Learn hot english no 189 february 2018 page 32

HOW TO... LISTEN TO ENGLISH

Useful information on how to do different things in English.

How to...

listen to English

L

THIS MONTH, HOW TO... LISTEN TO ENGLISH.

istening to English is difficult. There might be noise,
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 stresstimed 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

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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!

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