English Listening Practice: Exercises for Beginners & Intermediates

English Listening Practice
Let’s practice your English listening skills!

Are you looking for exercises to practice your English listening skills?

You’ve come to the right place.

Here are 6 listening exercises for both beginners and intermediates.

English listening exercises for beginners:

English listening exercises for intermediates:

As you can see, there are many ways to practice listening. Let’s discuss them one by one.

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English Listening Practice:
Beginner Level

Do you have trouble understanding even slow speakers?

If so, you’ll love the three exercises in this section. (They are beginner-friendly.)

Exercise #1: Practice with ESL Listening Lessons

If you’re a beginner, it will be hard to improve your English listening skills.

Why? Because almost all English materials (movies, TV shows, YouTube videos, podcasts) are too difficult for you.

So for someone like you, the best materials to use are listening lessons created for ESL students.

For your convenience, I’ve listed the best ones below. All the lessons listed here have transcripts/captions, so rest assured you won’t be confused by the end of each lesson.

Best English listening lessons:

Note that some of these lessons are not necessarily “easy.” They can be quite difficult even for intermediates. But I included them here anyway because they provide transcripts.

ESL listening lessons will help you get used to natural spoken English (to some degree).

The problem is that there are very few good listening lessons out there, so the amount of practice you can get is limited.

But don’t worry. There are other ways to practice listening.

Let’s discuss the next listening exercise.

Exercise #2: Practice Listening
with TV Shows & Movies

If you enjoy American and British TV series and films, you’ll love this exercise.

First, watch a movie or a TV show with subtitles. As you watch it, don’t worry about listening practice yet. Just enjoy the show (and feel free to read the subtitles).

After you finish the show, watch it again without subtitles. This time, the goal of watching is to practice your English listening skills.

Simple, right?

Alternatively, you can also rewatch some of the the old shows that you saw a long time ago. But this time you watch them without subtitles.

Watching Shows a Second Time Without Subtitles — Is It Necessary?

Now you might be thinking…

“Boo! It’s so boring to watch something twice! So I’m just gonna watch shows one time with subtitles. Hopefully, this’ll be enough to improve my listening comprehension.”

Unfortunately, this will not improve your listening much.

If you only watch shows with subtitles, you’ll be practicing your reading skills instead of listening skills.

Think about it.

When you watch a show with subtitles, your brain is working hard to understand what’s going on.

There are two ways for the brain to do that:

  1. Read the subtitles
  2. Listen to the dialogue

Which option do you think your brain will choose?

The answer is obvious; you brain is going to focus on reading the subtitles.

Why? Because it’s much easier. The text on the screen is clearly defined, so it’s very easy for you brain to process.

The sound of people talking, on the other hand, is not always clear. Quite often you hear a character whisper, mumble, or talk really fast. Sometimes the background music is too loud. So it’s very difficult for your brain to figure out what’s being spoken.

As a result, you brain will pay attention to the subtitles, not the sound.

So when you watch a subtitled show, you’re not improving your listening.

You’re actually improving your reading!

So now you might think…

“But as I’m reading the subtitles, I can ‘hear’ the dialogue too. Which means I’m also practicing and improving my listening skills!”

No, you’re not. You may “hear” the dialogue but you are not “listening.”

It’s like having a news program on in the background while studying. You may “hear” the news reporter talking, but when you finish your study, you can’t tell what the news stories were because you weren’t paying attention.

So in order to practice listening effectively, you need to watch shows a second time without subtitles.

TV Shows VS. Movies — Which is Better?

Should you practice listening with TV shows or movies?

Well, it doesn’t really matter. (You can do both.) What’s more important is to watch stuff you’ll enjoy.

That said, if you want my take on this, I suggest you focus on TV shows.

The reason? Because it’s more time-efficient. TV shows usually have many episodes. So when you complete one episode, you can immediately jump to the next.

On the other hand, when you finish a movie, you have to make a decision about what film to watch next. You may have to spend time reading movie suggestions, synopses, and reviews.

Exercise #3: Increase Your English Vocabulary Through Reading

Technically, reading is not a listening exercise.

But as a beginner, it’s important to increase your vocabulary as much as possible.

Listening and reading, combined together, are the most powerful way to build your English vocabulary.

If you do only one of them, that’s okay. But if you do both, the results will be even better because you’re learning both pronunciation and spelling.

When your vocabulary improves, your listening comprehension will get better as a result.

However, it’s important the read the right material.

You don’t want to read something like this:

“Strange Bedfellows!” lamented the title of a recent letter to Museum News, in which a certain Harriet Sherman excoriated the National Gallery of Art in Washington for its handling of tickets to the much-ballyhooed “Van Gogh’s van Goghs” exhibit. A huge proportion of the 200,000 free tickets were snatched up by homeless opportunists in the dead of winter, who then scalped those tickets at $85 apiece to less hardy connoisseurs.

The language of the text above is old-fashioned. While it may be useful for advanced students, beginners like you should focus on something easier.

So what kind of material should you read?

I recommend English books or blogs that have similar vocabulary as spoken English.

Here’s an example:

Are morning people born or made? In my case it was definitely made. In my early 20s, I rarely went to bed before midnight, and I’d almost always sleep in late. I usually didn’t start hitting my stride each day until late afternoon.

Here the language is casual and similar to spoken English. Reading content like this will indirectly enhance your listening skills.

If you want a list of books to read, visit this page.

