I wouldn't say my English is poor, though it's not perfect. I took the IELTS test for many times, and I got a full mark, and sometimes nearly full marks in my listening part. I understood almost every single word in the test, even if the speakers had a regional or foreign accent.
I thought my listening was fine. But two months ago, I arrived in Australia and found out that many people kept confusing me. With some native speakers who spoke to me over the phone, I could just catch a few words. They did seem to help me, slowing down, repeating, using shorter expressions and avoiding or explaining slang, but these hardly ever worked.
Then I listened to many Australian public speeches. Guess what, almost every word was clear to me. I watched some American films, and then I seemed to have discovered my problem. It was I could only understand about 30% of their words no matter how hard I tried, how many times I watched, how loud the volume was, and even when the speed was slowed down to 50% of the normal. I then tried to do the job with the subtitles, at 50% of the speed. Something unblievable happened!
With some phrases, I heared random noise that didn't seem to match the subtitle. I believe the random noise could be slurred/reduced/compmressed/relaxed form of the phrases, or is it? I suppose this is also the problem that prevents from understanding Australian in person.
Dear learners on italki, how do you understand native speakers' natural pronunciation? If you also expreienced a hard time when they're using slurred English, what was your way of overcoming the difficulty?
Find as much relevant Australian media as you can, YouTube will probably be a better bet, as I imagine theres some form of RP in Australian media. You can always post the video here for better translation, as I find YouTube auto translate will be horrible unless the subtitles have been encoded manually.
I've no issues understanding the accents, but if they use slang or reference points that have no bearing here in the UK then I wouldn't be able to follow fully the conversation. I believe that's true of any language or dialect.
Read this joke <em>out loud</em>, and see if you understand it:
Patient: Doctor, Doctor, I’ve god a two theik, a near rake, soar rise, bruise darms, a stummer cake and I far tall the time.
Doctor: I see, perhaps you’d like to way din the corridor?
Of course, this joke is meaningless when you read it on the screen, but believe it or not that's exactly how English native-speakers would say it:
Patient: Doctor, Doctor, I’ve got a tooth ache, an ear ache, sore eyes, bruised arms, a stomach ache and I fart all the time.
Doctor: I see, perhaps you’d like to wait in the corridor?
One of the hardest features of English is how native speakers say words in sentences very differently to those words alone. This is what linguists called connected speech. Actually, connected speech exists in all languages, but it's especially big in English. Just like grammar, there are rules on how connected speech works, but I don't advise learning them as they're very difficult and abstract. What I suggest you do is watch some English-language TV and movies (no more than 5-10 mins at a time) with no subtitles. When you hear something you don't understand, watch again with the subtitles and make a note: How are they saying it differently to the individual words? Then make a note for later use.
You need to learn "native speakers' natural pronunciation" ASAP.
It's hard work but analysing short dialogues with their transcripts could be a good idea. I find that I can improve my understanding from 40% to 70% by listening to the same clip of Italian 5 or 6 times, before then reading the transcript.
You could also try to get involved in a local book club or something similar where you are discussing familiar material with native speakers.
I'm not sure what you mean, but it's almost certainly not random noises - unless you're watching some very weird films ;-) Could you be more specific?
You must remember that public speeches and ESPECIALLY listening tests (as in IELTS) are not really natural, normal speech. They're much slower and more careful than natural conversation.
The big difference between Chinese and English are that words in Chinese generally sound the same in a sentence as they do individually. But in English the word "handbag" doesn't sound like "hand+bag", it sounds more like "hambag". When you have a sentence where half the words are changed due to connected speech, I can understand how it sounds like random nonsense to you (kind of like the first version of the joke I posted above). Remember: spokenenglishisn'tlikewrittenenglish... therearenospacesbetweenwords! That's why I think it's a good idea to learn language in "sentence chunks" in order to better learn how words work together.
