Name: LISTEN like a NATIVE SPEAKER - English Lesson
Uploaded: 2020-09-16T19:25:38.000Z
Duration: 14 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The music of language of English and how native speakers listen to it.

The stress, the up-down shape is the anchor for me when I'm listening, and it gives me that familiar structure.

Everything that I hear fits within this structure of stress.

Tom's going to teach you how to identify what native speakers identify when they're listening to English,

and how to use that to your advantage to be more easily understood when you're speaking English.

He's a standout teacher in Rachel's English academy, he coaches students every day,

and I have seen and heard the amazing progress that students can make when working with him.

First, he's going to talk about the music of English

and then he's going to use some clips from movies to illustrate what he's teaching you.

Hi! I'm Tom Kelly, a Rachel's English teacher with Rachel's English academy.

and there's one thing that I think really helps students speak more like native speakers,

and it has nothing to do with actually speaking.

It comes before speaking, and it's all about listening.

In order to speak like a native speaker, you really want to be able to listen like a native speaker.

So what does it mean to listen like a native speaker?

Well, the first thing we want to think about is the fact that English is a stress timed language.

So what does that mean? It means that our syllables are going to be different lengths from one another.

Now, we're gonna have stressed syllables which are the longer syllables,

and we're going to have unstressed syllables which are shorter.

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Here's how I like to think about stressed and unstressed syllables.

Unstressed syllables are quicker, they're flatter in vocal pitch, they use less energy.

Often that means they don't use as much movement from your articulators, your jaw, your tongue, your lips.

And they can be just a little less clear often than stressed syllables.

Alright, so that leaves stressed syllables.

They're longer, they have more energy, they use more movement from the articulators, they're clearer.

And I think, probably, the most important part of a stressed syllable is the curve in the pitch of the voice.

It's an up and down musical curve in the voice that happens on stressed syllables in American English.

So those stressed syllables with that up-down shape, those are my anchors,

and that's what gives me a familiar structure when I'm listening to English.

We know that stress syllables are longer,

they have this musical element with this up-and-down curve in the voice, and that unstressed syllables

that syllables are more important than words when it comes to spoken American English.

When you are reading English and you're looking at all the words on a page, the words are very important.

It's the words that are giving you that information

and you need them to be spaced out in order to read more easily.

Well, when we speak English, we don't really worry about any of those breaks in between words, do we?

We kind of mash everything together into one long word.

Yes, I was just working on a video on this topic!

When you read, the unit that you focus on is a word but when you're listening or speaking,

the unit isn't the word, it's a thought group.

And a thought group is any collection of words between breaks when speaking.

It can be really short, you can have a one-word thought group, like 'hi!'

or it can be much longer, a very long sentence with no breaks.

Let's take the phrase: I'll see you later.

But when we speak it: I'll see you later.

There's really only sounds, like there's one word.

So the syllables, these stressed syllables are the important part.

That's what we want to bring out in our sentences, in our phrases, so that our listeners can understand us,

and that's what native speakers are listening for.

They're listening for the stressed syllables.

How can we tell what the stressed syllables are?

What did we say about stressed syllables?

They have that up-and-down curve in the  pitch of the voice.

How many up-and-down curves in my voice do you hear?

Subtitles ListPlay Video

LISTEN like a NATIVE SPEAKER - English Lesson

vulnerable

phrase

awesome

rhythm