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Do These 5 Things to Improve Your English Listening Skills! - Duration: 13:02.
Hello and welcome back to OLA English with Greg. In today's lesson I'm going to
give you my top 5 pieces of advice to help you improve your listening skills
in English. I speak to many students and they always tell me that listening and
understanding native speakers is one of the most difficult things in a foreign
language and I think this is for 3 main reasons. Firstly, they use
expressions and native ways of saying things that you don't necessarily learn
at school or in your classes. Secondly, their pronunciation just isn't like your
teachers. And third, they speak too quickly!!! Aghh, slow down!!! So in this lesson
I'm going to give you my best advice to help you get over this problem and start
understanding English native speakers a little bit more easily... are you ready?
OK, I'm Greg from Online Language Academy. We teach conversational
English via Skype to students all over the world to help them gain fluency and
confidence in spoken English. If that's what you want then click up there and
try class. OK, and all these students that we have always tell me the same
thing, "I need to communicate more easily. Yes I need to speak more fluently and I
also need to understand native speakers when they're speaking to me because it's
important in my job / I go to England and I can't understand anybody when they're
speaking to me and..." OK, calm down! There is something you can do about it. OK so
let's have a look at the 5 things I want you to do in order to improve your
listening skills in English.
First is learn connected speech. Alright, connected speech I did a video
on one small aspect of connected speech, you can watch that video up there, and I
talked about the use of the intrusive R and the linking R just to help us
speak more clearly and more fluently to basically to make it easier for us for
native speakers to speak. One example of this is "Donna and her mother..." Donna and
her mother... We put an imaginary R between the two words to help us speak more
fluently. Right I'm not going to talk about connected speech in this video but
I think it is really important to learn these little linking techniques that
native speakers use to make it easier for us to speak so that when you are
listening you know what to expect. I've said simple expressions, simple sentences
to my students sometimes and they haven't understood me simply because,
using that example, they've understood the word Donna but they think the next
word is Rand. And they think: "Rand?? Rand???" What's Rand???" No, I'm not talking about
the currency, I'm saying Donna AND but I'm linking the words with this
intrusive R. There are many techniques that we use in English and I want you to
learn them so that you know what to expect when you're listening to native
English speakers talking.
The second thing I want you to do is listen to music in English. Now I'm sure
you already do this, right? I mean English and American music is so
international but I'm sure in your country you listen to English songs all
the time on the radio. A lot of students watch an entire film in English with
subtitles and I don't really find that too helpful to improve your listening
skills. Yeah it feels good, right, when you watch a movie in English and you
understand it. You feel good, sure! But I want to focus on smaller
parts of English, I want you to find your favourite songs in English and actually
listen to them while reading the lyrics, OK, while reading the words. Listen to
it, listen to how the singers actually pronounce what they're singing. Music is
such, such an effective way of learning how native English speakers really speak
and it's the best way to hear the rhythm and also to hear how we link words into
one another. I've been teaching English for about 15 years now and I can tell
you that the students with the best pronunciation are not the students
who've lived in England, they're the students who've learned English by
listening to music! Honestly! And it's such an easy thing to do. I'm sure your
favourite song in English is 3 or 4 minutes, just listen to it, learning
the lyrics and imitating exactly how the singer sings the song, alright, and then
you're walking around the house, you're driving your car and you're singing the
song with a perfect English pronunciation that you can then
transition into your spoken English and when native English speakers are
speaking to you... surprise surprise... you can understand it, you're gonna
recognize the words, recognise the sounds and you're going to understand it!
Number 3 is to not learn words in English... don't learn words in English...
learn phrases! If you just focus on single words in English then when people
are speaking to you it's kind of natural that you translate every word that you
know, it's quite an ineffective way of learning a language and a much more
effective way is to learn groups of words or chunks and both use them when
you're speaking English and recognize them when people speak to you. Alright, a
couple of examples of chunks are, "Do you know if..." Alright and it's important to
learn the real pronunciation of this, listen to how we actually pronounce it.
