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Part 2 “I Can’t Tell Words

Apart!”
(Click here for the original video)

Hello and welcome back to part two of this special series: Three Steps to Better Listen-
ing Skills.

The point of this series is to help you have better experiences listening in the language
that you are learning.

Whether that’s in a conversation with another person, whether that is listening to the
radio, watching TV, whatever it is.

I’m looking to give you ideas here that help you directly influence your listening skills -
practical things you can do to help you improve your listening, so that you can reduce
the stress and the frustration that can often be associated with not understanding in
the language that you’re learning.

And to help you energise your learning and enjoy your conversations and your whole
experience learning a language and much more.

So let’s quickly recap part one:

1. Many factors go into being able to simply understand easily.

2. With your textbook diet, you’re being shielded from real language. You’re not
seeing what real language sounds like, and this results in frustration when you
hear the real thing because there’s this big gap.
3. The solution is to allow yourself to learn to spend time with real language

That’s what we covered in the last video.

But of course, what happens is that as soon as you go out there and you start to listen
to real language, what happens is that you have these problems:

• “I can’t tell words apart in fast speech”

• “Two or three words might appear in one or words seem to be linked together
and mumbled, not like in my textbook.”
• “Some sounds are difficult to hear clearly or hidden by the speed.”
• “I can’t 2 recognise words I know when I hear them.”
• “I can only separate the words when I ask someone to speak more slowly for me.”

Does that sound at all familiar?

It should do.

That’s exactly what normally happens when you make that progression from listening
to basically beginner materials to listening to real language.

Now of course the result of these problems is this:

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“If I miss a few words, I panic and the whole conversation becomes a nightmare. I
can’t wait to get away.”

So let’s have a quick reality check then and talk about why this is happening.

So the first obvious point to make is the language that you’ve been exposed to in your
textbooks and language classes are nothing like real life…

It’s nothing like the language that exists in the living real world out there.

You are shielded from all kinds of things that make it difficult to learn as a beginner.

Textbooks are artificially created for beginners to make the language digestible. In par-
ticular, easy words, phrases and grammar are chosen.

Here’s a totally different way to study:

Take real conversations as your starting point for learning.

How about that?

In this approach, you take the things that people are actually saying out in the real
world in your target language… and you study that.

Can you see how this is a very different approach from your textbook where everything
has been artificially created?

What you’ve got right here is the actual real language that’s simply been written down
word for word... and this is what you have to start doing in order to begin to tell words
apart in fast speech.

Now let’s examine why this is special.

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In the last class I told you about something called connected speech.

Now, this is a fancy linguistic term to describe how words change when they’re spoken
at a natural speed in full sentences.

You did know that words are pronounced differently at “full speed”, right?

Have a look at this sentence right here.

Now you can imagine this is part of a long speech, maybe, and in the end the person
says:

“Despite the fact that he arrived sooner.”

Now, it doesn’t matter about the context, because what I’m going to do here is show
you how this particular sentence might be difficult for a learner of English.

You speak English, so you’ll be able to appreciate the difficulties once they’re pointed
out.

Just say this sentence aloud a few time - at full speed.

Done that? Good.

Let’s begin with how it might be pronounced in the textbook:

“Despite the fact that he arrived sooner”

(Say it aloud, slowly and articulately)

As you listen to that, you can tell that it sounds very unnatural, right.

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No one would talk like that.

A natural way of saying it is, “Despite the fact that he arrived sooner.”

(Say it aloud at full speed, as if in the middle of a conversation.)

Now let’s look at all the different things that are happening in this sentence…

Elision
First of all we have something called elision.

Elision is when sounds are removed - when they’re literally not spoken.

Here this takes the form of what’s called a glottal stop, which again is a fancy way of
saying that we are just dropping our T’s.

So instead of saying:

“Despite the fact that...”

We say:

“Despi’ the fac’ tha’...”

A lot of our T’s are disappearing, they’re being taken away, and this is called a glottal
stop.

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Now if you were an Italian person who pronounces all the syllables at the end of your
words, “Despite,” like that; then it’s a big problem to listen to fast English like this because
you don’t know what that missing sound is.

Catenation
Now next, have a look at these two words here that contain the blue letters.

“He arrived,” now that might seem pretty straightforward but of course when we speak
quickly, listen to what happens in between these two letters,

“He_ya_rived,”

We’ve got what’s called catenation - a fancy word meaning that the words are joined
together.

In this case, we’re adding a little ‘ya’ sound that goes in between “he” and “arrived”.

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Now if you were listening to this as a learner of English, you would hear that ‘ya’ sound
and you think to yourself, “Well what kind of word has a ‘ya’ in the middle of it, in the
spelling?”

In fact it’s not, it’s just a little pronunciation quirk.

Assimilation
Now lastly, have a look at these two letters here:

Look at the ‘d’ and the ‘s’ sound.

Now, when we speak quickly, these change.

Listen to what happens to the D here, we say, “Arrived sooner”...

“Arrivessooner”

What happens is that D actually turns into an S, we say it like this, “Arrivessooner.”

(Note, you need to say this aloud at full speed to recognise how the sounds change.)

