Improve Your Listening Skills with this One Tip

hello good morning good afternoon good evening wherever you are i am here to help you with your listening skills this morning it's early it's dark but we are here to get motivated to learn english fluently and listening skills listening skills are something that so many of my english students here at go natural english tell me are a big challenge so tell me we are live here tell me in the comments first of all hello good morning hi sergio nice to see you vignesh tell me hello and tell me yes or no are listening skills challenging for you is it challenging to understand native english speakers when they speak english quickly i know as your english teacher i speak english clearly i speak a little slowly i enunciate each sound so it's easy to understand me but what about people out in the real world in the streets in your office how about listening to them so today i'm going to give you one big tip that comes from the english fluency formula audio ebook and i'm going to go to page 28 which is about listening skills listening skills it's so so important whether you want to understand native english conversation or a movie or the news i remember when i was studying spanish for the first time many many years ago and i was actually working with spanish-speaking children in a school i was teaching after-school activities and they would speak spanish and i would listen and try to understand and i would hear them speaking clearly but i couldn't understand what they were saying i didn't know whether they were saying like there was two words that i got confused ah ser which means to be or aser which is to do and i was like which are they saying i don't understand and so that led me to want to improve my listening skills in spanish and this was like way before go natural english this was um like uh 15 or 16 years ago no more than that this was like 18 years ago um so that made me want to really research about listening skills and language acquisition and get my master's degree in teaching english and write this ebook which by the way i need to tell you this is very important today the english fluency formula audio ebook is on sale for 50 off so if you click on the little arrow to open the description for this video you will see a link to get your own copy and to read the whole thing and it's 50 off today so listening there is one tip that i want to tell you that will greatly improve your listening skills and the reason why i could not understand my spanish-speaking children students not my children but my students is because i was thinking about how the words look on paper and not how they actually sound in the real world when people use them i wasn't thinking with my ears i was listening i was trying to listen not with my ears i was trying to listen with my eyes do you understand what i'm saying how can you listen with your eyes how do how do we listen with our eyes well our eyes can help us of course we can read lips but this is not the correct way to listen now maybe it seems very obvious and you're like okay teacher gabby um i'll listen with my ears got it but what i mean is that we have to stop we have to stop trying to listen in the same way that we read so when you're reading a book you see the words on the page you can see that this says listening but what we do as adults is we apply the rules for sounds in our native language your first language what is your first language tell me in the comments we apply those rules to the words we see on the paper okay so instead of reading listening if i was a native spanish speaker i might think that i read this like a listening or if i was a japanese speaker i might think this listening or something that follows the rules something that sounds a bit more closely to the rules of my native language okay so the important thing is to stop listening with your eyes it's good to read don't stop reading reading helps us with our vocabulary and structure and you can listen to this ebook there's an audio mp3 that you get when you get the ebook um so it's very important because it's very important to listen with your ears and not with your eyes we have to consider that sounds do not follow the spelling in english let's take the example of o-u-g-h can you think of any words in english that end or have i usually end with o-u-g-h can you think of any words tell me in the comments can you think of any words that end in o-u-g-h yes tough t-o-u-g-h i'm home tree thank you for that example ahmad same example good tough show stealer kamala good tough okay rough tough now we have different examples cough thought okay thorough do you hear how each of these words has a different sound ott cough just the word cough gh sounds like an f we would not know that if we hadn't heard the word rough sounds like uff cough sounds like off cough do you hear the difference in the vowels so this is a spelling that is especially challenging because the same letters o-u-g-h can have different sounds so what do we do well we need to stop listening with our eyes only and listen with our ears and we have to apply the sounds correctly we have to understand the sounds correctly we have to think about the sound off cough going with the meaning of the word to cough cough is right cover your mouth of course and um what are some other words we have we have thoughts we have ought i see a good example there bots josem good example um we have though though though kind of like aldo or however thoroughly sergi or sergey nice example thoroughly so this is an example i wanted