faster than their own language: It takes a lot of mental energy to identify the words you’re hearing, without pauses between, while the next words are already being spoken.

The faster your brain can look up related vocabulary in the language, the easier listening becomes, so reading can actually help your listening skills, too! The language can also change depending on who’s talking: What kinds of words, phrases, endings, rhythms, and sounds are used by younger or older speakers, by men versus women, in formal or informal contexts?

Image of two women standing next to a large display of baguettes, loaves of bread, tomatoes, and bananas. The woman on the left wears an apron and appears to be the baker and is talking to the woman on the right, who is carrying a baguette in a paper bag and appears to be a customer

Listening across languages

Languages can vary dramatically not only in their grammar, but in their sounds, too! For example, in English, we often make our voice go up at the end of questions, to show that we’re asking something, but making your voice go up or down, higher or lower, doesn’t change the meaning of a word itself: House always means the same thing no matter if our voice goes up (…house?), stays flat (house), or does anything else (HOUSE!). But for many languages, how you change your voice matters a lot! Tonal languages are common throughout East Asia, the Americas, and Africa, and in these languages you need to know the tone of each word: its special pattern of your voice going up, or down, or up then down, or down then up, and so on.


Languages can also have pretty different sounds, like the trilled “rr” in Spanish (like in carro, meaning car), clicks like in Zulu (like in the word umgwaqo, meaning street), or the “th” in English, like in think (it’s actually a pretty rare sound across the world!). Some languages even have different sounds for different speakers: In one dialect of Mixtec, an Oto-Manguean language spoken in Mexico, there are words that men have to say as “tee” (men say teena for dog) and women have to say as “chee” (women say cheena for dog). Learners have to recognize all these sound differences in their new language!

Tips for listening practice

Be sure to make the most of listening on Duolingo, and incorporate listening practice in your everyday routine!

  • In your Duolingo lessons, remember to turn on Listening exercises from the settings under your profile.
  • Adapt listening exercises to your needs, especially when you’re starting out! Use the turtle button to hear the language slowed down, and replay the words and sentences as many times as you need.
  • Get extra listening practice by first listening to an exercise with your eyes closed, before you even see the sentence. If that feels too tough, listen while reading first, and then play the recording a second time with your eyes closed before you respond. Listening without seeing the text helps train your ear to identify the words and even individual sounds in the language.
  • Listen to music in the language you’re studying. Music is catchy, has lots of repetition, and helps you learn useful phrases in a memorable context. Look up the lyrics to check what you hear!
  • Watch shows or movies in the language by switching the audio to the language you’re learning. You can check out movies originally made in the language, and you might be able to find options that are dubbed into the language, too.
  • Find apps or podcasts in the language. Look for options related to news, sports, history, fashion—any topic you like to hear about in your own language!

For beginners, it may feel more comfortable to practice listening to language that’s somewhat simpler and has more repetition. Check out YouTube videos (with captions!) to find music videos, children’s stories and nursery rhymes, and videos on topics you are already familiar with. Any kind of listening helps you get used to the language’s rhythm, new sounds, and useful expressions, even if you don’t feel comfortable with all the vocabulary or grammar yet.

More advanced learners might want to try out materials created for adult speakers of the language. These often feel more challenging, so start out with listening opportunities that also have transcripts or video to help you along. Even listening to the language without understanding everything is good for learning! Training your ear takes practice, time, and lots of exposure (hearing the language).

Image of Duo the owl with headphones on and looking cheerful

The message is clear: You’ve got this!

Listening is an important part of successful communication, and now you have everything you need to sharpen your skills!