Why Can't You Understand Natives? 

I started to understand natives pretty well in voice chats on discord lol. I think that's a big step for me, because people in these chats usually don't have professional mics and have a pretty real conversations. But I still have problems with understanding some movies. And! I am pretty bad at conversations. But I'm getting better and better every day! Three month ago I was so scared of writing text messages, and now here I am! Writing this comment and not spending 15 minutes on nervous re-checking. I felt a need to share my happiness somewhere. Have a good day, the person who read this.

One really important thing is that when native speakers converse, they do not say or hear words, they say and hear phrases. Basically, you hear a whole phrase or sentence at once, and then your brain tries to match it to your internal "phrase dictionary". This is why you can hear a completely garbled phrase and still understand it, because your brain can match it to something expected in the context. The converse is that you can say a perfectly enunciated sentence and not be understood, because it is the wrong idiom and the listener does not have it in their mental dictionary. Case in point: as a native English speaker, I was once in the USA and asked for an order "to take away" at a fast food restaurant. The server became glassy eyed and became unable to understand me, no matter how carefully I enunciated my words. The problem was that I was supposed to ask for the order "to go". When the server failed to hear "to go", they became confused and stopped comprehending.

One of the most annoying moments in my life was when I met a group of French people a few months back as a student in the UK and couldn't understand anything. I thought that after learning French for 2 years in school and 1 year in uni and then many lessons on Duolingo, I was going to understand most of their speech, but I was so shocked and upset when I realized I couldn't understand 99% of what they spoke. When they spoke slowly specifically for me, i was able to understand 60 - 70%, but when they spoke amongst themselves, nah. Oh, and this even happens with my native language Kannada (a language from Southern India), because I grew up in a neighboring state where Tamil is spoken. Our family has been in Tamil Nadu for generations, so our Kannada has a heavy Tamil accent and a lot of Tamil loan words too. It doesn't help that both of these languages are closely related, so a lot of words are already similar to begin with, so it's hard to know when I'm using a loan word and when the word is already just similar or the same. So, when I speak to Kannada speakers from Karnataka (where Kannada is natively spoken), we have trouble understanding one another and so, we switch to English 😆.

I thought I knew English when I was in Italy till I left my home country and found myself working on a fishing boat in Broome WA, with two Scottish, two guys from the north of England, a londoner and a guy from NY... Now that was a good training!

All I heard was 'Blah blah blah Engirish haard' 😂🤣😂 I'm kidding of course 👍👍Excellent video💯

Metatron - I also just wanted to highlight that quite a large number of people - and especially those over the age of 50 - suffer from some level of hearing loss or the ability to process rapid speech (15%+). Typically, people first notice this when they have trouble hearing over background noise. For some people, hearing loss makes it harder to understand rapid speech - particularly when it's women or girls talking quickly because they have two problematic features (ie higher pitch and rapidity). Usually when someone with hearing loss asks the speaker to slow down they gets angry or frustrated. I have mild hearing loss so I've experienced all of this first hand. I'm usually accused of not listening or being rude. My one request is that people make an effort to speak a little more slowly if requested to do so without taking this as a personal slight. If someone was blind you wouldn't shout at them because they couldn't see. There's a huge correlation between social isolation, depression, and even dementia when people experience hearing loss. So please understand the issue and make an effort. As you say Metatron, enunciating more helps a lot. (In my case enunciation and slower speech works better than simply speaking louder.) Likely in my case it's genetic, as my mother and grandmother both went very deaf in their 60s and 70s. Be tolerant of those of us who are struggling and don't just tell us to get hearing aids - because hearing aids don't help if it's a speech processing issue rather than a loudness issue.

This has made it difficult for me to translate a show from Japanese to English by ear. Though lately, I've found that if I speak to Google Translate and try my best to sound like what I think I heard, it can guess what I said pretty accurately, so it's been a very helpful tool for this purpose. Unfortunately, sometimes it can't guess due to a lack of context.

There is a really interesting video here on RU-vid where someone edited sentence fragments from English native speakers and played them back to other native English speakers. The listeners were completely unable to understand what was being said. But when they heard the whole sentence, they understood immediately. This shows the importance of hearing and understanding the whole sentence in context to understand what is being said, and explains why lack of enunciation does not matter when you can hear the whole sentence and fill in the gaps automatically.

I’m a Linguistics major and I have never been taught this or heard this term before, so thank you.

This is so hilariously accurate. I have lived in Texas the great majority of my life and can tead spanish quite well. However, I cannot follow a conversation between two coworkers in spanish. I can understand the greater meaning, but the details and nuance are beyond me.

I spend hours and hours on italian listening. It's really the only way. I watch youtube videos, the radio, and movies. So there is a major variety and I'm startimg to notice accents. When i mean hours... i mean 9 hours and more a day. Even when im steeping, i listen to the italian news on the radio. Subtitles help as well. Italian audio and Subtitles. Im definitely improving. Plus i have an italian bf so he helps as well. 😂 I def have to ask him to pronounce clearly 😅. Thank you so much for this video! It came at a perfect time. This is all i desperately want. Is to understand speech😢

As a Japanese learner, I would watch shows and look at the subtitles, then rewind and listen again to make sure I could hear the words properly. After a while I learned which kinds of words would be contracted, blended to other words, or sometimes abbreviated. Native speakers like to make lots of shortcuts in their speach to make things easier so I found that animation and music was good for listening practice since they often have to speak more clearly for those kinds of media.

When Metatron refers to "lack of enunciation" I think he's referring to the weak form that so many words take, which is actually necessary in natural speech. Geoff Lindsey just did a great video on the subject. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qlbGtEg68x4.html&ab_channel=DrGeoffLindsey

LOVE THIS!! So true!! While learning Portuguese, I found it much easier to understand Brazilian Portuguese than the Portuguese spoken by people from Portugal. I would argue that enunciation the most important factor. For me, Brazilian Portuguese flows more smoothly, so while there are plenty of examples, such as "para" becoming "pra"; "Não, é?" becoming "Né?", as a non-native speaker, getting used to these patterns comes quickly. But for Portugal, both the rhythm of speaking and poor enunciation (dropping syllables constantly), understanding Portugal natives is far more difficult.

As hard as Finnish is to learn the nice thing is that our pronunciation of written words is consistent. I don't mean that we always speak standard Finnish but that when you see a word written down there's no ambiguity and this goes for regional accents. I don't think there's a Finnish regional accent or everyday speech that you can't write down clearly. For example the phrase "are you", standard language is "oletko" or the redundant "oletko sinä" and one everyday version would be "ookko" or redundantly "ookko nä". Even though there's a clear lack of enunciation and typical shortening of words there's no ambiguity of the sounds you need once you learn how Finns map alphabet to sounds. One letter, one sound. This is also what leads to our recognizable "Rally English" accent.

Yesterday I watched Kurosawa Akira's Seven Samurai. Even though I have 20+ years of experience with Japanese, there were some parts of the dialogue too hard to understand, perhaps due to a combination of all mentioned reasons. Japanese friends told me that they also find difficult to understand old Japanese movies. Patience!

Another reason I have found that you don't understand natives in movies or television is that the audio mixing makes it extra difficult. The voices may be quiet compared to the music, sound effects, and the actors could be speaking in a very dramatized tone. This is why I often need to watch movies with subtitles even English (my native language). You could say just turn up the volume but then the music blares and there's an explosion and it is way too loud.

Thank you for this. I always figured I was just terrible at understanding most foreign languages. As an American, I've found German to be the easiest to understand, because I guess they have a similar speaking style in terms of rhythm and speed. That and lot of similar words between the languages.

I remember in elementary school I was in the same class with a girl who was speaking the language so terribly that I was asking her each time to repeat what she just had said, she had no problems pronouncing things clearly - she just didn't want to because that's how she was speaking at home - the language was Polish and we both were Polish natives living closely to each other, that's crazy

At 7:16 there is a Ukrainian dictionary on the page camp, and at 7:35 the building looks like Kyiv Polytechnic University.

I remember listening to an audiobook in spanish and could barely understand it I assumed that it was just a bit beyond my vocabulary level But then I slowed it down to 80% speed and could understand it fine And that's in a medium with more anunciation than is in speech That's when I realized why native speakers were so incomprehensible to me

It reminds me of an American who asked me:e stop instead of t, ye stop instead of t, it's all I heard. Great video.

Now I understand why your English is so clear to me, as I am Spanish speaker. For me, it's a good practice following you because I don´t need any translation, it's a pleasure to listen to british English.

