HOW TO UNDERSTAND NATIVE SPEAKERS: top tips

How to understand native speakers

Understanding native speakers is something many language learners struggle with.

Whenever I learn a new language, I get a bit of a shock. I learn a lot of vocabulary and a lot of grammar. And then, when I’m ready to go out there and speak, I realise how little I actually understand.

How is that possible, I think. I’ve been working so hard, I know so many words, I can even read newspapers in the language. But I can’t actually understand what people are saying to me!

I’m sure you’ve been faced with a similar situation in the past. And don’t worry – you’re not the only one. Being able to understand native speakers is something that comes with practice. There are specific things you can do to make it happen, and I’m about to share them with you.

Understand how letter combinations sound together

Speech is, of course, made up of words but, ultimately, it’s just a string of letters and sounds combined together. Those letters and the sounds they make blend together to make longer sounds, and then those longer sounds blend together to make even longer sounds. And that’s what language is!

So, if you want to understand native speakers, your first step is to focus on individual letters and letter combinations, and to understand how they sound together.

The best way to practise this is by reading and listening at the same time. You can look at a script and listen to a recording of it, and pause frequently (as frequently as every couple of words) to see how the different letter combinations sound together. You will be surprised by what you will discover. Sometimes words will sound differently depending on what other words they’re surrounded by.

The more you do this, the more you will begin to realise that native speakers’ speech is not one long word at all…

Learn about filler words

My second tip for learning how to understand native speakers is to do with so-called ‘filler words’.

Filler words are basically words that don’t mean anything. They exist in every language. They’re just words that people use when they speak but they don’t carry any specific meaning.

The word ‘like’ in English is one of them. People use it all the time, sometimes multiple times in one sentence.

If you didn’t know ‘like’ was a filler word, you might be listening to someone and thinking they’re talking about ‘liking’ something, or that they’re saying that something is ‘similar to something else’. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. When you know it’s used as a filler word, you can almost block it out so that it’s not distracting you from the real meaning of what somebody is saying.

You can google filler words in your language and make sure you’re familiar with them. This will definitely help you understand native speakers better.

Diversify your listening practice

If you want to get better at understanding native speakers, you need to diversify your listening practice. What I mean by that is that you need to start listening to many different types of people, in many different situations.

Often, when you buy a language course, the listening activities included in it will be scripted and recorded by a native speaker who sounds a certain way. They’re likely to be a professional voice artist who sounds fairly well-spoken and educated. Unlike many people, you will encounter when you use the language you’re learning to speak to native speakers. You will be talking to a variety of different people, from different backgrounds and different regions. They won’t all sound the same, obviously.

So, you want to make sure you’re prepared for that by diversifying your listening practice. To do that, you can watch the news in your target language because often they’ll have clips of people being interviewed on the street. Or you can watch youtubers because they’re from different regions and you’re likely to encounter different accents when listening to them.

Don’t translate in your head

When you’re translating what somebody is saying in your head, you can’t really focus on what they’re saying because there will always be a sentence or two ahead of you. You’re going to lose track.

Anyway, when you stop translating in your head, your ability to understand what people are saying to you will improve massively.

Don’t be afraid to ask people to repeat

The best way to really understand native speakers is to ask them to repeat. It’s like pressing rewind and play again on a language recording.

And – seriously – people don’t mind! Trust me, there’s nothing wrong with asking somebody to repeat. They’ll be happy to do it and they will enjoy the conversation even more because by repeating what they’ve just said they will allow you to understand better and be more engaged in the conversation.

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https://www.5minutelanguage.com/how-to-understand-native-speakers/