How Do You Improve Your Icelandic Listening Skills?

Hello everybody!

I am writing this post to respond to a common question that I receive all the time: "How do/did you improve your Icelandic listening skills?"

Unfortunately, this question does not have a simple answer, as every individual learns best through different methods and at different paces. However, that's not to say that I have not picked up some tips and tricks over time that you can apply yourself and see if they work for you.

All answers and anecdotes here are from my personal experience.

Why is listening the hardest skill?

Reading and writing are the easiest because you have much more time to process and work over the information than the other two skills. When you are reading something, you can look at a word, and if you do not know it, check the dictionary or a translator. In addition, and sneakily helpful, when you read, you know exactly what word is giving you trouble, even if you don't know what the word means. This allows you to check what it means in a dictionary or other source.

With writing, it's much the same story. You can use the internet, a dictionary, a thesaurus, or whatever you need to be confident before putting your words out.

Speaking, the third skill, is more difficult than reading and writing, but you have an advantage in that you get to choose what to say. You don't have to choose any big or hard-to-pronounce words if you do not want to. You can choose words that you have full confidence in and will never, by the nature of the medium, use a word that you have never heard of.

Listening is the hardest skill because you have none of the control granted by the other three mediums. When you are listening, you are passively receiving, so you are at the mercy of whatever is spoken to you. Unlike reading, you also have much less ability to take what is being given at your own pace unless you are listening to an audio recording. Depending on where you are hearing the recording, slowing it down may be possible, but that often leads to distortion instead of improved clarity.

If the audio you are listening to has an accompanying text, such as an audiobook or a song, you can stop the recording and reference the written word, using the much easier reading skill before moving on. However, this is not always possible, as most audio sources do not have accompanying texts: a YouTube video may have no subtitles, your podcase may not be scripted, or a song may not have been transcribed anywhere.

Talking with somebody is the most difficult because you have to contend with their entire vocabulary and any speech patterns that they possess. Then, when they speak, you hear one word, and then it's instantly onto the next one, regardless of whether you caught or understood it. Even if they repeat what they said and slow it down for you, thanks to elision and slurred speech, you may still not be able even to tell what word they are saying, much less be able to decipher its meaning and respond intelligently.

What can you do about it?

Luckily, if you're listening skills are not the best, there are methods that you can use to improve them! Like with everything in the world, the real answer is going to be to practice more. But, that's not to say there aren't any tips that can help you along the way.

1. Study vocabulary

I have found personally that the most important factor when determining whether I understand a spoken word is whether I am already familiar with a word. This may sound incredibly obvious, but its value cannot be understated. While you can certainly pick up a new word from spoken language that you have never heard or seen used, it is way easier to hear and understand a word if you have already used it and committed it to memory beforehand. This is, in my experience, the biggest reason why new beginners fail at listening comprehension; they don't have the vocabulary to keep up.

Think of the process as similar to the concept of "Sight Words." When you are teaching somebody to read, you tell them to figure out the words by sounding them out letter by letter. This works fairly well, especially if the writing system is similar to the phonetic one, but it leads to very slow reading as the person has to sound out the word entirely. This is where Sight Words come in. With Sight Words, you tell her non-reader not to sound out the word but to simply memorize how it sounds all together. While this sounds counter-intuitive to the sound-it-out system, it's important when building for fluidity.

The same goes for hearing things. While the basic approach is to hear the sounds and try to imagine how they are written based on the sounds, knowing how the entire word just sounds as a whole is much quicker, less mentally taxing, and ultimately more fluid.

Another benefit of if you are already familiar with a word, is that it is much easier to pick it out of a sentence. Being able to pick out when words start and end is one of the hardest sub-skills in language learning to master. If you cannot pick out an individual word, it becomes very hard to extract its meaning.

Think of it this way. If somebody were to speak to you in Spanish but you had never studied Spanish or any other romantic language, it is going to be very hard to pick out individual words. It is likely that it just sounds like a single big string of sounds that have no discernable start and stop. Since you have not studied Spanish vocabulary, you have no reference points: you don't know how Spanish words typically end, you don't know what words are conjunctions and which ones are just a part of the conjugations, and you don't know what sounds Spanish articles typically make.