Grad student in linguistics here. A concept from psycholinguistics is something called "normalization" where the brain maps the phonemes to the previous language exposure. For example, I'm a PNW AmE speaker, and the accent around me is Manchester English -- a Northern English Accent, it takes time for my brain to register what sounds there are around me, and how they correspond to my dialect. When you deal with another language, focus on one accent in particular that you're interested in. Get really good at not only listening to those sounds, but being able to make those exact sounds yourself when you speak. This multisensory approach mirrors a lot of first language acquisition, and by doing so, you can find out how the language works without needing to put thought into it.

Also, there is an interesting phenomenon where native speakers can sometimes fail to understand other native speakers. We can hear something said on TV or in a movie and have no clue what was just said. We can rewind it and replay it over and over, and eventually resort to subtitles to figure it out. Sometimes enunciation really does matter!

When I took Spanish in high school, I initially found it difficult to understand recordings of native Spanish speakers. As I progressed, I could generally understand basic spoken Spanish, subject to my vocabulary. I was able to carry on a basic conversation with an exchange student from Mexico, but I spoke far slower than I could listen. I'm sure he spoke slower and enunciated more precisely when talking with me. On the flip side of this, I once had a co-worker who was from Iran. His English was quite good. He said that he found me easy to understand because my accent and enunciation were similar to his English teachers. I tend to enunciate more clearly in my everyday speech.

Thank you for this. I'm English and have felt so sympathetic towards the staff in the National Health Service who really struggle when patients use colloquial English instead of the received pronunciation staff were taught. I first became aware of it when a Chinese doctor was completely baffled when I overheard a patient referring to his bonce (head) during rounds. I was in my teens but it made such an impression on me I've always made a big effort to use standard English since then. I've never had a problem with people being rude about my accent when abroad, I've only had patient attempts at understanding and efforts to gently correct my pronunciation. Yeah, sometimes they've had a bit of a giggle at my attempts but it was friendly not hostile and I appreciated them taking the time to help me improve my grasp of their language.

I was walking down the street, in the USA, with a Canadian friend and some guy tried to hit us up... she told him in French that we didn't understand him and we both shrugged and walked off. So we literally pretended we didn't speak English even though we're both N. American. It happens.

I understand insults lol

The cure for that, exposure. Being Brazilian, I learned Spanish only by listening to songs, reading a few literature books, and watching movies and series. Understanding mexicans was easy. They often speak with a drawl and rarely speak very fast. To understand those from Spain, I had to hear a lot of Spanish from Spain (and they have at least one quite different dialect). Argentinian only became understandable after watching hours of content from an Argentinian youtuber. The same for Cuban. So, the vocabulary is the same, but phonetics vary dramatically.

For this stage, watching with subtitles in the same language (not translation) is great.

It's interesting having grown up with a father who's accent was horrendously thick in English. It made it much easier to understand people with thick accents in general (in English). I'm not sure how it works technically but I suppose you begin to listen for context and there are usually patterns of logic that become apparent over the course of conversations. Much of his writing was especially difficult to decipher though. Always a combination of his three learned languages.

Native English speaker here.....i met some friendly lads from Newcastle.....it was like a foreign language to me

I watched a video awhile back on why it's often difficult to understand what people in movies are saying. The bottom line was technology. Sound recording tech became so good that actors no longer need to pronounce everything clearly or loudly, because the microphones and editing will do everything for them.

Metatron. Loved ur vid on the Roman Gladius. Like the way U use ur knowledge as the Metatron Gladius to cut through the difficult parts. This allows so many viewers to learn and understand difficult concepts they have never been exposed to. Metatron is using his Gladius to cut the Gordion Knot, just as Alexander did. But to make difficult concepts understandable to all his viewers. Go Metatron go! We love U.😊

So true. I've been married to a woman from a different country for 2 years. Even though I hear her speak her native language almost every day on the phone with friends or family, learning has still been a very slow go. And yes, when I asked her to repeat something very slowly, I realize I actually knew all the words and that it was a matter of annunciation.

It is wonderful how I can understand you, obviously some words or expressions I do not know, but it is flawless.

Your English sounds absolutely wonderful, I think I'd mistake you as a native and not a native Italian.

