“Level Up Your Listening”—Refold Course Review
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Level Up Your Listening—A Full Review of Refold’s Course
Even when you know the words in a foreign when reading them, understanding them in fast spoken language is a whole different ballgame. The words blur together, sound unfamiliar, or just vanish before your brain gets a chance to process them. The ambiguous and intuitive nature of listening makes it one of the hardest language skills to master.
Refold’s new course Level Up Your Listening is designed to tackle this exact problem. As someone who’s followed and recommended Refold for years, I was curious to see if this course could make a difference. Instead of just going through it for the sake of reviewing it, I took it myself—just like any other student.
In this post, I’ll walk you through what the course includes, who it’s for, and whether it lives up to its promise. I’ll also share my personal experience with the course and how, to my surprise, it turned out to be a complete game-changer for my Cantonese learning.
What is Level Up Your Listening
Level Up Your Listening is a 28-day course by Refold designed to help you master the skill of listening.
By the end of 28 days, the course promises to give you the tools to become a confident listener and clear up any confusion about how to effectively improve your listening skills with proven techniques and activities.
Throughout the course, you'll primarily use two TV series of your choice—one "known" and one "new"—as your main learning material. You'll also learn how to turn any audio, such as podcasts and YouTube videos, into powerful tools for sharpening your listening comprehension, along with strategies for how to use subtitles to improve your listening.
Who is This Course For?
This course is designed for learners who already have a foundation in their target language and want to improve their listening skills through immersion. If you're an absolute beginner, Refold recommends starting with their Teach Yourself a Language course first, as this one may otherwise be a bit too advanced.
People who like watching TV shows will likely enjoy this course the most, though it’s not required, as the listening strategies learned can be applied to any listening activity.
The official languages you can learn with Level Up Your Listening are:
Japanese, Spanish, English, German, French, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Italian, and Russian.
Even if your target language isn’t one of the above, just like mine wasn’t, you can still benefit from the course. The ‘minimal pairs’ flashcard deck and the language-specific content database are the only two things you’ll miss out on.
Spanish speakers can take the entire course in Spanish, as everything is fully translated.
How the Course Works
Before I share my own firsthand experience (and breakthroughs) of going through the course, here’s an overview how the course works, so you’ll know what to expect from taking it.
Format & Structure
The course is split into 4 weeks. Each week has a theme and set of skills you’ll be learning.
Weekly breakdown
Introduction module
Get connected to resources, the Content Database, and the community to make the most of the course.
Week 1: Foundations and Habits
Build solid listening foundations and daily habits for success, while strengthening your listening endurance.
Week 2: Fundamental Skills
Focus on the sounds of the language with ear training to stretch your listening ability.
Week 3: Intensive Listening
Push your listening skills to the next level by breaking audio into smaller chunks and using subtitle confirmation and transcription to capture every detail.
Week 4: Freeflow Listening
Learn to enjoy content without subtitles to strengthen your comprehension.
Each Day of the Course You’ll Have…
A written lesson (1-2 minutes read).
A minute video lesson (4-5 minutes) for about half of the days, with some days also featuring video tutorials for different listening tools.
Daily homework assignment, in line with the topic of the week.
Homework
The daily time commitment for the course is 1 hour, with the majority of that being spent on the homework assignments—the activities you need to improve your listening.
Each assignment is named and tracked by Refold’s own Habit Tracker App, giving students a clear sense of when homework is completed. The assignments change every 3-4 days, giving enough time to learn each skill while introducing new tools and activities to the student’s arsenal.
What You'll Learn...
Core Listening Skills
Push beyond your current level with intensive listening—training your ears to catch what you’d normally miss.
Improve sound recognition with ready-made ‘minimal pairs’ flashcards, helping you distinguish tricky sounds.
Use the multipass method to increase comprehension.
Train your ears with looping, giving yourself extra chances to catch difficult parts.
Building Strong Listening Habits
Create an effective daily listening routine for steady progress.
Use the Refold Habit Tracker to stay motivated and track your growth.
Learn how to benefit from freeflow listening for natural comprehension.
Smart Strategies & Techniques
Avoid the Anki trap—keep flashcards useful without overwhelming yourself.
Become an audio detective, sharpening your ability to notice new details.
Use chorusing to improve focus while listening.
Make intensive listening portable—train your ears even on-the-go.
Essential Tools & Resources
How to use subtitles strategically to skyrocket your listening.
The easiest way to download any YouTube video as audio.
Turn decks into bite-sized transcription exercises using Refold’s ready-made Transcription Cards-template.
Set up and use ASBplayer to make intensive listening and sentence mining effortless.
How to take advantage of apps like Audacity, Pocket Casts, and Music Speed Changer to make your listening practice smooth.
What's Included in the Course
Core Materials: 15 video lessons, 15 tutorials, 28 written lessons.
Practice & Tools: ‘Minimal pairs’ flashcard deck, dozens of listening activities, Refold Habit Tracker app.
