3 Skills To Understand Fast-Speaking Natives

1. 3 Skills To Understand Fast-Speaking Natives As you listen to native speaking media, recognize that it is an excellent opportunity for you to dramatically improve your listening comprehension. You don’t need to do this all the time, but regularly practicing this will bring surprising results. The more you develop yourself in following 3 areas, the stronger your native listening abilities will be. 1. Native Vocabulary: Phrasal Verbs, Idioms, Slang As you listen to native speakers, no matter what your level is, we will use vocabulary that you just won’t understand. Vocabulary is the first key here because it is the most fundamental. You see, if you don’t know enough vocab to understand the contents of native speech, there’s no way you will understand the challenges of pronunciation and connected speech. 2. Native Pronunciation: Connected Speech The second aspect of native listening comprehension that will certainly interfere with your native listening comprehension is native connected speech. For a lot of intermediate learners who have strong vocabulary, this can be the most frustrating. You see, native speakers usually don’t speak all nice and organized, the way you probably learned in school. We tend to connect, reduce, and eat our words. Some, like myself, do it more than others, but it is universal. 3. Cultural Fluency The final, and probably most subtle obstacle to understanding native speakers is the culture. This one is extremely important, as it really is true that you won’t ever be completely fluent in a language if you haven’t explored the cultural side of the language.Cultural fluency has a lot to do with history, geography, stereotypes, cultural memes, body language, sports, and most importantly, humor. Source: reallifeglobal.com www.millsenglishtutoring.com