But when you heard your friend call you from across the room, your ears perked up because the familiarity of your friend’s voice registered as meaningful.īasically, your brain is constantly subconsciously deciding what is or isn’t meaningful based on what your ears have been exposed to. Your brain filtered out practically everything you were hearing as meaningless nonsense. You were probably surrounded by groups of people talking over each other, but you didn’t hear every detail of every conversation. Think about the last time you met up with a friend in a busy café. Your brain is also programmed to filter out meaningless background conversation. But if your brain is filtering properly, you’re probably not consciously hearing any of that. As you’re reading this, you might be hearing the humming of your air conditioner, the rumbling of passing traffic, the squeaking of your chair, and the chattering of family members or coworkers a few meters from you. Our ears are constantly hearing noises that the mind either registers as meaningful or filters out as not meaningful. And our brains are sophisticated enough to hijack the process, sometimes not in a good way. “Listening comprehension” literally means comprehending what we listen to-that is, making sense of what we hear. It all starts with self-awareness and humility, acknowledging your own strengths and weaknesses and not going too far beyond your current level in Spanish. ![]() Since we don’t get subtitles for real-life conversation, it can be very hard to understand sentences spoken by a native speaker, even if all the words and phrases they’re using are within your vocabulary.įortunately, there is a tried-and-true method for steadily improving how well you understand native speakers, and it doesn’t require any special tools or equipment. Furthermore, a native speaker’s pronunciation and manner of speech are likely to be much more relaxed and fluid than yours. But when a native speaker responds, they know about 15,000 words that they’ve been using most of their life-you might get lost if they throw in just one or two that you don’t know yet. You can probably find a way to say just about anything using only those words. Let’s say you’ve mastered the most common 2,000 words in Spanish. ![]() But when a native speaker responds, what they say probably won’t be restricted to the vocabulary you know. Second, when you’re expressing yourself in Spanish, you’re able to use the vocabulary, grammar, and idioms you’re most comfortable with to piece together what you want to say without going beyond your current level. When a Spanish speaker responds, who knows how fast they’re going to go? You have very little control over that. Listening comprehension is the hardest thing to perfect when learning a new language, for two reasons.įirst, when you’re speaking, you’re able to go as quickly or as slowly as you need to. It turns out that learning to express yourself in Spanish is actually the easy part. But we’ve found over and over again with our students that the opposite is true. The government has, however, previously been at pains to insist that the errors had been spotted before any train was built, and that "not a single euro of Spaniards' money has been wasted" as a result.If you’re like most Spanish learners, you might think you’re pretty good at understanding the Spanish you hear-you just need to get better at speaking it. "From the moment I found out about this matter, I've done everything I could to find out what happened and to find a solution," Spain's transport minister, Raquel Sánchez, told reporters after meeting Revilla and Barbón on Monday The Socialist-led coalition government of prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has tried to make further amends by announcing that travel on the Asturian and Cantabrian networks affected by the delays would be free until the new rolling stock began to come into service in early 2026. Isabel Pardo de Vera, Spain's secretary of state for transport, and Isaías Táboas, the president of Renfe, have resigned as a result of the "bodge," as it was called by Cantabria's regional president. Problem is, last month it was discovered that the new trains under construction are too wide to make it through the existing tunnels. ![]() Spain's transportation department and the private state rail operator, Renfe, announced a fat $275 million contract that started three years ago to modernize the country's commuter railway in Asturias and Cantabria with fancy new trains.
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