Speed Demon

Hi, in this lesson we are going to look at three scary things about English. So, learning a language can be very difficult, very scary actually, but it is not so scary once you know what the monsters are. So, when you watch a movie and there's a scary monster, well the scary monster often is not so scary once you know all about it. You know all of the monsters tricks, and what the monster is doing to make it scary. So, we're going to look a three scary creatures, feature creatures of English, and see why they make English so difficult to learn, and what we can do about it to help us to learn English better.

All right, so the first creature is the speed demon. So, the problem is that English sounds really fast, right? And people often feel like they are a deer in the headlights. That's because the English just comes at them so quickly, and this is a big problem because English speakers can speak up to seven words per second. Now on average speakers speak between three and five words per second, that's a lot. That's a lot that you have to process, and there's no pause between the next time, between the words, so the words just keep coming and coming and it makes English very difficult to learn.

Now one of the problem is because if you listen to textbook English the English is read by a voice actor and they tend to say the words clearly and slower, but if you listen to naturally spoken English or maybe movie English, something that actors are saying on TV or in a movie, they're going to speak much faster. So, speaking is a lot like driving a car actually, so the first second that somebody talks they usually say the English a bit slower and often they have a word that they say to let the person know, "Hey, I'm going to be speaking really quickly." So they might say, "So," or, "Well," or, "Yeah," and then they boop, they speak really quickly. Example,

"So, what are you doing tomorrow?
So, how was the movie?
So, what did you have for breakfast?
Yeah, I had a really good time.
Yeah, it wasn't that great.
Yeah, I just had cereal."

So, we say the first word kind of slow and then boom, we speak really quickly. So, this is a big problem. 

So, you might be thinking, "Well, how can I defeat the speed demon?" Well, actually the only thing you can really do is just listen a lot, listening to textbook listenings or textbook activities will never ever get your speed up, it just won't. You need to listen to lots of English preferably naturally spoken English, and the more you listen the better you will get. And look at it this way, it's kind of like playing a sport. So, the more that you play the better you get and the faster you get. So, in the sports world at the highest level the biggest difference is speed. In tennis, in basketball, in soccer, it doesn't matter the athletes can do it faster than athletes can do it at the lower level. And the only way they do that, they get their speed up is they play a lot, so you just need to listen a lot. The more you listen the faster you are going to become at processing English and getting your speed up.

So on Elllo we help students by having levels, and you can go to some of the easier spoken English, the slower spoken English, and also if you do the one minute English videos usually because the person is only talking for one minute and they're kind of talking to the audience, usually their speech is a little bit slower and because it's shorter the listener does not really fall behind. So, I highly recommend the One Minute English videos on Elllo to help you develop your listening speed. 

And that's it, so that's the speed demon. Don't be afraid of the speed demon it just takes time. English is fast. Every language is fast when you first learn it, but the more time you put into it the easier it will become. Good luck.