I know that passive listening is barely better than nothing when trying to learn a new language from scratch?

Hi, TrustMeOnThisOne

Passive listening is not only boring, but it also gets frustrating when you don't understand something.

Why listen 'passively' for 1, 2, 3 hours at a time to 'kill time', and not give your all 100% to it for much less time?

Why not speaking along, singing along, dancing it, whispering it, shouting it, crying it, loving it, hating it, making it your own, embodying it?

This way it becomes yours, not someone else's words.

Also, putting 100% for 5 minutes a day consistently is WAY better, more productive, more fun and gets you more results than doing it passively for an hour.

Putting your full attention in French will also train you to put all your attention in everything you do, and you'll find yourself one day having so much more fun everywhere.

Why waste your life? :)

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Hope this helps!

depends what you mean - you could listen to French radio on www.rfi.fr - their website has a section for people learning French, so there's stuff you can do as well as listening; it's worth checking out. And not being totally passive! Boring!

Also - some listening that is def not entirely passive! What about getting a novel that looks interesting to you, and getting the audiobook as well? Then you can be listening, but you have the printed book, and that makes it easier to check the words you didn't catch, in your dictionary later on.'

Maybe start with something short and not too difficult - even a children's book is a good educational resource! - or something like Anna Gavalda's L'échappée belle.

If you feel you are not quite at the stage of listening to extended fiction yet, how about one of the specially produced packs of short prose extracts , book + CD - there's one called Read and Think French, which has the texts, new words down the margin, and the CD; or one called Easy French reader - again, short texts and CD.

Once you have listened a couple of times WITH the text to hand, you can just shove the CDs on anytime you're just pottering about [cooking, tidying, painting the spare room] - but yes, listening to French as much as poss will help your understanding of spoken French, and your own pronunciation.