How to improve your listening/ reading of English: Part 01.

 

       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:


 -     Robert enthralled the audience with his witty repartee.


When we read this sentence, our brain tries to make sense out of it. Clearly, ‘Robert’ a person, did something to ‘audience’ with ‘something’ ‘something’. This is what you will understand if you don’t know any of the words ‘enthralled’, ‘audience’, ‘witty’ or ‘repartee’.

 Let’s say you know one word in this sentence and it is:
- audience : Robert did something to the audience with his ‘something’ ‘something’.
= no meaning.

let’s say the word you knew was:
- witty : Robert did something to the ‘audience’ with his witty something.
‘witty’ is an adjective. It describes ‘repartee’. But if we know  only that, we won’t understand what Robert did to the ‘audience’ with his ‘repartee’ that is ‘witty’. In fact, an adjective sometimes can be omitted with no effect on the meaning.

- John came to the party in his brand-new blue jeans.

and

- John came to the party in his jeans.

are both correct and even if we didn’t know ‘brand-new’ or ‘blue’, we would still understand the meaning.
So, ‘witty’ is not important = not a key word in this sentence.
‘Repartee’ is more important.
But ‘enthralled’ and ‘audience’ are the most important words in this sentence. Especially, ‘enthrall’. Because we need to know if this verb ‘to enthrall’ is a good or a bad thing. Second comes ‘audience’.
To enthrall = to keep someone completely interested.
Audience = a group of people in one place watching or listening to something or someone.
If we want to understand the whole sentence, we need to understand:
- Robert enthralled the audience.
Repartee = quick and usually funny answers.
‘Witty’ = clever, smart.

But we need only as far as ‘audience. So that we know what Robert did to the audience. How he did it is not always important.
(Remember our discussion of adverbs ; words that describe how something happens.)
So, this is what causes us to not be able to understand something when we hear it; not knowing key words.

Since we are very young children, our brain knows this. The first words a baby learns are ‘papa’, ‘mama’ ‘milk’etc. Then he/she goes to ‘pipi’ ‘poo-poo’ and other words starting with the most common and the most important. This is what you should focus on when learning vocabulary. If you’re reading, and you found our example above, and you didn’t understand it, then you need to look up in your dictionaries the two words: ‘audience’ & ‘enthrall’. Or the one you didn’t know.

And you have to just keep doing this as many times as you read. Never skip too much stuff you couldn’t understand. Get a dictionary of your choosing and translate words. Until only the words that are not so important are not familiar to you and by then, you would be able to learn them too.
But this works better with reading. With listening, it’s a little bit harder. Why?
Continue reading : How to improve your listening part 02.