Audio clips are a great way to help you hear the rhythm or music of a language. You will start to identify which words or parts of words are stressed or emphasized. You will hear the reader’s voice rise and fall. You will hear how one word slides into the next. In longer pieces, you probably won’t be able to follow the story, but that’s okay. The trick here is to hear the music of the language.
A side benefit is that, in the beginning stages—when you are just listening for the rhythm—it’s a great way to fall deeply asleep.
Books don’t repeat words and phrases as often as meditations do (unless you choose a very simple children’s book), so there’s an art to choosing the best fit. For example, children’s books use simpler language structures and vocabulary, but I can never stay interested in their story lines. If I can actually understand the vocabulary, the storyline is too basic to enjoy. So, using children’s books to learn the language doesn’t work for me. You may find they’re exactly what you need.
Novels are also a challenge. I tend to understand just enough to get interested, and then run out of vocabulary before I can find out what happens next. I start to dread listening. That’s never a good thing when you’re trying to learn something.
So, I hit on the solution of listening to self help books to get the rhythm of the language flowing through my head. Set goals! Talk to angels! Organize your closet! Predictable advice, often repeated. I figure that, if some of the messages sneak into my head along with the rhythm and vocabulary, it couldn’t hurt. After a while I start hearing words–or even phrases–that seem important, and look them up.
Once I start understanding whole sentences, it’s time to switch to a different book to listen to at bedtime, or I’ll be up all night trying to figure out the grammar. So–I find another book that’s too advanced for me, to listen to as I fall asleep. And the book I’m starting to understand? That goes on my daytime playlist to listen to while doing other things.
My goal is to listen to the entire Harry Potter series in Spanish. Without a dictionary. Awake.