In college I had a chinese man as my trigonometry teacher. Half the class dropped because of the language barrier. I, for the most part, understood him quite well. Tanyent = tangent Cosigh=cosign ...etc but there was one phrase he would say that was way over my head for the longest time Eeenjenidiwaah...🤨 I finally figured out that what he was saying was "in general" 😅😅 Ill never forget that moment it clicked. Such a humble, kind, and extremely intelligent man. He wanted desperately to improve his english and I wish I had this knowledge to help him way back then. Thanks for these videos, Metatron These will definitely be a blessing for my next language endeavors

Thank you! I already assumed this but could not articulate it. I used to be native American English speaker (Ohio) but German has become my native tongue after living her for more over 40 years. I have learned English at school and University and took also some French lessons. I considered myself for a long time as a native speaker since I could easily understand the news or watch all episodes of Star Trek, Star Trek TNG, DS9 and Voyager. HOWEVER, I struggled to understand any other movies since much of it was inaudible to me, except there were subtitles (which I actually hate because then I focus on reading instead on listening). Now I know its not only because of the actors mumbling but also of the lack of enunciation. PLUS I would like to add a third factor: Not being familiar with proverbs and figurative speach. In my job I get often called by colleagues from India, Poland, Italy, Spain, Portugal and France. Apart of the difficulties with understanding French and Indian accent, I understand all them very well. BUT its different when my colleagues from America, Ireland or London call me. I notice then that Im not familiar with certain phrases. Its worst with people from London. I understand every word but it still makes no sense to me since I do not get the context of how thats related to what I just said. Sometimes it even makes no sense to me and I wonder if they wer asking me something, confirming me something or need me to tell, explain or repeat something or if they are still continueing with smalltalk, telling me how happy the are about the latest champions league ranking results. I cannot give an example but its a bit like your given sentense:" Im sorry, I was cought in traffic" As an American I would say "I got stuck in traffic. All streets were jammed" and therefore I would struggle with your "was cought in traffic" and wonder what you mean if I did not get the context why you're saying that.

Regarding the last point: There’s a study (Rubin 1992) showing Americans are more likely to claim “I don’t understand 🤷🏻‍♂️” when audio is matched to a picture of a foreign-looking speaker 🧕🏼. Yet American listeners understand perfectly when the exact same audio is matched to a picture of an American-looking speaker 👨🏻‍🦰. So I do believe that the native listener’s attitude can play a role in effective communication and, by extension, the foreign speaker’s confidence and motivation for their target language (Ashtari 2014). Often nationally-born people are overly critical or just lack faith in communication with non-native speakers that come in foreign appearances. At least for me the study by Rubin can explain why many students complain about well-spoken foreign lecturers - even when they are professors at a linguistic level to independently write academic papers, and often have better enunciation than their English counterparts. 'Do you know what a foreign accent is? A sign of bravery.' - Amy Chua

I attended an international school when I was a teenager. The classes were taught in English but only about half of the students and teachers were native English speakers and they were divided among Americans, Canadians, Scots, Irish, English, Welsh, Australian, and New Zealanders. This is how I would explain it: I can understand you just fine if I'm listening with (really for, but you get the point) an Italian accent, but even that only goes so far. The same goes for an English accent speaking English. England has a lot of accents. French Canadians sound different when speaking both English and French than a Parisian does.

What’s funny is having people in my block learning how to hear my bad Spanish. I figured I was making more progress than I was until I did some shopping on the other end of town and people did not understand me at all.

Fun fact. Happened to my Missus. Once she arrived to UK, she had loads of trouble with communication. In part coming from rather antiquated schooling philosophy in our native country in time we were crunched by education, in part by lack of experience with native speakers. Visit to the doctor. Nurse asking question. My wife ??? Nurse asking same question again. Wife: English is not my first language, could you repeat please? Nurse, with same speed and atrocious West Country accent, but 2x louder... She genuinely tried to help my poor wife understand the sentence. Didn't played well at all :D My mantra. Strive to communicate. Doing this in grammatically correct way will come within time... ... providing you will drop your attitude, accept your shortcomings and work hard :) Cheers! I.

yeah enunciation is a huge thing. I remember taking a trip to china with my parents, I could understand everything but there was a moment of processing after everything. But then one of my parents friends, the first time we visited them, For some reason i could understand her a LOT more easily than anybody else there was no "processing gap" of a fraction of a second like i did with everybody else. I couldn't put my finger on it I mentioned this to my parents and then they told me that she's a retired teacher and that she probably speaks more clearly and enunciates more than most people just out of habit and that's likely why.

