Why is it difficult for us to understand foreign speech by ear and 8 ways to fix it

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Feel free to ask again, learn to guess from the context and practice distinguishing dialects.

Experts rate the skill of listening comprehension as the most difficult. Many language learners are "blown away" here. Why? People respond in different ways.

• Everybody distracts me.
• I do not understand the interlocutor's accent.
• I don't understand half of the words in a conversation.
• To understand a foreign speech by ear is not my thing.
• In general, a bear stepped on my ear.

Did you recognize yourself?

We will analyze step by step all the main reasons why it can be so difficult to understand a foreign speech, and we will find the best solutions for you.

1. External conditions

These are noises, technical problems, everything that does not depend on us and the interlocutor. What gets in the way of effective communication.

Imagine that you are driving to your dacha and talking on the phone. When you leave the city, the connection is interrupted. What will you do? Usually we warn the interlocutor that the signal will now disappear, and ask them to call back later or send a message.

What do we do when in a similar situation we do not understand the interlocutor in a foreign language? Usually we immediately decide that the problem is with us. The overwhelming majority of those who are just starting to learn a foreign language are embarrassed to ask again. Or they don’t know how to do it at all.

Solution 1. "Please repeat one more time"

During live communication, we are sometimes distracted by extraneous sounds: the noise of the street, office, conversations around. Even in our native language, we cannot always hear the interlocutor the first time, and this is normal. But when communicating in a foreign language, we simply forget about it.

What to do if extraneous sounds during communication interfere with you, and you do not yet understand foreign speech very well without them? What if the external environment does not allow you to catch the interlocutor's speech 100%?

1. Tell your interlocutor about it!
2. Ask again, even if you seem to understand everything.

Solution 2. "Stephen Covey method"

This is a more advanced method than just asking again. The author of the principle is American psychologist and bestselling author Stephen Covey. I recently began to apply his method to language learning, and the results of my students are very inspiring.

1. After listening to the interlocutor, retell the meaning of what you heard in your own words.
2. Do this until the interlocutor confirms that his words are understood correctly.
3. You can ask again both the meaning of individual words and the meaning of whole phrases.

For example: "I understood you correctly, do I have to come on Monday at 3 pm for a Chinese test?" In addition, this is how the skill is pumped to highlight the main thing in what you hear.

2. Features of the interlocutor's speech

Dialect, accent, slang can make it difficult to understand. As well as any individual characteristics of the interlocutor's speech - pronunciation of certain sounds, intonation, speech rate.

A couple of years ago I needed to translate for an Australian company at a trade show. It took me a whole day to begin to understand the Australian dialect, even with my native English level. And then another half day to learn how to imitate it.

How to deal with such situations without unnecessary stress? After all, learning all the dialects is unrealistic. Almost in every German village they speak their own dialect, and each interlocutor has individual characteristics.

My translation practice led me to two effective life hacks. The first, "strong position", can be used if the conditions allow you to control the course of the conversation: for example, when they want to sell you something. The second life hack is best used if you yourself need something from the interlocutor, but the "strong position" is too tough for you yet.

Solution 1."Strong position"

Consists of three steps.

1. Set a framework for the interlocutor - insist on literary language in the conversation. For example, in Germany, almost all residents speak Hochdeutsch, the common language. Sometimes the exception is the elderly or young people who do not want to give up slang.
2. Identify patterns in the conversation, determine which familiar sounds are pronounced differently. If the conversation does not allow you to do this quickly, ask the interlocutor to point them out. For example, it can be vowels: "o" instead of "a", and the English "spider" will sound like "spider". Usually every native speaker is aware of these patterns and will be happy to help if asked politely.
3. Practice hearing these patterns. Modern video and audio courses include a variety of recordings in the learning process. Male, female and children's voices, the speech of the elderly, conversations in dialect - everything can be found.

Solution 2. "Shurik"

It will come in handy in the following situations:

• the interlocutor speaks very quickly;
• we listen to news in the media;
• we have just started to learn the language, and any speech for us sounds like news in the media.

