Wednesday, April 29, 2015

How to improve your listening/ reading of English: Part 02.


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?”


The answer is: You can’t. In order to understand a word > then a phrase > then a sentence, you need to have met that word before. Either heard it more than once (or enough times for you to remember you met it.) or have seen how it’s spelled/ pronounced. Even native speakers from the US, UK or any other country learn like that. When, for example, they go to college, studying, for example, medicine or any other science and they find a new word(s), they write it down or try to know its meaning. But because they know most of the words, learning one or two words isn’t difficult. And this is how it is for advanced learners as well. (how did you learn advanced words in your language?
for example, in high school in literature class? I’m sure you used a similar way.)




  Now, How much of the scene in the video did you understand?
Don’t worry. This particular scene is very poetic. (if you haven’t seen that movie before), the character in the mask says so many words starting with the letter V.
(click here: for the text of
The type of language (words) he uses is called literary.
(Check : Types of words in the English language.)

But this is a scene in a movie. The actor would need hours and hours, maybe days rehearsing those words if he had to memorize the speech. (But they just added the voice later since he’s wearing a mask.). You won’t hear a person ever use these words or speak like that.
    Let’s look at a normal talk. A talk from TED:

Bill Gates: Our teachers need feedback.






Was the talk easy to understand for you?
Did you understand what the teacher said?
    
   You could watch the video again with English subtitles and see if your understanding becomes better(if you don't know how: click on the "cc" icon at the bottom right of the video player). It will be better because as we just discussed that reading is always easier than listening.
You could also see the text of the video here.
(you could also see the text of the talk in your language by clicking where it says 'English' to the right.)

The trick with listening is that you have to know to separate the words to know which is which. The English teacher in the video, speaks very fast and this is the normal speed native speakers speak. Some people say that spoken English is too fast. This is somewhat true, but, so many languages pace is fast. Your language might be too fast too for learners trying to understand it. You just don’t notice it. Neither do they.


Summary:
1. Improving your reading comes before improving your listening and it is also much easier.
2. You improve your reading by learning more words.
3. People speak in different contexts; A President’s speech is not like someone speaking in the street. (register.)
4. To become able to understand what someone says, you need to know at least the key words in that sentence. You need to have heard, read those words = know their spelling & their pronunciation.





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