Most people have encountered a Type of student theory that separates people into 3 categories depending on their natural abilities to learn through different senses, claiming that one will most probably be dominant and thus the learner will be inclined to go for a certain type of exercise and memorization techniques with more ease than say for the other two types of activities.
The 3 types of students are divided like this – Visual for people whose brain is way more apt to use the visual stimuli and remember information through it, Kinesthetic – for the doers – the people who perceive the world through processes and touch, and the Auditory – the people who tend to listen and notice sound way more than the other types. In this article we will cover the Auditory student and whether it is possible to learn the Bulgarian Language mostly by listening.
How We Learned Language as Children 🤔
All children are built to pick up their first language through listening so in a way we all started as auditory learners. Of course, this learning is also strongly connected to the visual and kinesthetic context, but seeing how very little is expected of a baby to do, for many objective reasons, we as babies would mostly observe and listen to the world around us.
Language is in a way a musical thing – it has got rhythm, patterns, sounds, intonations, and ultimately sentences form meaningful units that inspire reaction and emotion.
Babies undergo a phase psychologists call the “Silent Period”. This is the stage before babies start talking in their language. The “Silent Period” is not a passive phase of silence; on the contrary, it is a very busy time as babies try to assimilate the sounds around them. When the baby listens it builds an emotional response to language as it senses the tones and nuances and at some point, it starts to understand on a more specific level. What tends to happen is that some sound patterns would appear more often than others and would lead to similar circumstances – Are you hungry?- precedes being fed. Thus at some point, the child begins to pick up meaningful chunks, that will become separate words later in the development. What will happen eventually is that by the age of 3 most children would have started using the language actively and by the age of 7 a child would have reached a proficient stage of her ability to understand and use language. So perhaps it is safe to say that it takes 3-4 years of complete immersion in the language mostly provided by a couple of loving parents who make conscious efforts to show, facilitate and teach us, to be able to start using the Bulgarian language freely only though listening and context, but it is also true that listening is the most important and primary way of learning the language, mostly because language is a spoken thing rather than a written one.
How can we effectively learn the Bulgarian Language through listening practice?
Unlike babies we don’t have 3-4 years just for listening and being super cute, neither are we surrounded by loving grown-ups who would take care of us patiently, dumb down the world, and tend to our every need, alas we are mostly very busy and stressed-out people, who are in serious need of the language as a source of survival and empowerment, we need to buy groceries, ask for directions, make friends and socialize and we need to do it quickly, so the only way to optimize the messy natural process is to get some structure and conscious learning on our schedules, which unlike natural, loving, nurturing learning is way more intense, sometimes unpleasant and it needs us to be self-motivated and disciplined in order to achieve real results.
But even if we are motivated and self-disciplined enough many times people get discouraged because they haven’t chosen an effective way to build language and at some point, it feels like threading in the same place. For just that reason it is vital to consult a professional, sign up for a course in Bulgarian or do some research on which exercises actually work and what your personal tendencies and preferences are, very much like building your muscles in the gym you will need to adhere to a program that will develop your language skills nicely and evenly. So for all students of Bulgarian, we have compiled:
4 Great Strategies to aid your learning of Bulgarian JUST by Listening
1. Know your level and choose accordingly
Let's get one thing clear first - It is a myth that you can learn by listening to just about anything. In order to actually start picking up the language, there must be at least some portion of it that you actually understand. Otherwise, it will be gibberish and have pretty much 0 effectiveness. This is the main reason why people who have been in Bulgaria for 10 years but never had any Bulgarian lessons or study programs have made very little to no advancement in the language.
(If you are a person who has been in Bulgaria for some time now but you have no idea what your level is – contact us to do a placement test and interview.) 💬
Once you know your level it is good to analyze what sort of topics you would like to build. Try analyzing your everyday life and start from the closest things to you.
You can use memory cards, preferably ones with sound, and do them on a regular basis so that you can get to recognize the sounds well. Try repeating the words and try to recall the words you have learned throughout the day. It is crucial to test yourself and see what is the comfortable amount of words you can remember a day – start with 6 a day and work up the number, but remember – you need to revisit the words regularly if you want to really keep them in the long-term memory.
2. Read out loud and record yourself 🎤
A great way to practice both reading and speaking by improving pronunciation, chunking, and speed is to read out loud a text in Bulgarian and record yourself. It is crucial though to have a recording of the text done by a Bulgarian person so that you can listen and notice how words come together to form meaning, what intonation and sound combinations are being used, then after you have got it down and you feel that you can mimic the speech pattern to try to read and record yourself. This exercise is a bit unnerving because most people dislike their voice, however, if you can get past that and simply listen to the pace, chunks, and accuracy, then it will be invaluable! For some recordings and texts that you can use to learn the Bulgarian language - check out our materials section.
3. Listen on Repeat
“Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.”
When you have finally found things that you can listen to that are at your comfortable level of understanding and learning then it is time for drilling. If you listen to a given recording or video just once, usually you will remember the story and the gist but the language would be a faded memory within a couple of moments. For that reason, many people who say that they listen to the radio, the news, a podcast will say that even though it is a good comprehension exercise their ability to speak and the number of words and structures they know would not change significantly. To change that we need to do what kids do when they are young – listen on repeat, watch on repeat until you can predict what will be said. It is a boring routine, yes; however, you can trick it by listening to music instead.
Find a song you like, google the lyrics and try listening to it a couple of times before you attempt to sing along. At some point check what the text means and continue singing along and reminding yourself of what they mean until you no longer feel that the song is in another language. This method of learning helps with building structures and improving your grammar in the Bulgarian language as well.
4. Listen for Specific Type of Language
If you want to learn Bulgarian by listening it should not be a passive act. Listening as an effective form of language exercise is one of the most engaged and concentrated activities that you can do because it is not about exposure, neither is it about playing something in the background while doing something completely different. That method is too inefficient for your time.
Listening needs to be intentional, deliberate, and calculated. When listening to a track or watching a video try to listen to the tones, nuances, rhythms, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and tenses depending on what you are trying to become better at. If you do it all at once none will truly fall into focus. For instance - for the first round, you listen for the tones and the melody of the language, then listen to the verbs, perhaps try to write them down – do you know the tense, how about the conjugation, and so on.
In fact, for a 90-second clip, you could spend around an hour or two to completely digest.
Learning Bulgarian is a difficult task to tackle on one’s own. It takes a great deal of understanding of how you personally work, how memory and language work as well and not to mention how much effort it takes to stay motivated and push forward on one’s own. It is great to know how to study independently and to put in the extra work, but if you find it difficult to stay on track on your own, don’t hesitate to contact us at Studio. For courses, materials, and more check out our Bulgarian Language section.
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