You can even prove this to yourself right now. Go to Google Translate and look up how to say "Interview in (language you don't study)" for any language. Then, enter that result into YouTube and play the first video that seems to be an interview. Then, after the first line of the interview is spoken, immediately pause the video and write down the first sentence as best you can.

If you are like me, you'll probably have no words written because, at regular talking speeds, the entire thing just blends together. This is the problem.

But, if you know some of the words that are spoken in their entirety, you can, at a minimum, deduce where three words are, or at least where one stops and one ends. From here, the task becomes slightly easier.

2. Use morphology and syntax to your advantage

When it comes to a heavily inflected language like Icelandic, knowing your morphology and syntax is obviously important for spelling and reading, but they are also important listening skills. It's important to remember that written language is just a visual representation of spoken language. Every letter or symbol, in one way or another, represents or historically represented a certain sound. As such, every time you study inflection and syntax, you are actually studying phonetics as well.

For example, imagine you hear the following phrase:

(?) (?+ /r/) hana svo mikið.

This is a fairly simple sentence, but it illustrates the point nicely. If you know your syntax, you will know that Icelandic follows V2 word order, meaning that the verb is nearly always the second element of the sentence. As such, the second missing word is certainly going to be the verb of the sentence. The third word is Hana, which is an accusative form. As such, a knowledge of inflection will tell you that it is probably not the subject of the sentence, so the last missing word, the first word, is probably a nominative form noun.

(Subect) (Verb + /r/) hana svo mikið.

From there, even if you could not tell what was said at all in those first two words, you are already in a much better place for deciphering the sentence. If you know your inflection trends, then even better because that tells you that the subject is likely one of only five possible subjects.

(Ég/Þú/Hann/Hún/Það) (Verb + /r/) hana svo mikið.

While this seems only mildly helpful, with context clues, this can be extremely helpful. If you already roughly know the topic of the sentence, you can probably figure out what that first subject is, too, and from there, you can probably deduce the verb better as well.

3. Listen to things you like

While it's certainly not the most inspired tip of all time, it is probably the most important. To get better at anything, you have to practice, and listening is no exception. As you listen more, you will learn more about speech patterns, learn what words usually start sentences, learn vocabulary, and subconsciously improve in numerous other indescribable ways.

But you likely already knew that you have to listen to get better at listening at least some level. So, I will shift the topic to another question: How do you find things to listen to?

While listening to anything at all is good, listening to things that you like is better. This is because it actually gets your focus, makes you engage with the material better, and, most importantly, makes you want to keep listening.

Here is a simplified common story: you are a big fan of (A-type) music. So, you go to your search engine of choice and enter "Icelandic music" or "Icelandic (A-type) music" into your favorite search engine. You play a song that comes up, and it's an Icelandic band singing in English. Ah! I guess there's no (A-type) music in Icelandic.

That clearly is, of course, not true at all, so why did this happen? Well, it happened because typing the query in English told the search engine everything it needed to know. When you search for something in English, the engine guesses that you speak English and will give you results that are tailored to that end. Most English speakers who search for Icelandic music are probably not going to speak Icelandic, so why would the search engine, designed to get clicks and find what most people want, give you stuff in Icelandic?

So, the task is to get around this; you need to tell the machine that you speak Icelandic. Then, it will give you Icelandic results. There is a very simple way to do this. Instead of searching for "Icelandic music," try typing it in Icelandic. Try "Tónlist" or "Íslensk Tónlist" and see what the machine gives you back. I promise you will find something in Icelandic.

The same goes for any form of content you like. Type it in Icelandic. If you don't know how to say it in Icelandic, ask a translator. It's that simple. If you like true crime podcasts, find out how to say "True crime" in Icelandic and enter that into your podcast app. Do the exact same thing you do already to find content in English that you like, but just do it in Icelandic, and you will surely find something that you like.