When it comes to developing language skills, listening is one of the most under-rated activities available to you. While it may not seem like it, listening to materials spoken in the exact language you are trying to master.
Simply put, if you cannot hear the way sounds are produced, you can never learn how to produce the same sound. As such, it’s very important to supplement written courses, such as books and language software, with real world listening experience, whether you achieve that face-to-face with native speakers or through the media with movies and songs.
That’s one of the reasons why it becomes difficult to learn a new language whose accent is very much different from your own. When we listen, we tend to have expectations about what we will hear and are trained in it for years with our own first language. As such, English speakers tend to have a near-impossible time trying to make out the seemingly lightning fast accents of Chinese speakers – those sounds are completely unfamiliar to them.
The more you immerse yourself in a language, listening to materials made in it, the more familiar those strange sounds become. Repeated hearing will eventually entrench specific sounds into your mental phonetic library. Soon, it becomes natural to expect to hear them, making the process of learning vocabulary and pronunciation easier than it usually is.