How difficult is listening skills?
If you don’t understand what people are saying, it’s hard to respond or participate in conversations.
Listening in English can be particularly difficult due to certain features of English pronunciation and vocabulary. This can cause:
- Misunderstanding (when you think you understand something, but you don’t)
- Confusion (you don’t understand at all).
Below are some English listening problems, with some solutions.
English pronunciation – listening practice
Here are three ways English pronunciation makes spoken English difficult to understand.
1. The stress of not hearing every word
Unlike many other languages, English is a “stressful” language. This means that some syllables and words are stressed, but others are not. Grammatical words often have little stress. In fact, they have so little tension that you can’t really hear them. Sometimes it’s not a problem. For example, when hearing “I listened,” you might hear “I listened,” which doesn’t really affect the meaning of the sentence.
2- Connected speech
In Fast English, our words are connected, not isolated. This can make it difficult to identify individual words because they all seem to blend into each other.
- In connected speech, we add sounds: “il n’est pas” adds “y” and becomes “il_y_n’est pas”; Or “go Away” adds a “w” to become “go-w-away”, for example.
- We remove the letter “d” before another consonant, so “go and see” becomes “go see”.
- Combine sounds to create a new sound. For example, “Do you know her?” » can become “Dj-oo” when we speak quickly.
Some solutions include reading the text after listening to it (so you can see the differences between spoken and written words), as well as practicing speaking yourself using connected speech.
3- Dialects – listening training
There are many varieties of English and a speaker from the United Kingdom sounds different to a speaker from the United States. But you will hear more differences between regions and cities. Someone from London has a very different voice and tone to someone living in Liverpool, for example.
If you work in an international organization, most of your conversations will probably be with English speakers from other countries as well. Some accents will be more difficult to understand (at least at first) than others.
The best way to understand different accents and dialects is to listen to a variety of English!
A series of 28 listening exercises
Here is a series of 28 short listening exercises on YouTube that are free and easy to access and refer to whenever you want. These are examples of words that are difficult for some people, and they are explained and tested in short and entertaining cartoon videos. Here is the link to the series: