Introduction:

French is known as the most romantic of the romantic languages. Many persons learn french for a long time but in many cases, they are unable to understand the language when a native speaker speaks rapidly. Mostly due to the rapidity of spoken french, the subtle pronunciation, and the word stress, it becomes slightly hard to understand the language. But no need to worry about that, here some simple methods by following which you can improve your French listening skills

• Always practice active French listening. This means you should not just put on French music and do some other works along with listening to it. When you are listening to any french content, just focus and concentrate on that.
• Get a recording of spoken French. It can be a movie, podcast, or news broadcast. You can even subscribe to any French youtube channel. You can find something very interesting. Try to find out short content for better understanding. It can be 20 or 30 seconds of video or audio.
• Play the content and listen to a part of the audio and write down whatever you hear. Before writing down listen to the audio several times. First, you need to listen without the transcript. After trying a couple of times, double-check whatever you have written against the script of what was actually said. If you watch a movie, in that case, you can double-check by turning on the french subtitles. 
• Repeat this exercise regularly and in few days you’ll start making big progress with your French listening comprehension.
• When you order a french audiobook, try to order the actual book along with the audiobook, so that you can read along and get used to the pronunciation of the words. Audiobooks are generally read at a slow pace, so they won’t be difficult for you to understand. Always try to choose a story which you already know so that you can concentrate on the French. 
• You can even watch French gameshows on youtube where you will be able to listen to candidates introducing themselves in french. You can listen to their names, where they are from, about their family, etc.

• To improve your French listening skills you need to understand when French speakers link words together.
• You must learn the rules related to when you have to link the ending consonant of a word with the following vowel or silent -h;
• You must be aware of the sounds of the liaison. For example, The liaison form of words ending in S or in X ends in /z/

You can use the Listening-Reading method to boost your French skills

• The listening-reading technique will help you to train yourself to delineate words in the audio as well as to reduce difficult texts into comprehensible content.
•  The simplest way of doing this is to closely read a text while listening to the audio of that text simultaneously. 
• For getting the best result you can do this with a wide variety of content, with as much time as you can bear.

• A good french accent will help you to hear and pick up French sounds faster. 
• To develop your accent, you need to focus on any sounds or letters that are difficult for you. 
• As you are comfortable with the basic sounds, start to combine them using words and whole sentences.
• Try to listen to native French speakers as much as possible, and along with that take note of how words and sounds can blend, morph, or get dropped during a rapid speech. 
• Listen and try to imitate whatever you hear. Try to focus more on how the syllables are said together rather than simply saying the words “next to each other”. 
• There are significant differences between how words are said individually and how they are said when spoken together. And this the main reason why French learners most often know a lot of French but are still not capable of understanding the native speakers.