Does anyone have advice on how to train your ear for fast speech?
Any methods that you have found to be productive?
At present, I can understand native speakers when they speak slow to normal but struggle when it gets faster.
Thank You!
As you learn more and more, you can understand faster and speak. For me, I change the playback of YouTube videos to 1.5 to 2.0 when watching foreign content, and I think it trains me to understand fast speech easily.
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Thanks for the tip. I’ll give it a try.
Sometimes I use the LinqQ reader in sentence by sentence mode to listen to audio a bit at a time to help with difficult to understand speech. However, now I think I prefer listening directly on Youtube. You can get a rewind extension so you can rewind the YT audio by just one or two seconds at a time so you can quickly keep going over the parts that are not clear rather than having to rewind the standard 10 seconds and waiting.
There are several issues here. Some say it’s because normal speech uses some contractions, such as j’suis and j’peux in French. But I think it’s broader than that because in general we tend to semi articulate many sounds, and run words into each other, when speaking normally. So in French mettre can become met or even me. Then you have the issue of understanding on the fly once you recognise the words. Listening while reading is a good exercise. It trains the brain to recognise the words in real speech. Also try listening to clearer speech at normal speed to train speed of recognition.
For a long while I could understand the words, but not simultaneously assemble it into meaning and keep up with the next segment. It takes a long time to get used to normal speech, a long time,
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Hi. Thanks for the advice of reading whilst listening. It’s a good point about everyday speech containing contractions and getting used to hearing the meaning without having the full word at times. I will definitely incorporate this exercise.
Some of my Youtube content has hand-written subtitles and half of it is from native speakers without this. However, I’ve noticed recently that the Youtube automatic subtitles are getting a lot better. Maybe due to AI?
YouTube subtitles vary a lot, from execrable to fantastic. It might also be possible to get transcripts for podcasts. A lot of big media companies produce podcasts with professional presenters.
Thanks for the tip. I’m yet to delve into podcasts.
To say YouTube auto-generated subtitles, Languages having many speakers have a nice quality, even more than the creator-provided ones (because nowadays many creator uses AI to create their subtitles).