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How to learn a language with audiobooks (without just zoning out)

By Pavel Kharakh Published Updated

Why audiobooks in a new language tend to wash over you, and a step-by-step routine that turns them into real practice: the right book, the text, review.

You put on an audiobook in the language you're learning, start the washing-up, and twenty minutes later you realise you have no idea what has happened in the story. The voice kept going; you didn't. It feels like immersion, but very little of it is landing.

That isn't a lack of discipline. Listening is the format where attention slips most easily, and in a foreign language the slips cost more. The good news is that the fix is not to give up on audiobooks. It's to change how you use them. This post explains why the zoning out happens, then gives a routine that turns an audiobook into something you actually learn from.

Why audiobooks wash over you

Listening is the easiest way to drift off, even in your own language

In a study at the University of Waterloo, 211 students took in passages from Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything three ways: reading silently, reading aloud and listening to the author read. Every 30 to 90 seconds they were asked whether their mind had wandered. While listening, they said yes to about half of those prompts. While reading silently it was about a third, and reading aloud was lower still. Listening also gave the worst scores on a memory test afterwards (Varao Sousa, Carriere and Smilek, 2013).

That doesn't make audiobooks a lesser way to take in a book. When 91 adults in another study listened to, read, or read and listened to a chapter of a non-fiction book, their comprehension came out the same in all three groups, both straight after and two weeks later (Rogowsky, Calhoun and Tallal, 2016). But it does mean that audio gives your attention more room to leave, and nothing stops the story when it does.

In a new language, one missed word loses the whole sentence

On a page you can stop at a word you don't know, look at it, and carry on. Speech doesn't wait. You also can't see where one word ends and the next begins, so a phrase you would recognise in print can go past as a blur. Lose a word and you are often still decoding it when the next sentence starts.

How much you need to know is measurable. In a study of listening, van Zeeland and Schmitt found that learners followed short, informal stories reasonably well when they knew about 95% of the words, roughly one unknown word in twenty (Applied Linguistics, 2013). Those were short recordings that learners heard more than once, so a long novel at full speed is a harder test. Below that, the audio stops being input and becomes noise.

Listening alone teaches very few words

In the best-known study of reading while listening, Japanese university students met 28 new words in each of three short graded readers. After only listening, they could recall the meaning of 0.56 of those words on average. After reading, or reading while listening, it was a little over four (Brown, Waring and Donkaewbua, 2008). We went through that study and a dozen others in what the research says about reading while listening.

The pattern is consistent: the audio is most useful when the text is in front of you. So the routine below is built around reading and listening together, with audio-only coming later, once you've seen the words.

The routine, step by step

1. Pick a book you can mostly read already

This matters more than anything else. Open the first page and count the words you don't know in a passage of about a hundred words. Up to five or so, you're in the right place. If it's ten or more, find something easier: you'll spend the whole time decoding and won't follow the story.

What tends to work:

  • Graded readers, books rewritten for a limited vocabulary, many of which come with audio.
  • Children's classics, which are short, concrete and often familiar already.
  • A book you've read in your own language. Knowing the plot frees your attention for the language.

If you're learning English, our list of free audiobooks with matching text by CEFR level has picks from A2 to C2. The gentlest are A2: Winnie-the-Pooh and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. At B1, Treasure Island and The Call of the Wild are real novels that read easily.

2. Get the exact text the narrator is reading

An audiobook with the wrong text is nearly as hard as no text. Look out for three traps: abridged audiobooks, a different translation from the one in your ebook, and dramatisations with several actors and cut lines. In all three the words on the page drift away from what you hear.

Free sources where text and audio match:

For newer books, Amazon's Immersion Reading highlights the text of a Kindle book while its Audible version plays, if you own both. We compared it with the language-learning apps in Readuet vs LingQ vs Beelinguapp vs Kindle.

3. First pass: read and listen at the same time

Keep your eyes on the text and let the narrator set the pace. When your attention wanders, the page shows you exactly where you lost the thread, which audio alone never does.