The enunciation angle explains the limitation of the "slow" language channels

For English speakers who study European French, trying to understand Canadian French is rather difficult,

I’m from South Carolina and I have a friend from Boston. We tease each other on the way we pronounce certain words. People in the southern US speak slower than people in the northern US.

Concerning the part where you talk about the lack of enunciation and speech reductions, I remember Andrey Zaliznyak would tell us that there's always a rope-pulling contest of sorts between the speaker and the listener, whereby each party tries to spend as little resources as possible in communication (while more effort for one side means proportionally less effort for the other), and that this competition may in fact be one of the reasons behind language change in general. But there's also the notion that spending less time on utterances presumably makes communication generally more efficient.

At least in regards to English, a lot of the 'lack of enunciation' is due to the fact that the language uses stress timing and vowel reduction, which is not obvious from the way the language is written. This isn't just lazy or energy conserving, but can affect the meaning of what is being said. Stress timing is particularly weird and confusing if you are not used to a language that also uses it. Dr Geoff Lindsey has some great videos on it (and other English language stuff).

I remembered Lindybeige immediately I heard the example. Nice!

Not always as bad as it might seem. I am a South African. On a visit to Belgium I spoke Afrikaans to the locals & they spoke Flemish to me. No problem: from my perspective they sounded as if they were speaking Afrikaans with a funny accent & I imagine their experience was the converse.

Very much agree with the reasons you gave. If you want to pile on a few more: 1. usage of synonyms can be local: if you memorized soda pop and the local term is soft drinks, you're not going to hear what you're listening for. "Passed on" and "Departed" are ways of not saying "dead". 2. dental health on the part of the speaker, missing teeth wreak havoc on pronunciation. 3. topics of conversation. When the folks start in on interpersonal relationships, whose second cousin married their sister's brother-in-law... Sports statistics vary by the sport, and soccer fans might not understand baseball batting averages or sumo intricacies. 4. if they don't enunciate clearly, speaking more slowly just puts more time in between the words you CAN hear, and you need a certain number of those words per every 5 seconds (guesstimated) in order to make an educated attempt at understanding. Good channel here!

Thanks. I have been learning Slovakian for some years now and I figured that out yesterday. Spitesaje actually means spytaj sa jej (ask her). It is much easier to read than to listen

Great example your English and Video is wonderful! ❤

You are very good at explaining stuff.

One aspect of modern language learning (as opposed to language learning hundreds of years ago) is distraction by orthography. I noticed that at school with a fellow student named Çağrı. His name is pronounced [ˈtʃäːɾɯ]. The kids didn’t know the spelling before they heard the name and just replicated the speech to their ability, which worked good enough, but teachers just couldn’t do it, trying to pronounce the letters in some shape or form; they couldn’t do the (near-)silent ğ, although just ignoring the letter would have been good enough and perfectly easy; they didn’t listen. The teachers saw his name written in their list (as Cagri, as the school didn’t do the proper Turkish diacritics).

"English has a very incoherent spelling system." That's is putting it very politely, but yep... There isn't a single spelling, or even grammatical, "rule" that is not "broken" by some 50 or more "special" exceptions to the "rule" in English, and that is without including variations in dialect. It was frustrating as hell to learn growing up, doubly so trying to teach my kid it. I'm honestly surprised that she never replied to a "sound it out" with "go fuck yourself". Lol.

Great video brother! I’ve noticed that when I speak to an American that speaks a low or high level of Mandarin, I can understand them and can converse with them. Whereas with a Chinese native, I’m lost. I’m assuming those that pick up the language later in life tend to pronounce the words in a more textbook manner.

Oh my god thank you for saying that, I literally can't stand when people who are trying to speak English but are very unclear in their speech because of an accent or lack of real study of the language or whatever it may be, get mad because you don't understand them like I don't understand why people are like that. When I try to speak italian with people and I make mistakes or whatever it may be I'm never mad at the person for no understanding me, infact I feel like I become too apologetic to them and end up being like "im so sorry, so stupid of me to make mistake" and they are always like "WHY ARE YOU SORRY ITS OK" 😭😭

Thats absolutely right. I always tell natives in my country to speak the way, they would write if they want foreigners to understand them.