Remember the drunken Shurik from "The Caucasian Captive" and his "slower, I write it down"? This life hack is ideal for beginners to listen and hear a foreign language. With him it is not at all scary to show your ignorance, and sometimes even profitable! In a conversation, you can choose the steps that suit a specific communication situation.

1. Warn the interlocutor that you have just started learning a foreign language.
2. Ask to speak more slowly.
3. Be warned that you are recording.
4. Ask the meaning of words heard but not understood.
5. If you are listening to a recorded speech, pause often to make it easier for yourself to understand.

3. The experience of the listener and individual characteristics of perception

The third reason is ourselves and how we hear, how we perceive speech. These are our strengths and weaknesses. For example, hearing and remembering city names or surnames can be easy for us, but numbers can be very difficult.

German compound numerals have one interesting feature - they are named starting with one. The German will call the number 81 literally “one and eighty”. And the French generally say "four times twenty plus one." Imagine my horror when I had to translate from German into French early one morning. And it was about the money and the size of the parts. Numbers. Numbers. Numbers.

Solution 1. "Nothing but the Truth"

Life hack - tell the truth. In that situation with the translation of numbers, I confessed to the interlocutors that my weak point is the perception of numbers by ear, even in my native language. Therefore, I suggested writing down all the numbers, the clients were only delighted with this idea, and the negotiations even accelerated without losing efficiency.

1. Admit to yourself that you are not perfect. Identify your weaknesses in native language listening. These can be dates, surnames, complex terms.
2. Confess to the interlocutor what exactly you do not perceive by ear. Forewarned is forearmed.
3. Offer the interlocutor an alternative way to work with your "bottleneck": for example, write down all the numbers, surnames - everything that you cannot fully perceive by ear.

Solution 2. "Broken phone"

If you have weaknesses in listening, then there are strengths. Transfer these skills from your native language to a foreign one! To train them, mentally play with the interlocutor the game "spoiled phone". If there is no interlocutor, you can use a series, podcast, or YouTube video.

1. Guess the meaning of what was said to yourself, even if you have not yet heard the speech to the end.
2. Highlight the main thoughts.
3. Highlight pauses and accents, memorize intonation.
4. Practice quick reaction to what you hear.

4. Level of knowledge of the language

The fourth and last reason is the level of your knowledge. Simply put, how many words and grammatical structures you already know and how often you have heard them before. Yes, yes, they did, they didn't just see or read to themselves. If you memorized 100 words from the dictionary, but have never heard them, this means that you do not know them at all.

This is very easy to understand using the example of my favorite English tongue twister: “The sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick”. The translation also sounds fun: "The sixth sheep of the sixth sick sheikh is sick." Imagine hearing a set of such similar-sounding words very quickly. Even if you know all these words, in a new sound combination you will not always be able to understand the meaning. Of course, a tongue twister is an artificial situation, but it is ideal for training.

In the meantime, let's use "ambulance" to save the conversation when you hear unfamiliar words or grammatical constructions.

Solution 1. "Guess from the context"

Relax, your whole life is not enough to learn all the words of a foreign language. In addition, there are many terms in different professional fields - medical, technical, economic, political. Do you really need to know them all, even if you don't know your native language? I don’t know the term “on-mountain” in German, but if I need it in my life, I have a dictionary for it.

1. Learn the words that will be useful to you in communication. But teach so that you can hear them in different combinations.
2. Practice guessing the meaning of the unknown from the context. Context is all the words that appear next to a word you don't know. This is the topic of speech, background and so on. And for training, you can use the "broken phone" exercise described above.

Solution 2. "Subject and predicate"

Live speech is much more flexible than recorded text. And we are not always ready to "break" the patterns of grammatical structures that we have learned.

1. Be prepared for the interlocutor to speak “not by the rules”.
2. Highlight the main thing in the segment or sentence you hear - the subject and the predicate.
3. Repeat the structures you hear. This is living speech and your reaction to it.

Summary

Listening comprehension is the ability to listen to and hear foreign speech. Difficulties can be caused by both external factors (the manner of speech of the interlocutor, ambient noise) and internal (peculiarities of perception and the level of knowledge of the language). But they can and should be overcome - I hope life hacks from my practice will help you with this.