Support & Community: Access to a private Discord community, weekly guided progress reflections, personal guidance from Refold coaches, and ongoing support and inspiration from fellow language learners in the course.
Tech & Resources: Content database for 10 languages and tutorials for how to set up and effectively use programs like Anki, ASBplayer, Audacity, Pocket Casts, and Music Speed Changer.
Pricing
Level Up Your Listening is currently priced at $147 for lifetime access, including future updates. Plus, it’s backed by a 90-day, no-questions-asked, 100% money-back guarantee.
As the course is new, expect potential price increases in the future, so locking in the current price is recommended.
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My Experience Taking the Course: The Missing Piece I Didn't Know I Needed
Whenever you take a course, it’s probably because you’re looking for a solution to a problem you have, right? However, sometimes, what we think is the problem isn’t actually the problem, which was the case for me before taking the course.
I had been learning Cantonese for seven years, and while my reading ability in Chinese has steadily improved, one thing kept holding me back—my listening comprehension.
Despite all the time I put in, I wasn’t progressing at the rate I wanted. Conversations were still harder than I wanted them to be, and I couldn’t understand native content like TV shows effortlessly. I chalked it up to “well, Cantonese is just a tough cookie of a language. I just need to put in more hours listening.”
When I signed up for the course, I just wanted to improve my listening comprehension and pick up a few new ideas. What I didn’t realize was that my main problem wasn’t the lack of listening volume. While simply getting a lot of listening volume had for sure helped to a point, it wasn’t working any longer.
After starting Level Up Your Listening, I realized I had been missing a key piece all along. The issue wasn’t just about time—it was about how I was listening.
Aha-Moments and Breakthroughs I Had
Already the first week of the course, I felt very excited. I somehow knew I was moving in the right direction, which was to actively engage with the language when listening. For a long time, I had been mostly doing passive and freeflow listening, in combination with active reading, thinking it would be enough.
What I found out was that my learning had been lacking ‘Intensive Listening’. The strategies presented in Week 3, the ‘intensive listening week’, were a game-changer. That’s when everything clicked for me.
It helped me fill in the gaps that were holding back my comprehension—words and expressions I would have had a tough time acquiring otherwise.
I had used versions of some of these strategies early in my Cantonese learning, but this time, I gained a much deeper understanding of them and discovered more ways to apply them. I had also thought I’d outgrown these techniques at my upper-intermediate-ish level. But by following the methods in the course, I quickly realized how effective they were in advancing my listening ability.
Some of my main breakthroughs were:
Incorporating listening ‘quality’ time through various forms of intensive listening, saving me time by getting more value out of my listening time.
The start-stop method gave a structured and effective way to focus on the tricky parts I couldn’t comprehend, making them clear and easy to understand.
Effectively tracking my progress using Refold’s Tracker App drastically increased my motivation. It ensures I achieve my daily listening goals by making it feel like a fun challenge and game to complete them.
Learning to use asbplayer making ‘sentence mining’ and intensive listening not only effective but highly addicting, helping me fill in gaps in my vocabulary that are hindering my comprehension.
Incorporating transcription that I initially resisted but ended up loving, thanks to how easy it was to do the way Refold structured it.
Taking the course for Cantonese meant there were no resources for the language in their resource database. However, I’m someone who likes to find my own content anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal. I did, however, get helpful Cantonese resource recommendations from the Refold coaches in the Discord group.
How Level Up Your Listening Revolutionized My Cantonese Learning
Before taking the course, my Cantonese learning consisted of reading every day with LingQ, and listening to something like a podcast or other audio passively as I was doing the dishes, cooking, or walking to places. I’d also watch an episode of a TV show without subtitles here and there.
Since taking Level Up Your Listening I have put much more of an emphasis on intensive listening in my routine. The best part? I’ve realized that even a little goes a long way when done consistently. Right now, I’m watching TV show episodes using techniques from the course, like the ‘start-stop method’ and sentence mining unknown words or hard-to-hear sentences with the powerful ASBPlayer-Anki combo. And it’s working like a charm.
I’ve even incorporated some transcription into my routine, which is something I used to avoid like the plague. I had done some of it years ago, and I found it quite a time-consuming and difficult task. Deep down though, I knew how powerful transcription could be from my musician days when I did a lot of it, and it developed my ears to the point where I could pick up on sounds and nuances in music with incredible detail.
But when it came to languages, sitting down to do it felt inconvenient and frankly not something I thought I’d enjoy. Now, though, being able to convert any Anki deck into transcription cards—getting transcription exercises served automatically—has made it much easier to do. Surprisingly, transcription is naturally starting to sneak into my learning in other ways, too.
Even though we can’t rely on it all the time, motivation is still important in language learning. It largely comes from feeling like you’re making progress. Since I’ve noticed my ears starting to pick up details I wasn’t able to before, my motivation has dramatically increased. Now, working on my listening is the most fun part of my Cantonese learning, instead of just something I felt I ‘needed to get done.’