I think it helps to listen to native speakers speak then spending time in classroom environment like how I spent 4 years in high school learning german Now about 15 years later I'm learning japanese by watching anime and been doing it for 2 months to date and I feel that listening to native speakers talk helps with wiring your brain more to hear and understand language because for one your training your brain to understand it from native speakers but also the real grip I have with classroom is its generally more textbook so you when learning by watching anime I have less expectations of proper japanese and hearing more how people in japan speak it more or less

This is one of the main reason why I stopped speaking Spanish with lleismo and I started using yeismo instead, even tho using lleismo would make it a lot easier to know when to use "ll" and when to use "y"

Ha, I "completed" my English learning by watching Hell on Wheels and Breaking Bad with subtitles, until I eventually could turn them off and still understand what was being said. All that slang and mumbling was good training for my ear!

This was insightful and helpful. I have observed everything you talked about, as I do know some vocabulary from a couple of languages and have rather wondered why I can speak (from sentences) in a language but don’t understand it when someone else (native) does. But I especially liked your observation about this occurring within a language. I live in North Alabama myself, in an area with lots of different English speakers in it; but grew up in an area in the state with a heavy dialect (I guess that’s what you’d call it). I’ve grown out of most of it, but if I’m around it a lot, I will fall back into that dialect, and notice people from other parts of the us having trouble understanding everything I say.

I had this problem when I first traveled to UK West Yorkshire. I needed directions help in train station and when I spoke with locals, I barely could understand them, despite I could easily understand English spoken by Americans when I travelled through California or when I spoke to non-native English speaking tourists in different places. I visited pub in first evening and again, I barely could understand what bartender was asking me. After couple weeks I got used to Yorkshire accent and didn't have much problem later on.

This is a good point and also calls to mind how two non-native speakers of different language backgrounds may not be similar enough to recognize what each other are saying as they both deviate slightly from the English target in different ways.

you always say you can't learn japanese through anime and partly I agree, but I learned anime japanese by watching anime. I can understand all types of different anime without subtitles even anime that use the more traditional way of conversing. But great content as always keep spreading your wings Metatron

A lot of Americans mumble their English, as do a lot of speakers of regional dialects of British English. British who speak SRP (Standard Received Pronunciation) "Queen's English" have a very clear enunciation and cadence, which is why is sounds so beautiful. (And for all the ignorant people who think it is mainly spoken in Britain, that would be very wrong. 85-95% of SRP speakers live in Asia, Africa and Latin America because of the overseas schools manned by SRP speakers.

Thanks for the explanation. One question - If the minimal effort rule applies, then why do so many natives use kind of awkward phrases like "based off of", which is longer and harder to pronounce than simple "based on"?

Being from south Louisiana, I know we speak fast here but we also use double negatives ALOT. My grandma is from Normandy and doesn't speak English well, at all. She learned from Cajuns and creole folks. So the English she speaks is really broken lol. I remember having an exchange student from Italy at my school and he kept ask, "WHAT IN THE WORLD DOES, I AINT GOT NO, MEAN!!!" I never noticed how BAD we speak English until my conversations with him. He had been to California for a school year and then Louisiana and basically had to relearn the language lol. My grandma hates the way we speak French also.

You are right, in Czechia we pronounce "bohužel se to nepovedlo" (unfortunately its no good) as "kurva" usually :-D

I remember a very long time ago (the early 1980's) when I went to college where a lot of graduate students (in short teaching assistants) were from India and at home we had a local pastoral assistant from India at my home parish. My mother had a challenging time understanding him, but I had no problems whatsoever. Fast forward a few decades and my mother, after literally a year of watching the show, managed to understand the dialect of the British show the "East Enders" which was just the dialect of the eastern portion of London. We assume a language is a focused set of sounds where it is actually a complex regional mash of almost conflicting sounds passed more though generational learning than from a book.

I went to Scotland as a American. Me and Scottish girl were communicating. someone tried to point we both speak English and we both said no he speaks English pointing out a British guy.

I love it how Metatron's face lights up when he mentions his wife.

A good example for that could be the German sentence "Auf den Tisch" which becomes "off'n Tüsch"

Your english is very good, when you get excited about something funny you sound more english then italian hehe. How do you find listening to us aussies?

