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  • In this American English pronunciation video, we're going to go over five tips

  • to improve your listening skills.

  • In this video, I'm going to go over five tips, five tricks, five secrets to improve

  • your English listening comprehension skills.

  • If you pay attention to all five and spend time every day, not long! 15 - 20 minutes.

  • There's no way you won't improve dramatically. If you get bored working one way,

  • try out one of the other five tricks.

  • Studying pronunciation and listening skills go hand in hand.

  • The more you understand how Americans speak, and how to imitate that, the better you'll be

  • at speaking and understanding conversational English which can move at a pretty quick pace.

  • So the first trick to improving your listening skills is to study reductions.

  • How is it that Americans speak so quickly? They reduce less important words.

  • Let’s take for example this word: FOR. Fully pronounced, it’s FOR. But most of the time,

  • in a sentence, Americans pronounce itfer’. Really fast, with a reduced vowel, fer.

  • So if youre expecting to hear FOR, fully pronounced and clear,

  • then youre never going to hearfer’. This is for the meeting on Monday.

  • I’m going to be late for class. Fer, fer.

  • There are quite a few very common words that, just like this, Americans regularly reduce.

  • Knowing what they are, studying them, practicing them, will help you

  • identify them in a fast speaking of native English speakers.

  • I've put together a playlist of videos that goes over these common words that reduce.

  • I'll post that playlist at the end of this video.

  • The second trick to improving your listening skills is to study how Americans link words together.

  • American English is very smooth.

  • American English is very smooth.

  • Linking words together is another way that Americans are able to speak so quickly but still be clear.

  • When you study linking and the ways Americans link words and sounds,

  • it makes it easier to understand native speakers.

  • There are specific cases and rules. For example, when youre linking a word that ends in the EE vowel,

  • a very common ending sound in American English,

  • to a word that begins with a vowel,

  • it helps to put a Y sound in between the words.

  • Americans do this without thinking about it.

  • He always”. Heeeeeyal-ya-ya-yyalways.

  • It sounds likeyalways’. He yalways. He always.

  • The Y is a glide consonant, so we can use it to smoothly glide between words.

  • I have a playlist of videos that goes over the cases and rules for linking which I’ll put at the end of the video.

  • Studying this will make Americans easier to understand, and make your English more beautifully American.

  • The third trick to improving your listening skills is to study the specifics of native speech.

  • Great. Everyone wants to do that. HOW do you do that?

  • I’ve come up with an exercise to study native speech that I call a ‘Ben Franklinexercise.

  • In these videos, I take a small segment of natural, conversational, native speech,

  • and analyze every bit of it.

  • We look at intonation, stress, words that reduce, linking.

  • This set of Ben Franklin videos does it all for you so you can understand HOW to study the

  • audio and video clips of native speakers, and how to get the most out of your studies.

  • Let's look at a quick example.

  • Tom what did you do today?

  • Lots of interesting things happening here. I noticed first of all that I've dropped the tea here.

  • Whaddid, whaddid...

  • What did you do? I'm also noticing I'm getting more of a J sound here.

  • Ju, ju, what didju, didju...

  • So the D and the Y here are combining to make the J sound so we have

  • Wha - di - ju... Whadidju, whadidju, whadidju.

  • Tom what did you do today?

  • Today? Today. Today, I woke up...

  • At the end of this video, I’m going to put a link to a playlist of these Ben Franklin exercises.

  • Trick number four: Find a short audio or video clip of a native speaker that has a transcript.

  • I’ll give you ideas of where to find these at the end of the video.

  • Before you look at the transcript, listen or watch, and try to write down the transcript.

  • Keep it short, 10 or 20 seconds of video or audio.

  • Listen several times and do your best to write down exactly what’s being said.

  • Then compare it with the transcript.

  • What are the words and phrases you missed?

  • Listen again and try to figure out why you missed them.

  • Was the stress different than you thought?

  • Was one of the words reduced so much that you didn’t hear it?

  • Was there a word youve never heard of before?

  • When you figure out WHY you didn’t understand it, it’s going to help you get it next time.

  • Keep track of those words and phrases you couldn’t understand, and use them with tip five.

  • Now this is really cool.

  • The fifth trick for improving your listening skills

  • is to listen to a variety of native speakers say the word or phrase

  • that you have a hard time hearing or understanding.

  • There’s a website called Youglish

  • where you can plug in a word or a phrase and hear hundreds of examples of native speakers

  • using that word or phrase in conversational English.

  • Let me show you what I mean.

  • Here, I'm on Youglish.com.

  • Let’s say I didn’t understand the phrase “I want to do thatas "I wanna do that"

  • when I was working on a podcast listening comprehension exercise.

  • I type it in, with quotes, and I select US here for American English.

  • Now it loads a series of videos, all queued up to this phrase that I can listen to in a row.

  • Use this button to skip to the next example.

  • "It takes me like an hour and 15 minutes to get here, I wanna do that and..."

  • "You're gonna come and help me and you say no I don't really think I want to do that..."

  • "See others doing it and say, wow! I want to do that with my own..."

  • "You know, I want to do that..." "I'm want to do that and give you a call..."

  • "And I want to do that today..." "I want to do that, just tell me how to do that..."

  • "If I want to do that, I need these key..." "I remember thinking I want to do that."

  • "I want to do that..." "I want to do this, I want to do that..."

  • "I want to do it. Do I want to do that or do I want to..."

  • Wow, everyone said wanna. As you hear one example, pause it, and imitate it.

  • Listen to 10, 15, 20 different people say your problem word or phrase

  • and spend some time saying it out loud yourself.

  • What do you notice? Is there a Stop T? Is there a reduction?

  • The next time you hear it in conversation or a movie,

  • youre going to understand it.

  • There you have it. My top five secrets, my top tricks for improving your listening comprehension.

  • Aren’t you sort of excited to get working on one of these tricks right now?

  • I want to give you a couple of resources for number 4 – videos and audios with transcripts.

  • I love TED talks. Visit ted.com for thousands of videos

  • on varied and interesting topics with transcripts.

  • And just choose a 10 or 20 second section of the video to work on.

  • Also, lots of podcasts have their transcripts online.

  • One of my favorite podcasts is This American Life. Check it out.

  • Here are all of those playlists I mentioned.

  • Click here or in the description below.

  • Pick one and watch it next. Start working on it right now.

  • There’s no time like the present. Work with one of these tips everyday.

  • Bookmark the playlists. You can really take charge of your listening skills.

  • What other ways do you work on your listening comprehension?

  • Put it in the comments below so that everyone can benefit from your ideas and your tips.

  • If youre new to Rachel’s English, welcome.

  • I have over 500 videos to help you speak better American English on my YouTube channel.

  • Click here to visit my channel and subscribe. Or, see this playlist to get started with my videos.

  • The link is also in the description below.

  • And I have a great ebook – 290 pages with two and a half hours of audio.

  • This book details my method for learning American English pronunciation.

  • It organizes hundreds of my online videos for a path, start to finish, to help you speak beautifully and naturally.

  • Click here or in the description below for more information and to purchase a copy.

  • Youll get free updates of the book for life.

  • That’s it, and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.

In this American English pronunciation video, we're going to go over five tips

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