Listening Problem #1 - Vocabulary
How can words be a problem?
Let’s dig into our first listening problem: vocabulary.
Obviously if you don’t know the word (or phrase) that you’re hearing, it will be difficult to understand it.
There are, by some estimates, over 1 million words in the English language. Does that mean you need to start memorizing all of them to become a better listener? No - that would be crazy. Even I, who have been speaking English all my life, don’t know that many words.
Image by PDPics from Pixabay
The Oxford English Dictionary estimates that there are around 171, 000 words currently in use in English. That’s a bit better, but still overwhelming.
Thankfully, researchers have zeroed in on the most common words necessary for basic conversation, the Oxford 3000. You may think, “I don’t know 3000 words,” but I’m sure that if you have studied English to an intermediate level, you’ll find that you know most (if not all) of these words. [There’s also a list of 5000 words that is recommended if you’re trying to achieve fluency in English.]
So, we can always learn more vocabulary to help us listen better in English, but let’s focus on the words that we already know. How do they cause listening problems?
One problem may be that a word (or phase) was pronounced differently than you expected. This may be because:
It is similar to a word in your native language
You learned this word by reading it and not by hearing it pronounced
The word sounds different because of the way it’s connected to the words around it
Another problem may be that you are trying to consciously hear every individual word. Because English is not a syllable-timed language like Spanish or Arabic (We’ll talk more about this when we talk about understanding rhythm), many of the “unimportant” words - the grammar words - are not pronounced fully. To understand them, you have to take the combination of sounds, such as alotta, and know that it means a lot of.
Lastly, you may not be predicting what you’re going to hear. Similar to the way predictive text showed us suggestions of the next possible word to use when writing, you should be ‘predicting’ what the speaker is going to say next. Certain word combinations are more common than others so even if you don’t hear exactly what someone has said, you should be able to make a reasonable guess at what it was.
Beyond that, some experts estimate that more than 50% of our conversations are formulaic, or made up of regular phrases. The more familiar you are with these, the easier it will be to hear them.
What can we do about these problems with vocabulary? I’ll talk more about this in my next post.