Hurray! For those of you who struggle with making sense of English when it’s spoken too quickly, this video series offers suggestions that should help you! The reason it’s so difficult for non-native English speakers to follow conversations and speech when it isn’t slowed down so you can hear every word clearly is precisely that: The words AREN’T said in the way you learned them! They are shortened and sometimes not said at all in order to “bunch” phrases together so that they can be said in roughly the same amount of time. For example, English speakers say these two sentences in the same amount of time:
1) “The boy rode his bike.” (Spoken like: *”Th’BOY//RODE//’is’BIKE.”)
2) “The little boy always rode his bike.” (Spoken like: *”Th’ldl’BOY//aweys’RODE’//is’BIKE.”)
*Not using phonetic symbols. The // represents a syllable in English. The capitalized words should be stressed and the ‘ shows where are joined together and read as one word instead of two or three.
Hopefully,the description above explains why it is difficult to follow spoken English when it is spoken quickly. The video series will offer you strategies to making sense of such speech!
You can also find other lessons on Jennifer YouTube channel as well on on her website, called “English with Jennifer: A Site for Language Learners“. If you benefit from her site, please share it with your friends, family AND teachers! 🙂
To access information on how to use her videos for instructional purposes, please go to: https://www.youtube.com/user/JenniferESL/about.
English Language Site for Students and Teachers 