How to Understand Fast Native English at 100% Speed

You understand English fine when someone is talking slowly with you, but then when a native speaker talks at their normal speed, it turns into a wall of sound. Here's why, and it is not a vocabulary problem. I'm a native English speaker, but I've also learned three foreign languages. I speak German, Portuguese, and Polish. The core problem here is that native speech is not extra extra fast. It's actually just connected speech. Words start to blur together, sounds drop, and syllables merge. Things like wanna, gonna, or would you. Learners are trained on isolated textbook clean audio, and so of course this can be a huge shift, and it can be really surprising too. With this, native speech sounds like an entirely different language because it feels that way. As you're reaching towards fluency, you need to do two things. You need to start speaking in fragments more, and you also have to start building your listening skills around fragments. So the first method you can do to improve your listening skills is that you can train on connected speech, not just perfectly clean audio. A lot of learning materials like audiobooks or textbook audio are perfectly curated clean audio, and you don't get the same effect as you would listening to your friends talk, podcast, something completely natural and unedited. It's really important that you get exposure to real unscripted speech, and this is hard to come by if you are a learner. So look to podcasts, interviews, native-to-native speech, basically just not content that's specifically built for learners. That's exactly what you want to avoid. Now one thing to note here, and something that I've touched on in other videos before, is that you want to remember the 80-20 rule. Now if you don't know what this is, this basically means that when you are listening to something or even reading something, when you are taking in input, you are aiming to understand 80%. But if you are trying to improve your language skills, if you are working towards fluency, you need room for improvement. And that 20% mark of not understanding 20% is the golden mark. When you jump too far above that and you are studying ahead of your level, it's too much, and it's overwhelming, and you can't even pick out what exactly you don't know or understand because there's just so much of it. I have made this mistake before. I remember the first time I was learning a foreign language, I was learning German, and I was just so anxious to be at a higher level that I just thought to myself, well, if I study at a B2 level, then I'm gonna be a B2, right? So I got all B2 materials, and let me just tell you, long story short, it did not last long. I would not advise that because you just, you can't keep up, and you're missing so much of the groundwork. I mean, I can get into this another time, but the point is there is a golden mark here, and that is the 80-20 rule. So try to find resources where you understand about 80% of it, and you are still learning something. And this is going to be the perfect spot to practice your listening skills, your audio skills with real, unedited, connected speech. The next method you can use to improve your listening skills is the shadowing method. Now, many learners are familiar with the shadowing method, but you can really dive into the shadowing method and make it more effective. And here what we're going to do to really aim at that 100% native speech is that you're going to start shadowing at 100% native speed. So what you're going to do is you're going to play a sentence, just one sentence, but we're not doing individual words. Remember, one full sentence, and then you're going to listen, and then you're going to repeat it back as exactly as you possibly can. The goal here is not the words. Of course, you need to get the words right to make it effective, but the goal here is not vocabulary. It's not grammar. The goal is getting that speed and familiarity with speaking the language up. So you are going to focus on rhythm, intonation, cadence, stress. I mean, all of those things that come with speaking, you have to really focus on that when you are shadowing. So you hear a slight dip in the word. Okay, right, right. Then you have to try to repeat it exactly that way. And that is really going to build your familiarity as well as your confidence when speaking. And remember here, the key thing is that you are doing it at native speed. If you slow down the audio, if you are shadowing at a slower pace, that is training you to speak at a slower pace, which is not the goal. You want to train at full speed. So completely natural, native, unedited audio is what you're working with here. And you need to repeat it at the same pace. And remember here, pronunciation is a key part of speaking a language. You are working with completely different sounds. You are using completely different muscles, shapes in your mouth. Pronunciation does not just come about naturally. It's something you have to train and something you have to focus on. I am a huge advocate of focusing on pronunciation early so that you can actually get your speed up. If you do not have good pronunciation, you're not going to be speaking at a native speed. So it is essential that you focus on pronunciation early, you master pronunciation so that you can actually keep your listening and speaking skills up, and you can get them to a native speed. So remember that that is an important thing as you're working on achieving native speed. And I have linked my pronunciation workout down in the description below if you're interested. The third method for improving your speed is that you should be learning reductions directly. Now, if you don't know what a reduction is, it's when a native speaker takes a real word or phrase. For example, in English, we take going to and it shortens and it reduces to gonna. So instead of saying I'm going to eat, we say I'm gonna eat. And there are tons of these in the English language. Gonna, wanna, have to. And so if I had one big piece of advice here is that you should learn all of those separately. You need to ensure that you know all of those words directly, not just guessing when they come up. Oftentimes, language learners hear those words and they think they know what they mean and they're guessing a little bit, or they have never heard them before and it just sounds absolute gibberish. So you can skip all of this confusion really easily if you just look up a list of reductions and memorize them directly. This is really going to make your journey of understanding better so much faster if you just take the time to memorize these words directly. Now, the fourth method is that you need to stop subtitling everything. Now, once again, subtitles have their place, but if you are actively learning a language, they're not helping you as much as you think. What subtitles end up doing is they make it so that your eyes do the work instead of your ears. And when you're learning a language, that is not the goal. Reading is actually the easiest part of language learning. And so when you take actually something that's difficult and very beneficial for you and you put subtitles on, it makes it far less beneficial. You want to let your ears do the work. You want to train your ears to follow audio at different paces, natural speech, even cleaner speech in movies, whatever it is. You want to train your ear to be able to follow that to keep up with that speed. And subtitles are not going to help you do that. So if I were you, I would just rip off the bandaid and just stop. Stop putting subtitles on everything right away so that you can actually be improving when you're already spending your time exposing yourself to the language. Let that be time for the most improvement. And remember, once again, the 80-20 rule applies here too. If you are watching something and you only understand 30%, that's going to be a problem. And of course you need subtitles. You need to find media that really meets that 80% rule where you can understand 80% of it. And with that structure, you are going to be far more successful in following and you're not even going to need the subtitles. And the things that you don't understand, you will actually be able to figure out by context. Now, I have had this feeling before where I'm in a classroom situation or I'm talking to someone who knows that I'm a non-native speaker. And so they're kind of guiding me through the conversation. And I feel so confident, like I've really got a good handle on the language, feel so confident. And then I go out into the real world and have one real conversation and that bubble just pops. You realize that you cannot keep up and it's really frustrating. Or there are also times where you feel comfortable in a classroom setting and then you just turn on the TV and are playing something and you realize you cannot follow everything. These are completely normal feelings and experiences. Part of training your listening skills is also training your confidence. As you improve your listening, as you feel like you can follow a faster speed, your confidence is going to improve so much more. And it's going to give you what you need to actually have a more fluent conversation in the real world. So I hope this video helped you. Comment below which method you are going to start using to improve your listening skills. And remember to check out that pronunciation guide in the link below. I will catch you in the next video.