When reading, you could go back at the sentence and try to remember if you
know one of the words in the phrase or sentence. When listening to someone
saying this sentence, You won’t have time to figure out what any of the words
means. You can’t tell that person: “wait!” and then open your dictionary and
ask him: “how do you spell ‘enthrall’?”
Also, unless it’s an informal situation (talking to a friend.), you wouldn’t
be able to ask him/her : “what does “repartee” mean?”.
So, the question is: how is it possible to understand something when you
hear it for the first time and you can’t even check how it’s written or what
the words in it mean?”
So many of the English learners say that their problem in learning English is
listening/reading. Are you one of those people?
let’s see what exactly makes you not able to understand spoken/written English.
1. Languages are made of sentences. Sentences are made of phrases. Phrases are
made of words. If you don’t know a word in a phrase, if the word is not
important in that phrase (not a key word), you could understand the general
meaning of the phrase or if the word is a key word, you won’t be able to
understand the phrase. And if you couldn’t understand the phrase, you won’t
understand the sentence that phrase is in = your understanding will be
compromised.
Let’s look at an example:
A pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun to
avoid repetition. So, instead of saying:
"Tom is a nice boy. Tom has
many friends. Tom likes to play with his friends"
we say:
" Tom is
a nice boy. He has many friends and he
likes to play with them.
After mentioning Tom for the first
time, we can use the pronoun he. If it was Lisa instead of Tom, we would use she.
If it was the car, we would use it, and so on.
These are called 'subject pronouns'. Because they replace the noun that did
something = that was a subject.
