The advantages of listening
It is harder to understand spoken English than written English. There are two reasons for this:
- Speech is continuous. There are no pauses between words, so when you don’t understand something, you don’t know if it’s one word, two words, or maybe part of a word.
- People sometimes talk fast, unclearly or in strange accents.
It is also generally harder to learn vocabulary from audio content. If you hear a new word, it may be difficult to look it up in a dictionary because you will have to stop the recording (which is inconvenient and sometimes impossible) and guess the spelling (which may be hard).
Even though it is difficult, listening to spoken English is a hugely important activity with many advantages over reading:
You do not need any time for it. Reading is a very demanding activity. You have to be sitting or lying and your attention has to be focused on the text. Listening is different: You can do it in any position and it does not require all your attention. You can listen to English while walking, jogging, driving a car, cleaning your room, having breakfast or cooking dinner. You can do it while surfing the Web or doing some repetitive work. You can even emulate Khatzumoto and play foreign-language recordings all day and all night for 18 months.
Listening is an amazing deal because it gives you free learning time. You do not need to set aside any “English time” — you can learn English while you’re doing other things that you have to do anyway. Even if you are a busy professional and have no time for English, you certainly have time for listening!
- It teaches you to understand speech. As mentioned before, people speak in different accents. Some of them talk fast or unclearly. It takes a lot of practice to get used to it.
- A lot of audio content (especially podcasts and radio talk shows), contains informal English.
Informal English is
the kind of English that is spoken in everyday situations.
It is the opposite of formal English, which is used in books, newspapers, TV news, official speeches, etc.
In particular, informal English teaches you:
- Informal vocabulary, e.g. to knock yourself out, to be fed up with something, horny, whatnot, psycho.
- “Delaying” expressions, e.g. you know, um..., let me think. These phrases are useful because they give you the time to organize your thoughts when you are not sure what to say next. It is important to know them.
- “Correcting” expressions, e.g. I started in March, I mean April. “You live in New York?” “Actually, Jersey City.”. These expressions let you correct yourself or the other person.
- “Qualifying” expressions, e.g. I feel sort of stupid. She’s basically the boss around here. With these expressions, you show that what you said is not 100% true.
- Other useful “everyday phrases”, e.g. What do you mean?, Come again? (when you didn’t hear what someone said), Wait a minute (to interrupt someone).
- It shows you how to pronounce English sounds. While listening to a recording, you can repeat words and phrases to practice your pronunciation.
- It teaches you connected speech. You can learn natural intonation and rhythm — for example, which words are pronounced more strongly in a sentence, when to make a pause, how the pronunciation of certain sounds changes in sentences.