“Because I’m not a native speaker of English! Duhhh” many of you might think. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had advanced students coming up to me completely baffled. They have been learning English for years, yet they are still unable to understand native English speakers, especially on TV.
Why especially on TV? Well, because most native speakers are usually very understanding of the fact that English is not your first language. So they either slow down or simplify the language for you so as to spare you the embarrassment and avoid misunderstandings.
On TV, native speakers often speak as they would really speak in real life. There is no attempt to simplify the language. Screenwriters use real language as real people speak it in real life. So, listening to native speakers on TV is a real test for your listening skills. How much can you understand? Is it 50%, 75% or 100% of what they say? If you only get 50 or 60% of the conversation or less, then you have a serious listening problem here. That would also happen to be the reason you might have hit a plateau (stopped improving) in your English learning.
Okay, so why can’t you understand native English? Let’s assume you can read and understand 80% of the subtitles, so it’s not that the vocabulary or grammar is difficult for you, you just can’t follow the actors. Mainly 2 reasons:
1-(Spoken) Native English is chaotic
Now what do I mean by that? Spoken native English, as any other spoken language, doesn’t normally follow grammatical rules rigidly as written English (in the academic sense). Simply put, we never speak as we write. Well, most of us don’t. Unfortunately, the way you have been studying the language right from the beginning is through textbooks.
Those damn textbooks
Textbooks present an extremely polite, clean and orderly form of the language for the learners to model their English to. They are very politically correct, as if we were living in a perfect world, but guess what! We do NOT live in a perfect world, and many of us hate political correctness.
Sarcasm and Humor
Textbook English avoids sarcasm and humor while many native speakers use it, regardless of whether they’re funny or not. The point is that many of them WANT to be funny, and WILL try to be funny whenever they can.
Slang
Textbook English steers clear of (avoids) the use of slang. Let’s face it though. Native English speakers often overuse it, most probably not in job interviews (In Australia though, back in the days when I was looking for a job, I did come across a couple of employers who DID use slang during the interviews).
In written English, we have plenty of time to process and complete a thought and then to select the best words to express it. In contrast, in spoken English, we often don’t! Let me say it again clearly so you understand. We sometimes cannot say what we want to say as well as we wish to say it! That doesn’t mean we STOP talking or grab a dictionary and start digging.
Tactics of Chaos
You will hardly ever hear long awkward pauses in native English. Instead, we rephrase, elaborate, give analogies, digress and give examples. We even use interjections, make funny sounds or funny faces, use body language and repetition. We subconsciously use so many tactics to carry on with a conversation. tTose tactics make the language chaotic and consequently impossible for you to follow. You don’t see commas, nor do you see full stops, and while native speakers are jumping from one tactic to the next, you’re lost. Look at the text below:
Example of Slang
Do I like Paris? Umm, I don’t know, I mean…, look, don’t get me wrong, it’s truly just an astonishing city, so I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. But there’s something about it, something there, you know, something that I don’t like, I can’t put my finger on it. Could be the people, could be something else, yeah yeah, I suppose it’s not a black or white area for me. It’s just one of those places that I’ve got mixed feelings about, I don’t know, I’m just a weirdo, don’t listen to me.
The point I’m trying to make is that in written English, especially in textbooks, we do not see this sort of chaos, which is a normal phenomenon in spoken English. Spoken English is instant. It takes place in real time. We have to say what we want to say NOW. We may not always be able to come up with the best set of words to illustrate every thought we have. We still manage however to keep the listener hooked until we really figure out the best way to say it.
2-Pronunciation
If you have studied English mainly through textbooks or written texts, it is most likely that, one, you pronounce every letter of the English language based on spelling. And two, you pronounce it as close to your native language as possible. You replace some English sounds with others, you delete some altogether and you just mispronounce the rest. Your native language affects your listening. Because of your native language, you are not physically able to hear the English sounds as they are really uttered (spoken). You only hear them as you THINK they are uttered.
Sound-spelling dilemma
In spoken English, we hardly ever pronounce the sounds based on spelling. Each sound of the 44 English sounds has different spelling. There are only 26 letters to spell 44 sounds, so you can imagine how messy it can be. Now even if you learn how to pronounce each phoneme in isolation, you probably still won’t be able to hear it perfectly. In spoken English, phonemes sound different. Why? Because they affect each other. How we pronounce a certain phoneme (sound) really depends on its location or position in relation to the other phonemes. We might either stretch or shorten, replace or delete certain vowels or consonants. If no one tells you how that happens and most importantly TRAIN you to do it, you will probably neither be able to understand a conversation nor speak in one.
Conclusion
My conclusion is that you MUST learn the language through sound FIRST. That is how babies learn it, and that is how YOU should learn it. In the case of babies, there is no first language affecting second language, even bilingual babies learn 2 languages pretty much as one language. It’s only later that they realize they are using two completely different languages. For YOU however, it’s more complicated as the environment has programmed you to hear and say the human sounds in a certain way. That means you need INTENSIVE TRAINING to reprogram your brain and build new muscle memory. Once you do that, everything else will follow.
Who else thinks textbooks suck? Say “I”!
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