Just discovered your channel, thank you for the videros. I would also add that it also depends on how much diversity of sounds your native language has, this is certainly the case why Portuguese speakers understand Spanish better than the other way around.

Watching almost everything movie-like in German, my native language, (Germans are spoiled when it comes to dubs), watching _Barbarians,_ a German production, I really noticed having troubles understanding some actors, especially David Schütter playing Folkwin Wolfsspeer. My sense is that voice actors are by definition professional speakers, so everything is spot on, whereas speaking is only one of many aspects of acting, but also, it’s probably intentional that Schütter doesn’t speak very clearly.

You simply need to listen more. Daily podcasts will do.

What a great video 👏🙏 I couldn’t agree more with “improving through practice and effort than blaming..” Although I live in the US, I can recognize few mistakes I do make in terms of language structure. I am not shying away to ask my friends for help when needed. But, most of the time I put the effort to focus on learning, instead of acting like an entitled “spoiled brat” thinking that someone “must do the work for me.”

As a Greek, when i was speaking Italian in Italy people though i was from Sardegna because of my accent. Most asked me about it because while the accent sounded like it, it was still off and it confused them

Regarding the ‘pretending not to understand you’ part, I guess it also has to do with the education/experience of the native. Does he speak other languages? Has he lived in the same village all his life? I watch videos of an electrician speaking a Bavarian dialect. I read a lot of comments of fellow Germans that are saying they can’t understand him. I’m Swiss, I see even German as sort of a 2nd language, still I have no problems understanding that Bavarian. Why? I guess because I’m used to many different dialects (Switzerland has a lot of them and we use them in everyday life) and I also live in Spain now and speak Spanish, a bit of Catalan, have a background in French (forgot a lot, but learned it for 7 years or so in school), am a bit into Italian now, looked at Latin, ah yeah and English of course. So, even if I hear a word I’ve never heard before I’m used to using the rest of a sentence to make sense of it, because that happens in about every language I don’t speak perfectly…

Even as a native sometimes it can be difficult to understand another native from another region...

Regarding word pronunciation making them unrecognizable, I remember an instance when I was at a bus stop in Scotland and some Italian tourists asked me for some information in English with an extremely thick Italian accent and pronunciation, and I could only understand what they meant becasue my own native language is also Italian and so I could reconstruct in my mind how they were "reading" the English words using our native phonetic rules. Then again, few Americans and Englishmen from the South that I knew also often struggled to understand Scots talking to one another in their native version of English.

Tell me about it man. All of that and being distracted by having ADHD, it's a total headache. Ooh Pasta Pomodoro that sounds yummy!

It’s not only the accent than can differ from what you have learned in a foreign language, the dialects can be very different also. Here in Norway we have dialects that are so different that Norwegians can have problems understanding each other. Not only is the tune completely different, many dialects have different words for the same thing. I have hundreds of words and phrases in my dialects that are not in standard Norwegian. But if you speak standard Norwegian (Bokmål), everybody will understand you.

To illustrate your point, once a British girl complained to me about French people not understanding her when she asked for directions in French (I'm French): in the streets, she asked for a "Pharmacy", which very much looks like "Pharmacie" in French. The pronunciation of both words are also pretty close. But still not enough to make herself actually understood by natives, who had no clue that she was looking for a "Pharmacie". English vowel sounds can be very confusing to French people.

10:00 Good point for some, but not all cases. In some of the experiences I've had, it can be a lack of context awareness among the native speakers. Just the other day I had someone stare at me wide-eyed because I used the word for "teacher" instead of "professor", after confirming that they knew both words and the definitions were the same (in that language), they told me, even if correct, that it was just not what they would say in that context. It can be frustrating, especially as an American who's used to people speaking broken english and generally being able to communicate just fine, to not receive the same courtesy in countries that are more insular.

Accents aren't just a problem for the ESL students! Even among those of us born and raised in the US, sometimes accents from other parts of the country can be a problem. It's not just the way words are pronounced, but sometimes it is the actual words themselves, they use words that aren't used elsewhere, or use them in ways that they aren't used elsewhere. Forget about southerners, go try to listen to people from Appalachian! I was born and raised and have spent nearly my entire life on the east coast, and someone born and bred in Appalachia will be a real challenge for me to understand! I can only imagine it is like the rest of England trying to understand a Geordie. I listen to old school Geordie speakers and it may as well be a foreign language.