to share with you of four little letters o-u-g-h that make many different sounds and for better or worse in english we have many of these cases where we have one letter or two letters or three letters or four letters that can make many different sounds so we cannot rely on our eyes only for understanding english through textbooks we need to rely on our ears we have to listen carefully to fluent english conversation and listen for meaning what does this meaning tell us when we hear the word cough when we hear the word though when we hear the word thorough we need to look for meaning and not just the spelling we've been trained so much in the classroom to look for the spelling of words spelling tests and writing essays and being um ridiculed or or yelled at by our teacher when we don't spell things correctly spelling is important don't get me wrong it's very important however for listening skills we need to stop thinking so much about the spelling and start thinking about the sounds of the word and not just the sounds of the word but what are we hearing in context when you listen to english try not to just listen to individual words try to listen to full sentences conversations especially at this level you are at least an intermediate english learner english speaker you should be listening to conversations and it's okay if you don't catch every word we have to go for understanding make it a goal to understand the main idea of the sentence and think about what would logically be said in this situation okay ahmad's asking i was wondering do you speak this way in your videos i mean is it easier to understand you in your videos well um i'm speaking clearly because i'm presenting information and so if i want to teach something if you want to teach something you should present it in a clear way so when you are not in a professional or educational situation maybe you are out with your friends or family or in a more casual situation with english speakers they won't always speak so quickly i mean they won't always speak so clearly they will speak more quickly okay okay so there are a lot of other examples in this chapter for example the gh can make an f sound like cough the o in women makes an i sound we don't say whoa man we say we men women women it sounds like an eye if women i'm looking at my book i'm looking down at my book the ti in motion makes a sh sound she motion it's not mo t own it's emotion right um women is a great word to practice because even intermediate and advanced english speakers i hear um kind of a strange way of pronouncing this so practice it with me let's say it together women women women okay good um and there's other words with silent letters like lamb l-a-m-b knife k-n-i-f-e and castle c-a-s-t-l-e there's a lot of examples in the english fluency formula audio ebook where you can read and listen okay you know there are a lot of examples in here i'm going to move ahead for the sake of time and give you some suggestions about how to improve your listening skills as i'm really emphasizing my one biggest tip for you is to stop listening with your eyes so when you come from a background of learning english in the classroom you learn a lot of english in the classroom with your eyes you look at the board the teacher writes on the board you read your textbook you're always looking at your textbook with your eyes how much time do you actually get to listen to native english in the classroom how much time do you actually get to speak it's less time than reading your textbook or the board or worksheets or other materials that your teacher gives you so when you come from this way this traditional way of english learning thank you arae shah for your compliments awesome work thank you so much when you come from this way of learning we have to start anew we have to start fresh we have to stop thinking with our eyes with that reading information thinking about text and spelling and we have to start thinking with our ears as if english were a new language to us because let's be real let's be honest when you leave the classroom and you go into the real world and you hear fluent native fast english for the first time it sounds like a new language i have to tell you a quick story i was as i told you i was studying spanish for the first time like 18 years ago and i took two years of university spanish and i remember after about two years of studying i went to see a foreign movie which was a movie from argentina where people speak spanish and the name of the movie was nueve reynes nine queens i love that movie if you've ever seen it tell me if you have not seen it i recommend it um if you like suspense okay anyway when i was in the theater i was listening to the movie and i couldn't understand a single word i was reading the subtitles in english so i could understand because my reading skills were strong in spanish do you feel like your reading skills are stronger in english than your listening skills tell me in the comments yes or no um so i was listening and i couldn't understand a single word and i was really freaked out i was like shocked i was thinking is this spanish this isn't spanish why can't i understand a single word of this movie i just studied spanish for two years every day for two years in the classroom with a college professor at a good school and i spent a lot of time and money um oh someone's asking about freak out control union freak out means to kind of go crazy like be shocked surprised very surprised or upset it's a good phrasal verb here we go learning phrasal verbs today too so i freaked