They’re not speaking fast, your ears are hearing slow!
Why can’t I understand native English speakers? Why do they speak so fast? How do they speak so fast? What on earth do I do to get to the point when I can turn off my subtitles and just enjoy watching a movie without them? Yeah I know they’re all valid questions to which I luckily have the answer(s). There are essentially 4 keys to understanding native English.
1-Vocabulary
The first obvious thing to do to improve your understanding of native English is to work on your vocabulary. Most native speakers use between 1000 and 5000 words per day depending on their work and education. Many of those words differ from one native speaker to another depending on age, industry, interests and hobbies and likes and dislikes. However, there are still about 2000~3000 words that native speakers use regardless of the factors above.
That’s where you’ve got to keep on building up your vocabulary by reading books and articles to expand your lexical (words) repertoire. See? The word “lexical” for example is not something you’re going to use or hear often unless you are a linguist or a language teacher. So it really depends on your line of work and entourage. The word “vocabulary” on the other hand is more common and the word “word” even more common than “vocabulary”.
Common Mistake
Now, the biggest mistake a second language learner can ever make is to grab a whole list of new words and just memorize it. Or yet worse, just read the whole damn dictionary. None of this works. The best two ways are reading books or articles and watching movies or TV shows. Do that while using the dictionary and the internet to help you dig deeper though. You’ll find more examples on the internet and then get a very solid understanding of how you can use this word in context. So there you have it: Read, watch and dig.
2-Slang & idioms
That’s a branch of vocabulary anyway but it needs special attention. Idioms are not slang but can sometimes be. We use them a lot. I get many students asking me “so how can we recognize an idiom when we see one?”. Well, when you see a group of 2 or 3 words that literally don’t make any sense in the sentence they’re in, you’re probably looking at an idiom. Say you’re watching two actors on TV, one of them complaining about how his girlfriend broke up with him and left him for another man, so the other goes “you’re beating a dead horse”. It’s very unlikely that the guy’s girlfriend left him because he is “beating a dead horse”.
You’ve got to be able to extract the connection between the words in the idiom and kind of work out how that fits in the context of the conversation. If the horse is dead, is there any point in beating it? It’s not like it’s going to spring back up and start galloping again. The idea is that there’s NO POINT of doing something knowing that it’s not going to change anything. Then you realize that complaining about a girlfriend who already left you for another guy is POINTLESS, so there you go.
Slang
Now, slang is very tricky and difficult to remember, well not all of it though. The words can sound a bit funny and completely different from the main word. For example, someone who got drunk last night can say “I got plastered”, “I got wasted”, “I got sloshed”, “I got pissed”, “I got jacked up” etc. See? None of them bear any similarities to “drunk” phonetically (except for the “got” part).
The best way to study slang is to find a good book or website on slang and first pick the ones that you might use with native speakers yourself. If you come across a whole list of slang expressions you can use to say you’re “drunk”, don’t just start memorizing and parroting the entire list. Trust me. You won’t be remembering any of it. Instead, pick one or two and practice very well and put yourself in a situation where you can use them. When you do, you want to observe the native speakers’ reaction very well. Because you do want to know if you’re using them appropriately in the right context.
3-Word linking
Man, I can’t stress that enough. One of the factors that can change your listening forever is “word linking” or as it is also known “connected speech”. If you learn how to connect or link words together, your ears will start to process native English miraculously. Your mouth will produce the spoken English much more easily and effortlessly. The greatest benefit though is that you’ll be able to slow down native speakers dramatically. Fast English will turn out to be just normal because your brain will be able to process larger chunks of the language without too much trouble. Let me give you an example, just a sentence I was getting one of my private Japanese students to say:
“What day and time are convenient for you?”
He was first almost pronouncing each word by itself. So I wrote something to him on a piece of paper and told him to read it, he did and then all of a sudden the sentence came out perfect. Here’s what I wrote:
“What day yen timer convenient for you?”
Get it
So he needed to see the connected sounds as “separate words” to trick his brain into connecting them. So when I usually teach my students to say “can you” informally, I write the name of the African country “Kenya” on the board. And if I want them to say it normally, I write “Kenew”. That saves me a lot of time in correcting for example the /n/ sound. /n/ is very difficult to pronounce at the end of the word for many English students. By connecting it to another word and making it for example a mid sound as in “kenya”, I’m cheating the student’s brain into believing that it can produce it as it can in its native language. After I get the students to produce it and repeat it a few times, they can easily recognize it in native speakers’ speech. Word linking can undoubtedly work miracles with your listening.
4-Intonation
Intonation is a multifaceted area, hence quite complex. I’m not going to get into what intonation is now as I have already done several times on my website. Note that the areas of pitch height and pitch movement are most probably the ones to make a big difference in your listening to native English. When I say “pitch movement”, I’m basically referring to “tone”. In English, tones mean “feelings” or “intentions”, not “meanings” as in Chinese.
In Chinese, the meaning of the actual word changes depending on what tone the speaker uses. In English, it doesn’t matter how I use my voice pitch to pronounce, say “table”. “Table” always means “table” but my “intentions” are different. I can get you to understand that I’m angry, sarcastic, surprised or that I am simply asking a question.
Et Voila! Here’s everything you need to understand native speakers. No one’s saying it’s a cakewalk (easy) but isn’t it worth the time and effort? You tell me.
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