Stop Trying to Understand Every Word

Most language learners make the same mistake when listening to audiobooks: they try to understand every single word. They approach it like a detective trying to crack a code. And that is exhausting and will burn you. That was my approach for a long time until I understood that this was sabotaging my progress.

My experience with audiobooks

Recently I’ve been trying to fresh up my Portuguese and I decided to try a different source from what I usually use: I listened to an audiobook. When it comes to choosing books in the language we’re learning, I always go for a book that I’ve read before, because by knowing the context, it’s okay to not understand every word, because I can still knit together what the text says. But if you’ve never read the book before, it’s really difficult because you won’t understand every word and so you’ll continue to not understand everything and that is frustrating. I listened to “A coragem de não agradar”, The Courage to Be Disliked, which I read last year. I tried to listen to one chapter a day.

Why are audiobooks great?

Audiobooks are actually a great way to improve your language because you can easily spend several hours a day absorbing the language with them. You can listen to audiobooks while travelling, while driving or cycling, and also while working if the task is repetitive and simple. You don’t have to sit there and listen only to the audiobook, like when you’re reading a book. And unlike listening to real conversations, you can adjust the speed, which I really recommend doing, because when you’re learning the language, you still process information more slowly and the normal speaking speed is too fast. I listen to the Portuguese audiobooks at 0.9x speed, and that still sounds completely normal. Even 0.8x would be fine.

The Control Trap

When we listen to such an audiobook, of course we don’t understand everything. And there’s a tendency therefore to concentrate more, to listen carefully and analyse every single word. But doing so will exhaust you after 20 minutes, because it’s a completely mental overload. I really had to learn this the hard way. Why are we trying to analyse every word? We think we need to 'clean up' every unknown word, like pulling out weeds one by one until everything is clean. But the problem is that this focus on individual words blinds us to the actual message the book is telling us.

Words vs message

As Stephen Krashen says, language learning happens when we understand messages. He says “messages” and not “words”. But isn’t that the same thing? Don’t we need to understand words in order to understand messages? It may seem so, but it’s not. I can understand the message of what someone’s saying even if I don’t understand every single word, because of the context, the tone, etc. And in languages like Chinese, it has happened to me that I understood every word and still didn’t understand the message. In the end, the goal of a language is to communicate, to deliver a message rather than to speak single words.

Cognitive Load

So, why does this 'words vs. message' distinction matter so much? Because it's literally how your brain is designed to learn. In order to understand what’s happening inside our brain, we can look at the Cognitive Load Theory, developed by researcher John Sweller. It shows that our working memory can only handle about 2-4 pieces of information simultaneously. When you try to analyse every word, you're forcing your brain to juggle individual word meanings, grammar rules, and overall comprehension all at once. This cognitive overload is literally exhausting.

But when you focus on the message, what Krashen calls 'comprehensible input', something fascinating happens. Your brain shifts into what psychologists call 'flow state.' Instead of effortful, conscious processing, you enter automatic, absorbed attention. This is the same state that expert readers use, they don't decode word by word, they grasp meaning directly.

Effort vs relaxing

Some people think that learning a language is hard and if it doesn’t hurt in your brain, you’re not doing it right. The headache is proof of your progress. But this is very misleading and often means you’re approaching it in the wrong way.

Focusing on the message rather than the words changes everything, because it is much more relaxing than focusing on every word. You get absorbed in the audiobook and you’re no longer analysing, but just following the story, following the plot without trying hard. That’s what efficient language learning is. It’s not exhausting and hard. You bathe yourself in the language, you adapt to it. You let the language work on you, rather than you trying to work on it by forcing yourself to analyse it. Let the language reshape your brain.

Mastering Discomfort

Now, you’re sitting there, listening to the audiobook. You understand about 80-90%, but still not everything. And that is frustrating. The level of frustration can be very personal: some people feel more irritated while others are more comfortable with understanding less. Some may enjoy listening to the audiobook and not mind not understanding everything, while others may want to understand everything. Resistance may also change over time. Recently I’ve been noticing certain resistances that I did not have in my early teens: the thought that certain ways of expressing things in a foreign language are weird and I prefer to stick to my way.

Here is the deeper lesson: This is a mental training more than a training in language skills. The training to become comfortable with noise. When we are not comfortable with something, a resistance builds in us, a strong force that wants to reject what’s happening. Sometimes this is good, but when trying to learn a language, it’s not. So what do we do? Trying to fight the resistance would not help, it’s like fighting fire with fire. Instead, what we can do is to not resist the resistance. To become aware of it, to observe it, to maybe even welcome it, and let it be. Over time, if it is not fed, it will dissipate. Then we will have broken down the wall and can truly immerse ourselves in the language.