Why Listening Feels So Hard in Your Target Language

As a language assistant, I spend most of my time helping students with two skills they often fear a lot: listening and speaking. And although ultimately the only thing that you can do to improve these two skills is to actually practice them, I have realized that sharing with my students the reasons behind why listening can feel so hard can ease a lot of frustration and help learners notice key patterns much earlier.

Students often feel confident with written words quite quickly and assume that this skill will automatically transfer to listening. Yet the spoken language comes with its own set of challenges that students are more often than not, unfamiliar with.

I have personally studied linguistics and my goal here is not to turn anyone into linguists, but to make the “invisible” parts of language visible — so learners can better understand what’s happening behind the scenes once their brain is ready for it.

This article outlines the key challenges behind listening comprehension, especially in French, and compares them to English (or other languages) whenever helpful. Connecting new knowledge to something familiar always makes it more memorable.

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📖 First, story time

Before getting into the nerdy stuff, I want to share a story with my own learning of English, which I think reinforces the very purpose of this blog post. During my gap year, I spent a few months in San Francisco to improve my English. One day, my English teacher corrected my pronunciation of the word interesting, which I had been saying with four syllables (like in French), instead of the correct three. She explained that English stresses the first syllable and drops the first “e”, making it more like IN-trsting.

I had already been studying English for years, but no one had ever mentioned the rhythm or pronunciation rules before. And although my pronunciation didn’t miraculously become perfect that day, I remember clearly that for the next few days, I couldn’t stop myself from noticing that new English melody every time someone spoke to me. My brain was ready to start working on my English accent, all I needed was someone to point it to the right direction.

🗣️ Written vs Spoken

Reading and listening are very different skills.

When you read:

• the words stay still

• the spelling never changes

• you clearly see where one word ends and the next begins

  
  

Listening is the opposite:

• speech is fleeting, you only get one shot

• pronunciation varies (accents, speed, emotion, rhythm)

• words are not separated by neat little spaces

You can know hundreds of written words yet still struggle to hear them in natural speech. That gap is normal, and the rest of this article explains why.

🎼 Phonemes: the languages’ sounds

We count about 800 phonemes in the world but each language only uses around 40 of them. To become a good listener, your brain needs to learn to recognise the specific sound inventory of your target language, including (and particularly!) sounds that don’t exist in your native one.

➡️ 🇫🇷 In French, pay attention to:

• The three nasal vowels

• The French R

• The vowel u [y]

• The combination “ui” (as in “bruit”)

• The combination “gn” (as in “gagner”)

  
  

What your ear can’t hear, you won’t be able to pronounce

When you were a baby, you could hear all 800 phonemes. But between 6–12 months, your brain started filtering them, keeping only the sounds of your native language. Everything else slowly faded.

As an adult, when someone uses a sound your brain does not recognise, it simply interprets it as the closest sound it knows.

For example, Japanese speakers struggle to distinguish l and r because these sounds don’t exist separately in Japanese (which is why they might say something like “lice” instead of “rice”). Their version of “r” sits somewhere in between the English “l” and “r”. (And your English attuned brain wouldn’t be able to hear their “r” either… let alone reproduce it).

The only way to retrain your brain is through repeated listening. Your ear needs time to adapt, notice, and categorize new sounds before you can hope to pronounce them accurately.

📢 Connected Speech

Connected speech is how words are put together in natural spoken language. And that’s where the real challenges begin :)

The illusion of pauses in spoken language

Many learners expect clear pauses between words… but spoken language doesn’t work like that. Generally speaking, it is an illusion that we create pauses/gaps in between words. We blend sounds together to make speaking easier. When you begin learning a new language, this is a real challenge because you expect to hear the beginning and the end of each word clearly just like it’s the case in the written form.

Think about English. You don’t say:

This… is… an… interesting… point.

In real life, it sounds more like:

ThisisanINtrsting-point.

So how do native speakers understand each other?

Because they rely on context, not only on perfect sound recognition.

They subconsciously know:

• which words commonly appear together

• what sounds usually blend

• typical intonation patterns

• what meaning makes sense in the situation

• which words even exist in the language

As a learner, you don’t have this internal “database” yet, so it feels like a puzzle with many missing pieces.