Resist pausing every few seconds. In a meta-analysis of 30 studies, reading while listening helped comprehension only in the studies where the pace was set for the reader, not where readers controlled it themselves (Clinton-Lisell, 2023). If you can't keep up, slow the narration down a notch instead of stopping and starting, and bring the speed back up as it gets easier.

4. Keep sessions short and finish on a chapter

Twenty or thirty minutes of real attention beats an hour of background noise. Stop at the end of a chapter or a scene, not mid-sentence, and say in one sentence what just happened, in the language you're learning if you can. If you can't, that's useful to know too: go back and listen to the last page again with the text.

5. Look up only what stops you or comes back

You will meet unknown words on every page, and that's fine. Look one up when you can't follow what's happening without it, or when it turns up for the third time. Everything else can go by. When you do look a word up, keep the sentence you found it in. A word you can see in its sentence is far easier to remember than one on a list.

6. Second pass: now listen without the text

This is where audio-only earns its place. A chapter you have already read and heard is one you can follow on a walk, on the bus or at the sink, because you already know what each word looks like. Brown and colleagues suggest exactly this order: read a passage, read it again while listening, then listen only.

7. Review the words a little every day

One book is not enough to make a word stick. In Brown and colleagues' study, most new words were gone from strict recall three months later, and the authors estimate that long-term retention takes considerably more than seven to nine encounters. Reading a lot helps, especially if you stay with one author or series, because the same words keep coming back.

The other half is deliberate review, spread out over time. A meta-analysis of 317 experiments found that spacing study sessions apart beats cramming them together, and that the longer you want to remember something, the longer the gaps should be (Cepeda and colleagues, 2006). That's what spaced-repetition apps such as Anki automate. Five minutes a day with the words from your book is plenty.

How to tell it's working

  • You look up fewer words per page than you did in the first chapter.
  • You follow the narrator at normal speed without the text, on chapters you've already read.
  • Words you saved start to look familiar when they turn up again in the book.
  • The next book at the same level feels easier, and the one above it starts to look possible.

If none of that is happening after a few weeks, the book is usually too hard. Step down a level; there's no prize for suffering through it.

Where Readuet fits

You can do all of the above with an ebook, an MP3 player and a dictionary. We built Readuet to take care of the fiddly parts. It lines the book up with its audiobook sentence by sentence, so the sentence being narrated is highlighted and you never lose your place; press and hold any sentence to have the narrator play from there, and slow the audio down when you need to. Tap a word to see what it means in that sentence. Saved words come back in spaced-repetition review, and meeting one again in a book you're reading counts as a review too.

The free plan includes a catalog of about 2,700 public-domain books in ten languages, graded from A2 to C2. Narration and read-along come free on the prepared ones (English books by level, and what to read in other languages). The paid plans add narration on the rest of the catalog and line up your own DRM-free ebook and audiobook. Readuet runs in the browser and on iPhone and iPad; an Android app is in testing.

Frequently asked questions

Can you learn a language just by listening to audiobooks?

Not efficiently, at least not until your listening is already good. In Brown and colleagues' study, learners recalled the meaning of about half a new word out of 28 after listening only, against about four after reading or reading while listening. Listening on its own is most useful as a second pass, on chapters you've already read with the text.

What level do I need to start learning with audiobooks?

What matters is knowing most of the words in the book, about 95% or more, rather than reaching a particular level. For most people that means graded readers or children's books first. In our English catalog, the easiest complete books are rated A2, and most real novels sit at B1 and above.

Should I listen at normal speed or slow it down?

Slow it down if you can't keep up, rather than pausing constantly. A slightly slower narrator you can follow is better practice than full speed you can't. Bring the speed back up as the book gets easier.

Should I read along in my native language instead?

No. A translation in front of you lets you follow the story without processing the language you're learning. If you need help, look up single words in context, or pick an easier book.

Where can I find free audiobooks with matching text?

LibriVox has free public-domain recordings, most in English but also in dozens of other languages, and most book pages link to the text the narrator read, often on Project Gutenberg. For English learners, we've sorted free audiobooks with matching text by CEFR level.

Readuet is built on this idea: a book and its audiobook, aligned sentence by sentence, with a translation one tap away on any word. Try it free in your browser — the public-domain library costs nothing to read.