How To Understand Spoken Language Better: 7 Atypical Shortcuts
One rainy evening, I sat down to watch "The Intouchables" in French with full confidence that I would understand every single word. At that time, I had a solid B1 level in French and had no problems understanding French vloggers on YouTube.
But that evening, it seemed as though I had unlearned all of my French. Since then, I never considered foreign movies as a way to better understand spoken language, and for good reason.
The actors spoke too fast, and I couldn’t predict the flow of the dialogues. Unfamiliar words were popping up like mushrooms after the rain. Quick changes in pitch were overwhelming. On top of that, Omar Sy used African vernacular I had never heard before – and voila! I couldn’t understand 70% of the movie.
If this sounds familiar to you, welcome to the club.
Comprehension is a cornerstone of language learning. It gives you confidence, opportunities, and motivation to progress further. But it also requires a lot of work. Or does it?
Let me show you a way to improve your understanding of spoken language.
Listen to this audio file:
Did it sound like a sequence of undistinguishable whistles with no meaning? Yet, it was English. Now, listen to this one:
Now, let's refer back to the first audio file. Impressed?
After listening to the second audio file, you may have found that you could clearly understand every single word uttered in the sample of degraded speech. So what just happened?
You have just experienced what scientists call sine-wave speech.
And, as you may have noticed, your perception of sine-wave speech highly depends on whether you knew what these funny whistles were supposed to signify or had no previous idea about it.
How can you train your brain to understand spoken language better?
After listening to the clear speech sample just once, you may have been able to correlate SWS whistles with normal English speech and had no further problems in deciphering it.
Now, what will happen if you listen to 20 other samples of sine-wave vs. clear speech?
Dr. Matt Davis from Cambridge University has found that your brain would get incredibly better at recognizing this form of degraded speech the more you listen to it (1). He argues that with experience, your perceptual system tunes into the new distorted form of speech. The more you train your brain to perceive sine-wave sentences, the more connections between SWS sounds and English words it establishes, making it easier for you to understand distorted samples.
This phenomenon is called perceptual learning, and you have just learned to use it with one type of distorted speech.
But aren't accents, accelerated speech, or murmurs just different examples of distortion?
How does experience affect your perception and comprehension?
I guess you are beginning to realize that perceptual learning is all about experience.
Experience affects your perception in three major ways:
It improves your sensibility in distinguishing subtle changes.
It increases the speed of pattern recognition.
It lowers attentional load.
In our example, the more times you listen to different sound samples, the faster and more accurately you recognize their meaning, and the less energy you spend.
Remember Sherlock Holmes? The famous detective was able to "tell at a glance different soils from each other" and trace them back to one or another part of London. Sounds impressive, doesn't it? However, he wasn't born with this particular talent; he learned it through experience.
You, too, can do it. Not to detect the origin of mud from the streets of London, but rather to understand spoken language better, regardless of the language or accent.
Now, how does it work in your case?
How can you get better at understanding spoken language?
To launch the Perceptual Learning Program in your brain, you will need three things:
Extensive exposure to spoken language
Every new language presents a completely new set of phonetic and syntactic data.
If you listen to foreign speech for the first time, it probably sounds like funny noise. You can't distinguish where one word ends and another begins. However, the more you listen, the more active effort you make to understand it, the more times you repeat, the better you get. If you can now catch at least a few foreign words in a spoken sentence, you have made a huge improvement!
The more you listen, the more data your brain possesses, and the more patterns it can recognize. So, to understand spoken language better, you have to listen a lot. Devour everything you can find: podcasts, audiobooks, YouTube videos, series on Netflix, songs, and radio chatter. It is the fastest way to improve your understanding of speech.
Attention
There is a subtle difference between hearing and listening.
To move from the first to the second, you have to start paying attention. But, watch out. The lifespan of your attention is just about 10 minutes (yeah, the Sherlock Holmes mode is not too prolonged, unfortunately). After these 10 minutes, you'll check out – especially in the first weeks when you do not understand a single word – because it’s really hard to pay attention to boring things.
To be able to concentrate longer, you have to understand at least 70-80% of what is being said. So it makes sense to choose material tailored to your proficiency level. So try to avoid listening to “War and Peace” at least in the beginner stage of learning Russian; it will save you some nerve cells.
Instead, pick up any short audiobook and listen to it at least two times. I typically head to Audible and look for books I’ve already read. Since the story is already familiar to me, I can follow it and stay engaged even with very limited knowledge of a target language. And as I keep listening to the audiobook, my brain does its “incidental learning” job and automatically acquires frequent vocabulary.
Active classificational effort
Making an active classification effort means making sense of what you are hearing (which is quite hard if you just start learning a language).
Skipping this step will yield no results.
Simply listening to French radio for 24 hours in the background without actively engaging with the content will not improve your understanding of spoken language. However, this is exactly the phase where a ton of modifications can be done.
There are a number of ways to make speech more intelligible. For example, using subtitles. Subtitles often play the role of that clear speech sample you listened to in the first part of this post. They give you perceptual insight. If instead of an intelligible sentence you heard a wild stream of sound, stop, take it back a few seconds, turn on subtitles, and go over that phrase one more time. And one more. And one more. Until the big "Aha!"
When it comes to podcasts, I like to slow down the playback speed. I use PodcastAddict, which allows me to adjust the reading speed by 10%, 20%, or even 50%. Audible also offers a similar option. Slowing down the speed gives your brain more time to process what you already know and pick up new information along the way.
Another helpful tip I've discovered is to revisit old videos, movies, or podcasts multiple times. It's an excellent way to review your vocabulary and, more importantly, boost your confidence. Even if you only understood 50% of the content the first time, this percentage can increase to 80% on the second attempt and eventually reach 100% by the fifth repetition.
RECAP: 7 ways to understand spoken language better
Listen to a lot of authentic content: radio, podcasts, videos on YouTube, music, etc.
Make sure your listening sessions are short: you have just 10 minutes of active attention.
Choose content that is appropriate for your proficiency level.
Listen to topics that interest you, as it will make the learning process more enjoyable and motivating. If you don’t listen to the news in your own language, don’t think that hearing about world catastrophes in French will make you beaucoup de bien.
Use subtitles to boost your comprehension.
Slow down the reading speed of your audiobook player.
Listen to the same content multiple times.
I hope this post has given you some helpful insights on how you can tame that new bilingual part of your brain. If you have had the same problem with foreign movies, I would love to hear about your experience in the comments below.
Matt Davis – An Introduction to Sine-Wave Speech