There is no white triangle in this picture. Your brain is creating it through inference. (Seen on the YouTube video from Matt vs Japan: "Why you still can't understand your target language").

Fun fact: so how do “text to speech” apps/softwares do it?

Detecting connected speech is so hard that until AI came around, « speech to text » softwares were famously inaccurate. AI improved this because it can use context to predict. That’s why transcriptions often change while you’re speaking: the model is constantly adjusting based on new information.

Humans do the same. We don’t always hear perfectly, we infer.

🕵️‍♀️ Connected Speech In Action

As we tend to blend words together in connected speech, this can cause some words to be pronounced differently than they would in isolation. As my students usually take this opportunity to remind me how difficult all those French pronunciation rules are, I like to remind them that spoken language existed first. So these rules are to an extent quite natural because they make speaking easier and more flowing. ]

Let’s break down the most common features:

Les liaisons

🇫🇷 Liaison is when the final consonant of one word is linked to the following word, which begins with a vowel. There are 3 possible liaisons in French: [z], [n], [t].

• les amis → les [z] amis

• un anniversaire → un [n] anniversaire

• un grand homme → un gran[t] homme

🇦🇺  English adds new sounds too:

• do it → dowit

Elision

🇫🇷 Elision is when we drop a sound. In French, it’s the case of the sound « e » which is dropped in certain situations.

• Qu’est-ce que t’as fait?

🇦🇺 In English

• most common → mos-common

• next door → nex-door

Assimilation

Assimilation is when two sounds blend together to form an entirely new sound.

🇫🇷 In French the sound « j » followed by the sound « s » often becomes « sh » in spoken language.

• je suis → chui

• je ne sais pas → chepa

🇦🇺 In English

• don’t you → don-chew

🎵 Intonation and rhythm

Every language has its own melody.

🇫🇷 French is a syllable-timed language, meaning we spend the same amount of time for each syllable. It’s what gives it its “flat” or “even” rhythm (it doesn’t « sing » like Italian for example).

🇦🇺 English is a stress-timed language (certain syllables are stressed).

• we say IN-teresting

• To objECT (the verb)

• An OBject (noun)

This rhythmic difference alone can make French sound “fast” and English sound “bouncy” to learners.

🕳️ The gap between spoken and written form

There is only a handful of languages that have a perfect match between spelling and pronunciation (where words sound exactly like they’re spelled). It is the case of Spanish and Italian for example. French and English? Not so much.

🇫🇷 French:

• Most final consonants are silent

  (repas, transport, climat…)

  → Except C-R-F-L (remember: “careful”)

• Vowel combinations like ai, eau, ou, oi each represent specific sounds that must be learned.

🇦🇺 English:

• There’s the famous “though”, “thought”, “trough”, “thorough” — similar spellings, different sounds.

• Have you heard of the word Ghoti? It’s a respelling of the word “fish” and it’s meant to show how illogical English spelling is.

  • “gh” as in “enough“

  • “o” as in “women”

  • “ti” as in “nation”

Conclusion

Listening in a new language isn’t about intelligence, it’s about familiarity. Your brain needs time to map new sounds, new rhythms, and new patterns of connected speech.

The more you listen, the more your brain fills in the missing pieces, and the clearer everything becomes. One day, something that once sounded like a blur will suddenly make sense.

So keep listening, even when it feels messy or overwhelming. Trust that your ears are learning long before you feel the progress.

🎉 Want to keep improving your listening skills?

I’ve created a free list of curated podcasts (by level and topic!) to help you train your ear and get comfortable with real, authentic French.

👉 Download the free podcast list here or read the blog post here.

📌 Bonus: Free Visual Summary

If you'd like a more student-friendly version of everything covered in this article, don’t forget to grab the free visual summary — clear, simple, and perfect to print or share with learners.

👉 Get the visual summary here.

🙏 Acknowledgements

A few ideas in this article were informed by the work of Gabriel Wyner (Fluent Forever) and Matt vs Japan, especially his video “Why You Still Can’t Understand Your Target Language.” I highly recommend both resources for an easy entry into the world of linguistics.