Alan Palmer's Language Chat Podcasts

Hello everybody, I’m back from my holidays in France. Today I want to talk about when people speak fast and what you can do to help understand what is spoken. I think listening is the most difficult skill of the four skills in language learning For example: With writing, we have the chance to decide what we want to write and spend time on this. With speaking, we have the chance to decide what we say With reading, we usually have the chance to read the text many times if we want to. I don’t mean that the other skills are easy, they are often very difficult. What I mean is that with listening to conversational speech we often have no control over it. To explain more details:  Often the speaker has an accent  We cannot control the speed of the words (unless we deliberately ask the speaker to slow down – and very often we can’t do that)  Maybe the speaker is using slang or expressions – sometimes dialect words  Maybe more than one person is speaking at the same time, for example at a dinner table  M