ONE thing that will improve your English Listening Skills

If you want to improve your English listening skills,

don't try to understand each and every word.

Let's find out what to do instead.

(upbeat music)

Hello, it's Keith from the Keith Speaking Academy,

and the YouTube channel English Speaking Success,

where you become a more confident speaker of English.

You know, I think the biggest mistake that students make

when listening to English is,

sometimes, they try to understand every single word.

And you can't. Even I can't.

If you do that, you get lost quickly, you can't keep up,

and then you give up.

(chuckles) (static charges)

And you give up. (yelps)

(static charges) My white towel.

You must go beyond individual words, right?

The secret,

the secret, the one thing you should do is

always focus on the gist first.

The gist is the overall idea, right?

Just try to understand the overall general idea.

How can you do that?

Focus on the stressed words in a text,

or in a sentence.

These are the key ones that you really need

in order to understand what someone is saying.

Teachers, we call this sentence stress, right?

And in this video, I'm gonna show you

how sentence stress works,

and how knowing sentence stress will help you

understand much more when you listen to real English.

Let's do it. (screen whooshing)

So sentence stress refers to the words we stress

in a sentence.

Surprise. (chuckles)

We stress the most important words,

usually the nouns, the verbs, the adjectives, adverbs,

not usually prepositions or pronouns

or question words, right?

Okay?

For example, "I live in a town near London."

Live, the verb, town, the noun,

London, a noun, a proper noun,

(snickers) a real noun.

(screen whooshing)

So why is this important?

Because not all languages do this. (clears throat)

So in that sentence, right, "I live in a town near London,"

you can hear the rhythm, "I live in a town near London,"

dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, right?

"I live in a town near London."

Now, we don't go around speaking like this all the time.

"Where are you from? Hello, my name is Keith.

Hello, my name is Keith."

We don't go around speaking like that.

But, to show you the stress, "I live in a town near London,"

we stress these words.

Some languages don't, some languages stress each syllable

almost with equal stress, or weight, right?

For example, Mandarin Chinese.

(speaks in Mandarin Chinese)

Right?

Or Spanish, similarly tend to stress every syllable.

(Speaks in Spanish)

It's different.

English tends to be,

it's more of a stress-timed language, by and large.

So we stress the words at the same time interval.

Let me show you with two sentences, all right?

And listen for the stress.

"I live in a town near London."

"I've been living in this town just near London for years."

Can you see or hear, the stress is in the same place,

even though the second sentence has many more syllables?

And that's what makes English a stressed-timed language

more or less, generally speaking.

And I personally think

that's why English works very well with music,

'cause it has that beat, regular beat,

and so you can fit the lyrics into that beat.

Now, if you try and understand every word,

you will fail, all right?

Even British people don't do that.

"I've been living in this town just near London for years,"

we here "living," "town," "London," "years,"

that's what we focus on.

So that brings me to my second point, why this is important,

because listening for sentence stress is a strategy

Native speakers use as well, right?

We only focus on those key words, right?

We are so used to the grammar

that we will recognize the tense immediately, right?

But, and this is interesting, Imagine I'm at a disco,

or speaking to someone over the phone, or on a noisy street,

I will have strategies to help me understand

what I cannot hear.

I can't hear everything, so I use strategies like,

one of them, focus on the key stressed words.

Also, I will use the context to help me confirm the tense

and to get the overall meaning.

Sometimes, I will guess.

And all of these are listening strategies

that you should develop as well.

Listening for stress words, use the context, and guess.

Now, there's a third reason

that sentence stress is really important.

And it's because sentence stress can change the meaning

of a sentence too, all right?

Let's go back to our example,

"I live in a town near London,"

stress words provide the new and important information.

But I could, or you might hear,

"I live in a town 'near' London."

We've changed, right?

And maybe the person is saying this

because they want to make it clear

that I don't live far away.

So, "I live in a town 'near' London," right?

You probably still stress the word "town," but less,

'cause it's less important, "near" is the key information.

Imagine somebody said to me, "Oh okay,

so you live far away from London,"

I would probably say, "No, I live in a town 'near' London."

Can you see? The stress has changed again.

"No" is the key information to say, "No, you're wrong,

I live in a town 'near' London," I stress 'near.'

The other words are not stressed so much,

and they almost disappear,

because we're repeating them, they're not important.

Got it?

Of course, do remember, right,

context and intonation play a very important role

in deciding what the person means,

what they're trying to say,

but knowing sentence stress, it's essential,

and it will really help you understand

native English speakers, or proficient English speakers.

So to summarize, whatever your level of English,

there will always be things you don't understand.

Okay? Accept it.

Don't try to understand everything.

(screen whooshing) Focus on the stressed words,

focus on understanding the overall meaning, focus on gist.

Now, your next question is, "Great, Keith,

how do I do this?

How do I develop and practice this skill?"

Great question,

let me give you five tips to help you do this,

in the next part of the video.

Oh, by the way, if you're enjoying this

and finding it useful, do remember to subscribe.

Give me a like as well. (screen whooshing)

Okay, tips for practice. Number one, do dictations.

A dictation is where you listen and you write down,

or type, what you hear.

So do dictations with very, very short audio texts,

just two to three sentences, okay?

Listen and write the key words, the stressed words.

Listen again and add any extra words if you can.

Listen a third time,

and just try to write everything you can.

Then go back and check with the tape script,

if you can get a tape script, nowadays on YouTube videos,

you can get the tape scripts very easily.

Dictations, it's great,

we do this a lot in the Gold Live Lessons,

in the Gold Course,

students enjoy it and find it very, very useful.

I think, I hope so. (chuckles)

Number two, do plenty of longer listening,

news stories, podcasts, things like that

where you don't look up any words,

you don't take notes, you just listen.

So it doesn't feel like studying, right?

It feels that you are more like a native speaker

rather than a student.

Number three, change your expectations,

don't expect to understand everything.

Number four, listen to English at least one hour a day.

Yes.

As students, we don't listen enough.

One hour a day.

Now, that can be fitting it into your daily routine.

20 minutes in the morning when everybody's getting up,

before everybody wakes up.

Maybe on your commute for 10 minutes,

maybe on your daily walk for 20 minutes.

In the gym for 10 minutes,

or just before you go to bed, another 20 minutes.

(screen whooshing)

try and get in one hour a day.

If you can do 10,000 steps, (snickers)

you can do an hour of English.

The thing is, if you do,

you will notice a huge improvement in weeks.

Number five, stop using subtitles.

I know, I'm sorry.

And I know on Netflix it's like, "What did he say,

what did he say?"

Because the noise is louder than the voice.

But, try and get into the habit, sometimes,

not using subtitles.

Why?

Because subtitles encourage you

to focus on every single word, as you are reading, right?

It doesn't help you focus on the stressed words.

That's it, five easy tips.

(screen whooshing)

So there you go, now you know what sentence stress is.

You know why it's important and how to practice it.

So what are you going to do now?

Let me know in the comments below,

let me know what you think of this video.

Oh, by the way,

if you want to know more about the Gold Course I mentioned,

there's also a link down below.

But for now, thank you so much for watching,

and I will see you in the next video.

Take care now, bye-bye.

(upbeat music)