Do you know if... D'ya know if... D'ya know if... D'ya know if it's gonna be hot
tomorrow? Do you know if John's going to the party? Do you know if they're working
in Spain tomorrow? Learn the group of words and then you'll recognize it when
people say it to you, and you won't have to worry about understanding that part
of the sentence. For example, if someone says to you 'Do you know if Sandra's
going to the party tomorrow?' you understand 'Do you know if...' – it's a chunk that
you've already learned – 'Do you know if...' You recognize it, you don't worry about
it. And then you understand Sandra / party /
tomorrow... Alright, hey even if you don't understand every single word in the
sentence you get the idea and you understand the meaning of that sentence.
Learn chunks! Not words!
The fourth thing I want you to do is listen to a podcast or watch YouTube
videos on a topic there is something that you generally talk about. Let's
imagine you work in I.T, in a computer company. If you're using your English
every day to talk about computers, to talk about software or app development... watch
English YouTube videos or listen to English podcasts about technology! First
of all, it's something that interests you so you're gonna actually want to listen
to it. I love listening to entrepreneurial podcasts because it really interests me.
It's not... I don't feel like 'bufff.. I've got to listen to this entrepreneurial
podcast tomorrow', y'know? I really enjoy it, I listen to it and I walk around the
house listening to it, I listen to it when I'm driving my car, I listen to it
while I'm eating breakfast and it's interesting to me so I pay attention. If
you're doing this in English it's also a great exercise for you to not focus on
understanding every single word in the sentence - that's not important - it's a
great exercise for you to pick out the most important words and try to get a
general idea of what they're talking about.
Yes, native speakers speak quickly, teachers will often speak a little bit
more slowly perhaps or maybe more easy to understand, but if you go to central
London and you're speaking to someone there who has never ever spoken to a
foreigner before then they might speak incredibly quickly so it's great
practice for you to listen to something that's interesting for you at full speed
in English in a podcast or a YouTube video.
And finally the fifth thing I want you to do is focus a bit more on informal
English and slang and common expressions that we always use but they don't teach
you in the textbooks. Let me give you an example of this... So you might know my
wife is Spanish and when we first started going out
I took her to England to visit my family and my friends and doing that in a
foreign language it's... you know... she was probably a bit nervous and she was
thinking, alright, I've got to make sure my English is is the best it can be
for this moment and I remember introducing her to one of my best
friends and I introduced them and my friend said to her "how's tricks?"
How's tricks? That was the first thing he said to her and she was like, what?? How's
tricks?? Of course, 'How's tricks?' simply means 'how
are you?' in English but in an informal English. Obviously, it's slang and
immediately she felt like whoah, I'm not gonna understand this guy at all. You
know, she lost all confidence in her English, she thought I'm... just, what am i
doing? I don't understand any English at all! Yes, my friend probably should have
said "how are you?" or something more understandable for a non-native speakers
but it's also a great idea for you to learn informal slang English to help you
understand native speakers more easily and not get lost in a conversation just
because somebody's used a really really informal word that you never learn in
textbooks or in typical English classes in your country.
Alright, so these are 5 things that you can do starting now, you can do all these
things, you can take action to improve your listening skills in English. It's
not going to happen from one day to the next but they are also not very
difficult things to do. Learning slang is fun, I loved learning slang in different
languages. Listening to podcasts that you enjoy,
that's fun! It's interesting, listening to short YouTube videos or songs that you
love and learning the words... that's fun! Alright, and then learning phrases that
you're gonna hear all the time on TV, on YouTube, in songs and also learning the
linking sounds between words in English, these are such effective practices to
help you improve your English that you're gonna see results and it's gonna
make you feel great about yourself and you'll realize that you're soon gonna start
to understand English more easily than you did before. So take action! There are
a couple of videos I want you to watch next... that one on linking sounds in
English and that one is an interview I did in which we discussed 17 things you
can do to improve your listening skills in English. So watch those and I'll see
you in the next class. Have a great week! Bye for now!
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