Name: 4 Tips for Understanding Native Speakers of English
Uploaded: 2025-01-18T15:08:06.000Z
Duration: 12 min 22 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...

To-infinitive

Do you struggle to understand native speakers when they talk fast?

Gerund

Do you ever feel like native speakers are skipping sounds or even swallowing words when they talk?

I hear this all the time from my students who have been studying English and speaking English for many years.

In this video, I will explain to you why fast English speech can be difficult to understand and I will give you some tips to help you deal with this challenge.

We will also listen to some native speakers who are speaking fast to analyze their speech patterns and this will help you understand fast speech and feel more confident in conversations with native speakers.

One of the main reasons that you have a hard time understanding native speakers is because of linking.

Sometimes native speakers combine words so that a whole sentence sounds like one long word.

Linking happens with groups of words that are called thought groups.

Thought groups are words that naturally belong together.

In general, it's very common not to pause inside a thought group.

It's natural to say all of it in one breath without pausing.

We stress told and we reduce everything else.

And let's look at a sentence that has two thought groups.

If you told me about the issue, I would have helped you fix it.

The natural place to pause is between the two thought groups.

But it depends on how fast the person is speaking.

In this sentence, we stress told, issue, helped, and fix.

Here is my first tip for understanding fast speech.

When all the words are joined together, listen for the key words.

If you understand told, issue, helped, and fix, you will understand what the person means.

To sound like a native speaker, I suggest that you practice speaking this way too.

Here is one rule or we can call one pattern of linking.

The final consonant of one word is linked to the initial vowel of the following word.

The T of first and the O of of are combined.

And the F in this case changes to a V sound, a V.

That's the only time in English where the F actually sounds like a V.

And then that V and the A of all are also linked.

And now let's say all three words as one word.

Let's look at some more examples of what linking sounds like.

Because the K, the previous consonant is voiceless.

And when we have a voiceless consonant, the ED sounds like a T.

Let's listen to native speakers saying picked out.

And I would read the books that I had just picked out.

I would read the books that I had just picked out.

Worked out sounds very similar to worked out.

The T and the D are a little bit different, but it sounds very similar.

I guess you just told me we could have figured it out.

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4 Tips for Understanding Native Speakers of English

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