British folk music isn't a single sound; it's a collection of local habits, family songs and stubbornly surviving tunes, passed down in kitchens, pubs and farmyards. The good news is that you need no musical training to start listening properly. You need curiosity, a little patience, and a willingness to hear the same song more than once.

Begin with a single ballad

A ballad is a story told in verses, and it's the clearest doorway into the tradition. Pick one and live with it for a week: Barbara Allen, The Trees They Do Grow High, The Cruel Sister or the Scottish Tam Lin are all easy to find in several versions.

Listen three times in a row, doing nothing else. The first time, follow the story. The second time, follow the tune. The third time, listen to the singer: where they breathe, which words they lean on, how they decorate a repeated line. That third listen is where folk music starts to make sense, because it teaches you that the song matters more than the performance.

Get to know unaccompanied singing

Many newcomers expect guitars and close harmonies. In fact the oldest and most powerful strand of British folk is one voice, alone, with nothing behind it. The recordings gathered by collectors from the early twentieth century onwards, in kitchens and pub back rooms, are the real foundation of the tradition.

Listen for singers such as Harry Cox of Norfolk, the Copper Family of Sussex, Jeannie Robertson from Aberdeen or Belle Stewart from Perthshire. None of them sounds like a pop singer. Their voices are plain, unhurried and entirely at the service of the story. Give it time; the plainness is the whole point.

• A slow, measured English ballad, sung with no accompaniment at all
• A bothy ballad from north-east Scotland, with its farming slang and dry humour
• A Sussex family version of a carol or country song, sung in harmony

Follow the regions

British folk is intensely regional, and the accents, rhythms and subjects change with the landscape. Once you know a handful of styles, you'll hear the difference within a few bars.

• East Anglia — steady unaccompanied singing, songs of the sea, poaching and the land.
• North East England — smallpipes, fiddles, clog steps and a great store of short, punchy songs.
• Yorkshire and the Pennines — long ballads and the remarkable pub carols sung each Christmas.
• Scotland — Gaelic waulking songs, Border ballads and the bothy ballads of Aberdeenshire.
• Wales — penillion singing, harp tunes, and a hymn-singing tradition that shapes the phrasing.

Choose one region and explore it for a month rather than flitting about. Depth beats breadth, and regional listening is the quickest way to hear what makes this music tick.

Listen to the instruments and the tunes

Instrumental folk lives in sessions: fiddles, melodeons, concertinas, whistles, smallpipes, harps and guitars in various combinations. Listen for the drone humming beneath the melody, and for modal scales that sound neither firmly major nor minor. Dorian and Mixolydian modes are everywhere once you start noticing them.

Notice that dance tunes arrive in sets, usually two or three played back to back without a pause. Notice too the lift: a slight push at the end of a phrase that makes a room want to move. You don't need to name it, or count it, or write it down. You just need to feel it, and you will.

Train your ear with small habits

Ear training in folk music isn't about textbooks and intervals. It's about repetition and imitation, and it fits easily into an ordinary day.

• Learn one verse by heart and sing it while doing the washing up.
• Hear the same song from two different singers, and note what stays and what changes.
• Tap the pulse on your knee, then tap it again while humming the tune.
• Write down one line that struck you and a sentence about why.
• Give it fifteen minutes a day and learn one new song a week.

Within a couple of months, the unfamiliar stops sounding like fog and starts sounding like a language you half know already.

Go and hear it live

Folk is a live art, and no recording quite matches a room of people joining in a chorus. Look for two things: a folk club, where performers take turns in front of a small audience, and a session, where musicians sit in a circle and play tunes together. Local libraries, community noticeboards, pub walls and summer festivals are the best places to find them.

The etiquette is simple and kind. Arrive early, buy something from the bar, and keep chatting to a minimum while someone is singing. If you'd like to sing or play, ask the organiser first; most will be genuinely delighted. If you'd rather just listen, that's fine too, because an attentive listener is part of the performance. Ask before recording anyone, and don't feel you must join in until you're ready.

Then go home, play one of those songs again, and you'll hear something you missed the first time. That's how this music works: it rewards the return visit.