out you can practice saying this with me i freaked out it's a bit casual it's a bit informal i freaked out and yeah it was frustrating pedro good word i freaked out because i thought what is this i can't understand a single word of spanish so i just share this experience with you because i know what it's like i know what it's like to freak out when you hear english in the real world or in a movie or in the news or the radio anything and you've studied english for years but you still can't understand it and that's why we're here that's why we're here learning today about how to stop listening with your eyes and start listening with your ears so at that point when i was listening to the the words in the movie and watching the movie in spanish that i couldn't understand i thought okay i need to stop reading the subtitles and i need to just listen and i cannot tell you how many times i watched that movie i watched the movie again and again at home so i could listen without the subtitles and catch more of the spanish and i'm not going to tell you that it was immediate or overnight but oh julia thank you so much for your nice comment i'm a student starting to learn so much from you it takes time it takes repetition it takes patience but one of the best things you can do is find a movie or a short tv show that you enjoy and watch it repeatedly and if you enjoy it it won't get boring you should listen to the english carefully but first don't try to catch every single word this is impossible i mean even for native speakers we don't always catch every single word we don't always understand every single every single word um someone asked about the book that i'm referencing the audio ebook the english fluency formula fluent english in 15 minutes a day this is an ebook where i put all my best tips in here for you to download and read and listen to and if you open the description you'll see a link to this to get it for fifty percent off today it's a limited time promotion to help you with your listening skills and all skills so what i was saying before i saw that question is that you want to find a listening material like a movie or a tv show something fun that you enjoy and watch it for the main idea so in each scene try to understand in each part of the movie or each part of the tv show try to understand the main idea not every single word try to catch sixty percent fifty percent start with fifty percent can you understand half of what people are saying start there and then watch again and see if you can catch a little more you can check your understanding after you challenge yourself with listening only you can check your understanding by watching the subtitles but have you ever noticed that subtitles are sometimes different than the actual words that you hear it's true i learned this when i was watching that movie in spanish nueve reinas nine queens in english i saw the words appearing in the subtitles different than i was hearing them and this is another reason why we have to train our ears carefully because if we rely on reading if we rely on subtitles we're not going to understand what people are saying okay so we need to train our ears we need to train our ears letting go of what we think the letters in words should sound like and start anew start fresh just think what does this sound mean okay when my um spanish-speaking student was saying i have to think about the whole sentence was he saying something about to be or not to be a ser or was he saying to do something like blah blah blah i want to do blah blah blah blah blah blah is just an example we say blah blah blah in english when we want to just fill in some blank it doesn't matter what the words are um for example i i want to do something fun quiero i said okay so i want to do something fun so i had to listen to the whole sentence that my student was saying and not just focus so specifically on the individual words so definitely i could understand that this child this student that i was teaching like 18 years ago wanted to do something fun he wasn't saying some shakespearean poem to be or not to be he was saying i want to do something teacher i want to do this let me do this okay so you have to think about the context the main idea try to get the point what is this person trying to communicate with you use your ears don't rely so much on the letters that you think are in the word and what you have read in your textbook and try to train your ears from zero understanding what people want to say okay i have to get going i have a meeting i think i'm late for my meeting so i have to go it's a busy morning but i wanted to come here and help you a little bit with english listening skills thank you so much for being here haiyan jermaine denisa leonardo well you guys are awesome thank you for your comments cyril from brazil awesome make sure to leave your answers in the comments so that i can check them and reply to you later today and remember if you want to get all my best tips from go natural english in one place the english fluency formula audio ebook is on sale today for 50 off check the link in the description just uh click on the little arrow that's pointing down and you can open the description and click on that link okay guys have a wonderful weekend a wonderful day um wonderful everything good vibes to you and mwah bye for now

Channel: Go Natural English

Views: 38,049

Keywords: American Accent Training, American Accent, Go Natural English, Gabby Wallace

Id: SNR5GvDA_Vw

Length: 22min 31sec (1351 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020