Why This Course is Different (and a Breath of Fresh Air)
When I first started the course, I was expecting long videos with very detailed information. I’ve taken a lot of courses in the past, and I’m used to people waffling on for 45-60 minutes. This makes Level Up Your Listening stand out as a course.
I was expecting 30-minute videos, and instead got 4-5-minute ones, covering all the necessary information in a clear and no-nonsense manner. I was surprised at how simple and condensed the information in the course was. Which makes it much easier to digest and actually implement what you learn.
Many courses offer an “optimal method” or “secret sauce” for “guaranteed results”. Level Up Your Listening is different in that it doesn’t offer a shallow one-fix method or a one-size-fits-all approach. Listening is a complicated skill and process, and the team at Refold deeply understands how listening works and exactly what activities target certain problem areas of listening, and then reasons why they work (or why something doesn’t).
“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.” ― Harrington Emerson
The course both gives you clarity in what steps and actions to take but also gives you options for different types of listening activities to choose from. So in a sense, it’s a bit of a “Listening Encyclopedia”—which provides value long after finishing the course—since you might want to try different activities and methods down the line to just switch things up.
Another thing that surprised me was how accessible all the homework activities were. I have taken courses where the homework assignments felt like pulling teeth (or worse: watching a show where every episode ends on a cliffhanger—and the next season never comes), but with Level Up Your Listening, the homework quickly became the part I looked forward to the most every day.
Pros and Cons of Level Up Your Listening
✅ Pros
High-Quality Production – Crystal-clear video and audio make video lessons and tutorials a pleasure to follow.
Created by True Language Experts – The Refold team deeply understands immersion, and everything in the course feels intentional and effective—no gimmicky, useless exercises.
One-of-a-Kind Course – There’s nothing else quite like this on the market, which makes it a rare, standout resource for mastering listening.
Concise, Engaging Lessons – The daily lessons—including video, written content, and tutorials—take less than 15 minutes to complete. This allows you to focus on the homework, which is what ultimately gives you the results.
Fun and Motivating Homework – The daily missions, combined with the tracker app, make home assignments feel like a fun challenge rather than a chore.
Easy-to-follow Tutorials - Short, clear, and to the point, helping you get useful tools set up easily without the headache.
Perfect for Strong Readers Who Struggle with Listening – It helps you bridge the gap so your listening ability can catch up to your reading level.
Encouraging and Light Atmosphere – Ben’s fun, clear teaching style and Bree’s engaging writing make the course feel approachable and motivating.
Demystifies Listening – The course takes something as difficult to grasp as listening and breaks it down into concrete actions, giving you a clear and structured approach for how to improve it.
No Extra Costs – All recommended tools are either free or included in the course.
Active and Helpful Support – Coaches in the Discord group respond quickly and are highly knowledgeable, with daily check-ins helping learners stay engaged and learn from each other.
Ideal for Self-Motivated Learners – It provides structure but also flexibility, so learners can 100% tailor listening practice to their needs.
❌ Cons
Not for Absolute Beginners – Best for upper beginners and up, as a basic understanding in the language is necessary.
Requires a Proactive Approach – While content suggestions are offered, there’s no rigid path, so learners must take a proactive approach in choosing content and finding what works for them.
Learning Curve with Tools – The course introduces several tools for listening, which may take some time to get used to.
Final Thoughts: Is it Worth it?
It's always hard to know if a course will be worth it until you’ve experienced it, right? Had I known what I know now, I would’ve been much more excited to start Level Up Your Listening, because of how it has massively impacted my Cantonese learning. Without it, I’d still be stuck at the same listening plateau.
Now, I have a structured, engaging routine that helps me improve every day. If I had taken this course a year ago, I firmly believe my Cantonese would be at a much higher level than it currently is.
Level Up Your Listening takes the common and difficult problem of improving listening and offers a step-by-step approach to push it to the next level. It takes each skill and builds on it, making it a natural progression that never feels overwhelming by introducing one new element at a time.
While many of the tutorials can be found on Refold’s YouTube channel, the real value in Level Up Your Listening lies in how it organizes these insights into a step-by-step learning experience that you just can’t get by watching them in random order. The clear structure and accountability push you to actually use the techniques and make them part of your daily routine, which is what makes it effective.
What used to be the most frustrating part of my Cantonese learning is now the part I enjoy the most. This, to me, is huge, as improving listening ability is the key to truly mastering a language.
Keep in mind, this is no instant fix. Listening is a skill that takes a lot more than 28 days to master and requires regular practice. What Level Up Your Listening will give you are the right tools, activities, habits, and support to make real progress—something no other resource I’ve found offers with this much depth and in such a condensed format
It makes the often frustrating skill of listening something you can actually enjoy. Plus, it saves you time and effort, making it my best recommendation for anyone looking to level up their listening comprehension.
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