Can’t afford to buy books? No worries. You don’t to spend money on physical books. You can read blogs on topics of your interests instead. (Blogs are good because most of them use casual language similar to spoken English.)

English Listening Practice:
Intermediate Level

At this level, you shouldn’t have much trouble understanding native speakers with a standard accent.

Of course, you may still find it hard to understand fast spoken English or uncommon native accents, but that’s to be expected at this level. There’s still room for improvement.

The exercises in this section are meant to “stretch” your English listening skills.

What do I mean by stretch?

It means doing something that’s a bit beyond your comfort zone so that you improve faster.

Exercise #1: Immerse Yourself in English

The practice is simple: you listen to English at every possible moment.

It may sound simple, but it works.

Imagine that you listen to 10,000 hours of English. Do you think your English listening will improve?

The answer is YES! With that much practice, your comprehension will improve. There’s no doubt about it.

But the question is, how the hell are you going to find the time to do this?

Well, maybe you don’t have to practice for 10,000 hours. (That’s almost impossible to do.) But at least you should try to practice as much as possible.

How to Find Time to Practice Listening

Take a look at these activities:

  • Commuting
  • Waiting
  • Exercising (walking on a treadmill, riding a stationary bike)
  • Walking in the park
  • Doing house chores like cooking

These activities have one thing in common: they are “mindless” activities. They don’t require your mental focus or attention.

You probably have to engage in such activities every day. You can listen to English during these times.

Suppose you spend 10 hours a week on your daily commute. If you listen to English during your commute for a year, that’s 520 hours of listening practice!

And this is only one activity. Imagine doing this during other activities as well.

Over time, the amount of listening practice will add up and lead to amazing results.

The best thing about this practice is that you don’t to have to allocate your free time to do it because you’ll be practicing during other activities.

If you want free English listening materials, check out this page.

Unfortunately, this practice has one limitation.

The limitation is that your mind may wander to random thoughts during the practice. (So you’ll be “hearing” English instead of listening to English.)

But I think that’s okay. Even if you get distracted from time to time, the practice is still worth doing and you will get some results. (At least it’s better than spending the time on social media or playing games, right?)

That being said, if you have trouble focusing, the next exercise is for you.

Exercise #2: Test Your English Listening Skills

Suppose you’re a history teacher. Which approach is the best way to teach history lessons to your students?

  1. Teach them the lessons without testing their understanding.
  2. Test them once after all the lessons are taught.
  3. Test them before and after each lesson.

Which one is the most effective?


You think C is the best, right?

Research shows that frequent testing can boost learning effectiveness by more than 100%. Testing motivates learners to put more effort into their learning activities.

You can apply this insight to your English listening practice.

How? By testing your listening skills from time to time to see how good they really are.

The process can be as simple as:

  1. Find a video or audio with a transcript
  2. Listen to it. (Don’t read the transcript.) Then write down what the speaker is saying
  3. Compare what you wrote with the transcript

You can use a movie, YouTube video, podcast, or something else for this exercise. But I suggest you pick something that’s difficult for you to understand.

So what’s the benefit of doing this?

Firstly, by testing yourself, you’ll be able to assess the level of your listening skills.

But more importantly, testing is a great way to motivate yourself to practice harder.

If you perform poorly on this test (and you will if the material is difficult), you’ll want to do better next time. So you’ll get more serious with your listening practice, which will improve your results.

Exercise #3: Increase the Difficulty and Variety of Your English Input

A big mistake intermediates make is that they keep listening to the same people — people they can easily understand.

By staying in their comfort zone, they improve very slowly (or they aren’t improving at all).

So if you want to continue improving, you must:

  1. Listen to various types of English
  2. Listen to conversations you find difficult to understand

Here are some examples:

  • British English
  • African-American English
  • News
  • Documentaries
  • Fast speakers
  • Topics that you aren’t familiar with.

Of course, this will be a difficult exercise to do. But if you go through with it, you listening skills will become highly reliable.

Below you can find lists of various YouTube channels featuring different types of spoken English.

Fast speakers:

British English:

African-American English:

News:

Have a listen to a couple of videos from each of the channels. If it’s quite hard to understand (and if the channel seems interesting to you), hit the Subscribe button.

Be prepared to have trouble understanding some of this content. (That’s the point of this exercise.) The more you’re exposed to difficult English, the easier it becomes.

Action Plan for Your
English Listening Practice

You’ve learned 6 ways to develop your listening skills in English.

Now it’s time to take action.

If you’re a beginner, practice these beginner-friendly exercises:

  1. Use listening lessons for ESL students
  2. Watch TV shows and movies with and without subtitles
  3. Read in English to learn new vocabulary

Feel free to allocate time to do these exercises however you want. For example, you might do exercise #1 for two weeks, then practice exercises #2 and #3 at the same time for three months.

If you are an intermediate, you can also practice exercises #2 and #3 of the beginner’s level. These exercises are beneficial no matter what level you’re at.

But if you want to take your English listening skills to the next level, here are the more advanced exercises:

  1. Listen to English during “mindless” activities
  2. Test how well you can understand difficult English
  3. Listen to different types of English

Just like beginners, you can allocate time for the exercises however you want.

But remember that if you want to improve quickly, you must listen to something a bit challenging to understand.

However, be sure not to listen to stuff that’s too difficult that you understand nothing at all. (You should at least be able to understand “the gist” of the conversation — the main idea.)


Thanks for reading. I hope you find these practice ideas useful.

Improving English listening skills takes time, so please be patient. If you’re consistent with your English listening practice, you’ll definitely improve.


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