The term “hearing partner” is often used in the context of aural rehabilitation. Your hearing partner is a spouse or someone close to you who will be part of the process of adjusting to a new hearing aid or cochlear implant. They might go through a course of regular listening exercises with you to help your brain acclimate to the new sounds. But not everyone who could benefit from a hearing partner has one. You may have to be a bit more creative.

Spouses are convenient but not your only option.

As a supplement, or even a replacement for a human hearing partner, try a recorded book. You can borrow them from many libraries. You’ll also need a print copy. First listen to a passage, a paragraph or two. Then look at the print version. Think about your mistakes and why you made them. Repeat, etc…. It does take quite a while to get through a book this way, so choose a good one. In a noisy environment, headphones help. Or you can download the recorded book on your Bluetooth-equipped phone, and the recorded text will go straight to your hearing aid or cochlear implant.

FaceTime is good for practice as well. No captions allowed on this one. I like FaceTime on my laptop but lots of people prefer their phone. Have your FaceTime partner say a few sentences. You repeat what you heard. If you got some but not all of what was said, ask your FT partner to repeat the part you didn’t understand. Another way to do this is for your FT partner to read a paragraph. You paraphrase what you heard.

Try listening to music with captions. Go on Spotify or another app and choose some favorites – I’ve been listening to Paul Simon’s Graceland recently. Spotify captions are at the bottom of the screen. I find that after a few hearings I can understand the words without the captions. The music is a little distorted, but even the music sounds better with captions. This obviously doesn’t work with orchestral music.

There are various at-home hearing-rehab programs online and of course they are useful too. I haven’t used them recently and would love to hear readers’ experiences with them. Please comment below. And if anyone has other DYI suggestions, please share them.

After I got a cochlear implant in 2009. I really needed someone to practice with. A good friend, recently retired, was confined to her apartment for many cold winter months recovering from cancer surgery and complications. She couldn’t go out, so I went to her. As I wrote in “Shouting Won’t Help,” we spent long days talking, and sometimes deliberately practicing hearing. She would read and I would try to understand what she was saying. Sometimes my mistakes were amusing. “Tiger Woods was tucked away, eating paper,” I heard. She was reading from People magazine about the disgraced golfer. But he wasn’t eating paper, he was reading Playboy. “Reading” sounds a lot like “eating,” and “paper” sounds a lot like “Playboy” – especially out of context. But it’s out-of-context speech that is the hardest to get: the punchline of a joke, for instance.

The best way to learn to hear again is to practice. So find somebody — or something — to do the talking. You’ll do the listening.

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For more about hearing loss, read my books: “Shouting Won’t Help,” “Living Better with Hearing Loss,”and “Smart Hearing,” available at Amazon.com.