6 Ways to Speak English FAST (Like a NATIVE)

Hey there! This is Andrea, your  RealLife English fluency coach.  

If you want to understand fast English speakers,  

AND speak faster yourself, you have to know  some secrets about how we speak English. 

In other words, you have to know connected speech.  This is how we speak. We cut or reduce some  

sounds, we connect words, and some sounds change  depending on other sounds within a phrase. 

So, if you want to speak fluent and natural  sounding English out there in the real world,  

stay tuned, because this lesson  is packed with useful information.

When you start to understand how we sound and  flow while speaking English, you’ll learn that  

it’s not really that we speak fast… I mean,  some people do, but I and most people don’t…  

What is really happening is that we manipulate  sounds in such a way that it might sound as if  

we're speaking faster, but we’re really not. We’re just adding the things I mentioned  

before: reduction, linking and sound  morphing. That’s connected speech! 

And the problem is that at school  they’ve taught you the wrong way.  

They didn’t teach you how to train your ear. And  so now you expect words to sound a certain way,  

but because we use connected speech, we  speak very differently from what you expect. 

Although we’ll learn a bit about linking  and sound morphing, the focus of today’s  

lesson is going to be reduction, when  we cut or reduce sounds within a word. 

And there are two important  things that you need to know.

When we talk about pronunciation in English, we  have to know that words come under two categories. 

We have content words, which we stress, meaning  we say them a bit louder and more clearly. 

Then we have function words, which we unstress,  meaning we say them quicker, and less clearly. 

These are the words that drop  some sounds or syllables. 

Function words are the smaller words that  don’t have a concrete meaning, rather they,  

as the name suggests, have a function, a  grammatical function within a sentence. These are:

This brings us to the 'schwa' sound.

The schwa sound is very common in function  words. The schwa sound is the “uh” sound in 

In these words you can notice the strong  vowel sound. But if you pay attention,  

the other less obvious vowel sound is the schwa. 

Many times reduction means making a  word weaker by saying it with a schwa. 

For example, the word CAN has  a strong “ah” sound in it. 

However, when we say it in a sentence we replace  that “ah” for a “uh”, and so it sounds ‘kuhn’. 

Now I'll teach you some common  cases where reduction happens. 

In pronouns. Many times pronouns  

are function words, and as such, they reduce. In this case, it means that they drop a sound.  

The h. I’m talking about: he, his, her.  What did he do, becomes what di-dee do.  

What is his problem becomes what iziz problem.  Did you call her becomes Did-chew call-er.  

So you'll hear both linking and sound morphing  in these examples. Another pronoun that often  

gets reduced is 'them' but here we drop the 'th'  sound. I will call them becomes I’ll call-em.  

Why didn't you tell them becomes Why didn-you  tell-em. The two main prepositions that change  

very drastically are of and to. We don’t say “of”  we say “uv” or even just a schwa “uh” sound. Point  

of view becomes poin-nuh view. One of a kind  becomes wa-nuva kind. Then we also have for.  

For each other becomes fuh-rea-chuh-ther. Before  we continue let me ask you: Do you constantly find  

yourself stuck in your learning? Well you are  not alone, if you want to finally be able to  

understand and speak fluent English in the real  world, then I highly recommend you give our app  

the RealLife English app a try. First of all  with this app you can speak English anytime,  

anywhere, at the touch of a button and discover  other cultures as you connect with English  

speakers from around the world. And guess what!  It's all free. I bet this sounds like a dream,  

right? Well, now it's a dream come true. So  give it a try now. Just click here or in the  

description below now or search for RealLife  English in the Apple App or Google Play Store.

For this part I’ll give you some  examples for you to repeat after me. 

We’ll also bring Ethan on so he can  show us the American pronunciation,  

which might vary. These examples you’ll hear  contain reductions, but also the linking and  

sound morphing I mentioned before.For now,  just focus on saying it like me or Ethan.

You know, the reason why we reduce  sounds like this is because speaking  

with reductions is more effective. It takes  less effort. It’s not that we’re lazy,  

fully-articulating-every-single-word  takes a lot of effort. 

Also, in order for you to get more sensitized  to the sound reduction phenomenon in English,  

think a little about how YOU do  it in your own language as well. 

Now, another time we consider it wasted  energy to articulate the sounds exactly  

as they read is when the last sound of a word  and the first of the next one are the same.

Some examples are those are cheap prices. I need  to stop at the gas station. I joined a book club.  

We each have a ticket. Also, these sounds don't  necessarily have to be the exact same sound. For  

example, T and D are very similar, so in normal  speech I say NEXT DOR actually as NEX-DOOR. The  

T and the K sound also interact in the same  way. MOST COMMON can be heard as MOS-COMMON.

We’ve arrived at the end of this lesson. I want  to congratulate you for making it until the end!  

Many get distracted and leave  early, but you’re committed to  

improving your pronunciation so good for you! if you haven't subscribed to our channel,  

i encourage you to do it now so  that you don't miss our next lesson.  

let's quickly review some of the things we've  learned today. when we speak in English,  

we do it in a way that's easy and effective.  We use connected speech, which is how we cut or  

reducing sounds, we connect words and some sounds  change depending on other sounds within a phrase.  

We focused on reduction today. We learned about  function words (words we unstress) and the schwa.  

Then we learned that the  pronouns that start with an H,  

drop that consonant. So, we might say  “where-izi? Instead of “Where is he?” 

The prepositions of, to, for get weakened. We  saw many examples of verbs with prepositions.  

And then some examples of the same consecutive  sounds, which when they occur, we only pronounce  

them once. Ex: gas-station. For your next watch, I  highly recommend you watch this lesson Ethan made.  

It's called Stop Speaking School English - Start  Speaking Real-Life English. Ethan take it away!