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Learning to understand damn fast English speech with Eddie Murphy and Eminem

Students who learn English as a second are often not ready for the actual speed of speech of native speakers. This is all very understandable in textbooks and listening, and when the native begins to chatter, you are like “Che?”.

We will tell you how to learn to understand the fast speech of native speakers and not to ask them to speak more slowly each time. Let's raise the listening skill to the maximum level! Go!



Learning Listening vs. Perception of real quick speech


The real speech of the natives even doesn’t stand next to the textbooks on which listening perceptions are trained. This is not a secret, but many forget about it.

Listening exercises are designed specifically to develop basic listening skills. Ears need to get used to foreign speech. Slow and clear speech helps this.

But the bottom line is that native speakers speak haphazardly. Quickly, with implicit articulation and lack of pauses between words. They mix sounds and omit whole syllables. And if you add to this a possible accent and speech defects, the task becomes even more complicated.

Therefore, you need to learn to perceive lively fluent speech separately. This is the next step in understanding the language by ear.

Take for example an excerpt from the popular stand-up Eddie Murphy called “Raw.”


Murphy's speech is pretty quick. Moreover, he actively accelerates his speech in some parts of his speech in order to emphasize the comic nature of the situation.

00: 26–00: 44

Here Murphy is gaining maximum speech speed and it becomes very difficult to understand it. Even a student with an Advanced level will understand it with great difficulty, there is nothing to say about lower levels of knowledge.

There are 3 reasons why this happens:

1. The brain does not have time to process information


This is a common problem for students of a foreign language. Usually, at the initial stages of training, a student mentally translates words into their native language when listening, and only after that they turn into images.

At such a speed of speech, the brain does not have time to do double work. And if the skill of direct understanding is not developed, then all the words safely pass by. That is, you need to learn how to translate speech immediately into visual images.

For example, hear the word "table". And the image of the table should immediately appear in the head. If the word “table” first appears, and then it transforms into an image, you won’t understand quick speech.

According to statistics, 93% of students at Intermediate level and perceive English by ear through the mediation of their native language. To a greater or lesser extent, but the scheme “English word” - “Russian word” - “image” is preserved. At the same time, about 42% of Advanced students also sin with this.

How to fix?


Sighting - no way. The skill of understanding the language comes with time.

But there is one interesting trick. You need to learn yourself to speak English as quickly as possible. First, simple sentences on a given topic, then small monologues.

Tongue twisters and reading texts aloud at a high pace help well. Here are some interesting options for such tongue twisters:
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked.
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

:
- .
-.
- ,
, -?

***

How many cookies could a good cook cook, if a good cook could cook cookies? A good cook could cook as many cookies as a good cook who could cook cookies.

:
How many cookies can a good cook make if a good cook can cook cookies? A good cook can make as many cookies as a good cook who can cook cookies.

This allows you to "trick" the brain. Indeed, due to lack of time for reflection, he gets used to hearing English words and phrases without mentally translating them into Russian. This is a very quick process, but for fluency in English it is simply a must. So you can not only speak English faster, but also understand fast English speech.

2. Inadequate basic vocabulary


To communicate freely in English, you need to have a vocabulary of 4,000-5,000 words.

But you need to know them perfectly. With a quick speech, you will not have time to think about the meaning of the word.

Moreover, it is not necessary to have a vocabulary of 20,000 or more words. Indeed, the speech of the Native is 95% composed of these 5,000 basic lexical units.

Please note that native speakers do not always speak correctly grammatically.

0: 20–0: 24

- I don't see no rings on these fingers. - I do not see a single ring on these fingers.

Double negation in English grammar is not used to reinforce negation. Grammatically this is wrong. However, in colloquial speech such phrases are quite common.

And despite the fact that grammar is a curve here, such phrases also need to be known. You can not use them yourself, but you need to be able to recognize in any case.

How to fix?


Very simple - to learn vocabulary.

You just need to focus on everyday words and phrases. Still worth a good study of phrasal verbs and common slang.

This is actually quite simple. Now there are a sufficient number of applications for the study of English vocabulary. Add words to the dictionary and learn. In a year or two of stable studies, you can gain a sufficient amount of vocabulary to understand absolutely everything. And even if individual words remain unknown, you can still understand them from the context.

We recommend you learn 10 new English words per day. With such a schedule, in a year you will be able to gain the necessary vocabulary to understand up to 90% of even fast English speech. 10 words a day is not so much if you stick to the plan and do it every day.

By the way, for all Khabrovsk citizens we give a whole month of premium access to the ED Words application. Learn 10 English words per day with pleasure. Just download ED Words and enter the fastlanguage promo code here or directly in the application .

3. Misunderstanding speech abbreviations


With fast speech, nerve-takers simplify the pronunciation of whole phrases and phrases. If you don’t know how the simplified phrase sounds and what it means, you can get confused.

going to - gonna
want to - wanna
got to - gotta

These abbreviations know and understand everything. But what about the less obvious?

“Don't you” sounds exactly like “don't chew”. And while the listener thinks that nothing to "chew" here, the conversation will go far ahead.

But even clearly articulated words without accentuation are perceived rather poorly.

00:59

The phrases “you gotta be”, “you gotta have”, “that's what”, “you can handle” Eddie Murphy very poorly articulates. And because of the clear emphasis on the main semantic words, it seems that he says “bla-bla-bla-bla-madonna, bla-bla-bla-bla money, bla-bla-bla-bla pussy”.

Working with the most popular abbreviations allows you to understand them intuitively. That is, you hear the incomprehensible "ygdbi", and immediately understand that this is "you gotta be."

How to fix?


This is probably the hardest thing. Because the only way to learn to understand such abbreviations in fast speech is to constantly listen to fast speech.

To simplify the process a bit, watch the video with subtitles. It’s best to take those videos in which the speech speed is significantly higher than normal speech.

In this sense, the texts of Eminem are very useful. He reads with incredible speed, but he articulates the words very clearly.



04:24

This speed is extremely difficult to understand even the inactive. Yet she is a little beyond ordinary perception. But by reading the subtitles along with the text, you can make out how exactly words are reduced in fast speech. Understanding "in theory" is impossible. You can memorize all these “gonna, wanna”, but you need to be able to hear them. Only practice.

. . «Godzilla» 30 229 . . , .


Of course, just rap is not enough - you need live speech with intonations. You can choose any video - the main thing is that the speech is fast enough. But working with subtitles is simply a must. And by the way, it’s better to choose the video, rather than podcasts with text. Indeed, on the video you can also follow the speaker’s lips - this also helps a lot in identifying sounds.

If you can’t hear all the sounds of the phrase the first time, you need to rewind and listen again. Until a complete understanding is formed, which sound belongs to which word.

Recognizing fluent English is a rather complicated process. After all, you first need to get used to the very sound of the phrases. And for this you need to use English every day.

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