When you listen to Spanish for the very first time, it sounds like a sequence of connected sounds and syllables. You can read the words, but you can’t quite make them out in the audio. And that’s because, when you read, words are separated, and when you listen, words are connected. Your mission is to try to distinguish those connected sounds, instead of trying to listen for words. Here’s what you can do:
Listen to one-line sentences and try to repeat them. Find a resource with common sentences, like a greeting, a question, or a short description. Listen to the sentence once. How did it go? Now listen to it again, and repeat it, even if you don’t know what it means. Do this a few times until you get a better feel for the sentence.
This exercise will help you get used to the Spanish sound and rhythm, and you’ll start to learn where each word begins and ends. At this stage, you don’t need to understand what the sentence means. Just try to get a feel for it.
One mistake you can make here is to try to understand the sentence before repeating it. This will make things much harder, because you’re putting too much emphasis on the meaning, and not enough on the sound. When you do this, you’re turning listening practice into a vocabulary exercise, and that will make the sentence sound unnatural. So try to fix that by repeating first and then trying to understand.
When you speak what you hear (even if you don’t understand it very well), your brain stores the information, and when you listen again, it will sound familiar, and that will make your job much easier.
Do a 15-minute listening exercise. Find a resource with a short audio file, perhaps three to five minutes long. Listen to the whole thing without stopping. Just let the sounds go in one ear and out the other. Now go back to the beginning and start repeating each sentence as you hear it. Repeat the intonation, the rhythm, the whole thing. Do this a few times until you feel more comfortable with the audio. Now, stop the audio every two or three sentences, and try to repeat them before the audio continues.
This will force your brain to remember what you just heard, and it will force your ear to pay close attention to the sounds. And that’s how you can train your ear!