One advantage of learning fusha (formal Arabic) is literally no one is a native speaker due to an extreme situation of diglossia in the Arab world and it is also deliberately well enunciated almost always so aside from speed there aren’t really other factors to hinder auditive comprehension

There is another aspect of language learning, which is very frustrating when you try to listen to a language belonging to a different language family: the frequency filter. To maximize our understanding of our own mother tongue, in noisy contexts, our brain develops an internal filter to only listen to a specific range of frequencies. This helps us capture the most salient sounds of our native language to maximize understanding. The problem is that these ranges of frequencies do not overlap between languages and between language family. As a French speaker, I can decipher words in an Italian flow of words, but when I started learning English, this flow of words was totally un-parsable to me. If you wonder why Dutch or Scandinavian have such an easy time to learn English, it is in part due to the early age that they are in contact with the language, but also due to the fact, that English to them is parsable. Modern English evolved from Germanic dialects that were spoken in Jutland and in the north of the Netherlands (Frisian). It was later heavily influenced by Norse, to the point that some linguists posit now that English might belong to the the Scandinavian language family. When a young Dutch or young Norwegian listens to some English, (s)he hears the sounds, I could not when I was a kid. To teach English to French or Italian kids require a complete different approach than to teach the same language to kids from northern Europe. You need to train their ear first in order to break this internal frequency filter.

without watching i'd say it's fairly straight forward. as a native we don't learn language by strict rules. we learn by being exposed to it. without formally learning a language it's easy to just get lazy with it and resort to shorthands or enunciations that are technically wrong but, collequally understood. basically we start speaking a language that is technically not the native language and isn't likely to be in a textbook so even if we slow done a lot of people still just won't understand.

I’m from WV and I eat the ends of words. A group of American students I was in worked with a Spaniard who said he could understand everyone else but me.

I am grateful that they taught me IPA in school, but it has the side effect of making me make fun of all the people who try to explain how to pronounce something using the 'standard American way' of a sequence of silly syllables. Anyway, I'd add to the discussion that there's one more factor - as hearing worsens with age or damage sustained to one's internal ear organs (e.g. from exposure to loud noises), one can actually become worse at understanding spoken language, and this is especially noticeable for foreign languages. Say, previously you would understand 100% of your mother tongue, but due to hearing loss, you only understand 70% now. You can still understand most of it, and guess the remaining 30% from context, so the difference isn't that big. But if previously you understood 50% of a spoken foreign language, and it drops to 20% due to hearing loss, it goes from 'I can mostly understand what someone is speaking, between the words I understood and words I guessed from context", to "I understood so little of what someone said, I don't have enough data to make guesses at the words I didn't understand". At least, I noticed that my understanding of foreign languages dropped with age, to a point I had to turn subtitles on for movies, video games and youtube channels where I didn't need them a few years ago, whereas I don't notice such an issue with my mother tongue (yet).

I can follow a fair few dialects of English, myself, but there are some that are absolutely nightmarish to figure out - Yorkshire, for example, and especially older Yorkshire dialect, is pretty hard to converse with. Also, we should bring back the Thorn letter, to make certain words clearer for pronunciation, like þink, þorn, þought, liþp, þing, and so on... ;)

Absolutely. My dad was very adamant about speaking and enunciating my words. He couldn’t stand, what he called, lazy speech.

Mi piacciono i tuoi video! Hai contenuti in italiano?

Good vid as usual. All the facts you explain are obvious if you think about the situation, but when we are learning is difficult to accept how bad is our speaking. And also we must add the cultural differences. Here in Spain some people has the (bad) habit of using some rude words as a salute when they are with very close friends. Well, I remember an American student in my university (Granada) who was shocked because he believed two of those guys were insulting each other. And when we tried to explain him that they were just saying hello he thought we were making him a joke. Very interesting topic, thanks for teaching pal.

Also, some native speakers are just better at 'communicating' than others. It apparently doesn't come naturally to everyone to enunciate a bit more have a little more separation between words, or, when not understood, to try saying the same thing using different words as opposed to repeat the same just louder. ;) Often times you can just look at someone and get a feeling if it's going to be difficult.. like granddad in Alabama with not a lot of exposure to English spoken anywhere else.