there are a thousand things that could influence the way you listen.. But the good news is that you don’t need to understand every word in order to follow things.. Without even listening
Trang 1Useful information on how to do different things in English
THIS MONTH, HOW TO LISTEN TO ENGLISH
you might be tired, the other person might not be
speaking clearly there are a thousand things that
could influence the way you listen It isn’t a precise
science, and it never will be But the good news is that you
don’t need to understand every word in order to follow things
Experts have shown that we only actually hear/understand
about 40% of the words during a conversation – our brain fills
in the rest for us Take this as an example Imagine you’re in the
street All of a sudden, someone stops you and starts to say
something to you At the same time they pull back their sleeve
and point to their wrist Without even listening to the words,
your brain tells you that they’re asking you for the time
Before listening, you need to activate your existing knowledge
of the topic You can do this by thinking about the context
and the general theme Once your existing knowledge has
been activated, you can predict what people are going to say
For example, if you know that everyone is talking about global
warming, you can be more or less sure that they are going
to mention things such as “CO2, carbon, Kyoto, Copenhagen”
and “scientists” And if they’re talking about tax, then you can
be fairly sure that they’ll talk about “money, payments, the
government, increases” and “decreases” The fact is that 90%
of the people in the world say the same things as you and
I – they just do it in different languages Remember that! This
means that 90% of the time you can probably guess what
someone is going to say – you just have to trust your intuition
In order to listen effectively, you need to learn about English
pronunciation As we explained last month, English is a
stress-timed language As such, English pronunciation focuses on
specific stressed words and glides over other non-stressed
words such as prepositions, articles and auxiliaries The key is
to listen out for these stressed words And if you can capture these, you’ll understand what the other person is trying to say Just read this: “Pub Last night Great time Afterwards Cinema Saw Film.” Did you understand the story? Even though lots of words are missing, you can still capture the general meaning
So, when you listen, use your intuition and let your instincts guide you And never try to understand everything – it isn’t natural You don’t even do that in your own language You get the general gist and your brain fills in the details That’s why there are often misunderstandings (even in our own languages) – it’s all part of being a human
You also need to learn about connected speech Many sounds
in English combine For example, we don’t say, “Look / out” with two separate sounds We say, “Loo kout” with the final consonant “k” combining with the vowel sound “ow” of the second word, “Loo kout” This happens all the time in English and you need to be aware of it
So, what can you do to improve your listening skills? It’s simple: Listen, listen and listen again You need to do two types
of listening: (1) listening to recordings that are specifically targeted at your level; (2) listening holistically to native speaker conversations and recordings (this is essential for developing
an ear for the language) It can take a while to become accustomed to a native speaker’s speech patterns, but keep at it! Start listening in small amounts and build up more time as you go After a while, you will start to understand the sounds and to distinguish words Then, once you’ve mastered that, your learning will start to increase rapidly Listening is extremely important and is THE KEY to language learning
Good luck, and remember, listening is not a science – it’s a vague form of capturing information And if you can do it in one language, you can do it in another Go for it!
/ www.learnhotenglish.com / Want to do an internship with Hot English? For more information, e-mail info@learnhotenglish.com
32
How to
listen to English