It’s awkward to pronounce that D just before the S, so it kind of changes and it morphs
into an S…

And this is what’s technically known as assimilation.

And again, as a learner you’re listening to that and you’re thinking, “Well that word ends
in an S but what’s he talking about because it should end in...” and it’s very difficult to
know what happened.

Unless of course you are used to the way that these sounds change.

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Now these are all quite simple words actually but if you can’t identify them when you’re lis-
tening, well you may as well not know the words!

The example here was English, but this happens in all languages.

So whether you’re learning French, Spanish Italian, German, Japanese, Chinese; this hap-
pens in your language and this is why when you’re listening to people speak, you have this
feeling of not being able to recognise words that you know.

When you speak at natural speed, the pronunciation of words changes a lot.

And again, as a learner you’re listening to that and you’re thinking, “Well that word ends
in an S but what’s he talking about because it should end in...” and it’s very difficult to
know what happened.

Unless of course you are used to the way that these sounds change.

Now these are all quite simple words actually but if you can’t identify them when you’re
listening, well you may as well not know the words!

The example here was English, but this happens in all languages.

So whether you’re learning French, Spanish Italian, German, Japanese, Chinese; this
happens in your language and this is why when you’re listening to people speak, you
have this feeling of not being able to recognise words that you know.

When you speak at natural speed, the pronunciation of words changes a lot.

Listening At Full Speed

So how do we solve this?

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Well this is in fact only a problem because as a beginner you’ve been studying using
your textbooks, that’s why it’s a problem because you’ve been studying using stuff that’s
been written for the classroom.

It’s simplified, it’s sanitised, it’s dumbed down to be teachable…

And all the recordings are done in a very clear way with people speaking very clearly.

Now again, that’s great for a beginner but what happens when you’re ready for real
language?

Well it’s just like the shift that we talked about in the first video, moving from the build-
ing blocks to a more realistic, holistic experience of language.

You start with the real thing and you work your way back from there.

So the first thing to do is to not shield yourself from real language.

This will probably mean drastically changing your study habits... or at least your material.

You have to start by listening to real material of real people talking so that you get the
opportunity every day to listen to this thing that we’ve called “connected speech”.

By listening to recordings of real language, you’ll hear the way that the pronunciation
of words changes in real life, with no kind of filters, or without anyone trying to make it
easy for you.

Make sense?

Good.

Now, at this stage, you might be wondering…

“I understand the theory of this, but whenever I listen to real language, I don’t under-
stand a thing! It’s too hard to understand!”

You’ve probably tried listening to the radio or podcasts…

Or movies or TV…

And you can’t tell the words apart.

So how can you make it work?

With one very simple tweak:

You must listen to material that comes with the transcript.

Then, you listen and read at the same time.

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When you’ve got the transcript, you have help whenever you can’t tell words apart. You
simply look at the words written down in the transcript.

This is where the magic happens!

Now, do you remember our sentence in English from a few slides back?

If you were a learner it might sound a bit like this:

“Despi’ the fac’ tha’ heyarivessooner”

...like one very long word. It’s a big jumble of words.

But, if you’re reading along with the transcript, you can easily find the line in the tran-
script that gives you the exact words said.

And that solves the problem.

By studying in this way, you get used to how the sounds change in the language. And
pretty soon, you don’t need the transcript any more…

Because you have the skills to tell every word apart!

You’ll gradually learn exactly what happens in fast spoken language and you’ll simply
get used to it.

You will learn what sounds tend to disappear, change or get added in speech and every
gap that you currently have.

So that means that when you come to the real thing, and you’re listening to real Japa-
nese or French or Spanish or German, you’re not taken by surprise anymore.

It’s all part of this general shift towards holistic learning and this is the key to beginning
to clearly hear all the words and phrases that you already know in fast, natural, spoken
everyday language.

Quick Recap
So let’s quickly recap what we’ve covered here then:

1. The basic problem is this, “I can’t tell words apart in fast speech. It’s too much
going on, they all appear jumbled together.”
2. Most learning materials shield you from real language
3. Words are pronounced differently during fast conversations - this is called “con-
nected speech”
4. But the only reason you struggle with this connected speech is because you’re
not used to it
5. The solution is to use the transcript to identify and fill in the gaps in your knowl-
edge

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Sound good?

You’re almost ready to get started with this method.

But before you do, there’s probably one more thing you’re wondering…

“Okay, I’m really excited about this, and I can see how it will help my listening. But Olly,
the problem is that the things I want to listen to are far too hard, and they never come
with the transcripts!”

Great point.

Genuine problem.

So how do we solve it?

Well join me back in part three of this series and I will show you exactly how to solve this
problem, so that you can get on with the business of actually improving your listening
skills.

Right now, whilst you’re waiting for the third part, what I’d like you to do is to comment
on the original lesson page…

I think you probably know deep down that you need to spend more time with real ma-
terial. But what’s the main reason you haven’t done it?

• What’s the main reason that you don’t spend more time listening to real things?
• What is it exactly?
• What’s been holding you back from spending more time listening to the lan-
guage that you are learning?

Leave a comment or drop me an email, and I’ll see you back in the third class.

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