Listening

One of the most easiest things to do when you want to improve your listening and comprehension skills is listening to podcasts. You can listen to them anywhere and anytime - at home, while doing laundry, driving in a car, on the bus with your headphones on or just lying in bed - there are plenty of possibilities. If you like football like me, I would recommend The Sky Sports Football Podcast (or any other you like). When I want to hear about something interesting or about the latest news, I listen to The Guardian: Today in Focus podcasts. The episodes are not that long and I find the English beautiful and easy to understand. And in addition, you can learn something new! These podcasts I mentioned and much more can be found and listened to on Spotify.

I think that learning English should be fun, and therefore, my second source of listening is some TV series. My all-time favorite is The Big Bang Theory. You can watch it with subtitles, but I'm sure you'll easily understand even without them. The English is pronounced clearly and since it's a show about daily life of few friends, it uses basic and everyday vocabulary. But there are of course a lot of things that I, personally, heard for the first time or just didn't know them before. As most of the characters work in science field, they may use academic and expert language. I try to see this as a learning opportunity: You can upgrade your vocabulary and find out the meaning of unknown words in dictionaries. Another common thing that occurs often is English idioms. I saw the situations they were used in, so it helped me understand them better.