How to understand natives when they speak quickly
When a native speaker says a lot at once, stopping to decode every unknown word is what keeps you stuck. A polyglot explains what to do instead.
Understanding native speakers when they speak really quickly and say a lot at once can be very difficult. If you're just starting out it can be demotivating, because you're trying to understand and not really getting anywhere, and that hurts your motivation.
I did something a bit different here. I talked with a native Italian speaker, Jeppe, who speaks seven languages. I had a conversation with him, a bit in Italian and mostly in English, about how to break down something said really quickly in your target language and not get demotivated, so you can stay consistent.
What I did when he spoke rapid Italian
Jeppe got straight into talking rapid Italian, and I tried to understand bits of what he said. I understood some of it. Then we dived into exactly what the words were. At that point it doesn't matter what the connecting words are, like "also" or "therefore". What matters is that you get the key words, because they give you the context of what he's talking about.
Ambiguous zones
Jeppe's point: speaking six languages made him realise how important it is to understand how your brain works, and why we're motivated or not, because being consistent is only half the work.
When we learn a language, there's a lot of information we don't know. He calls these ambiguous zones. What we do is disambiguate that information. Say there's a piece of audio, and there are bits your brain doesn't understand. The human brain wants to clarify that ambiguous zone as quickly as possible, on the spot.
So he asked me to take on the behaviour of the learner who wants to understand immediately. Every time there's something ambiguous, they stop the speaker. Never letting themselves develop the context. Every time there's ambiguity, they pause the speaker.
We tried it. Every time he said something, I asked him to stop and tell me what a word meant. I did get to understand some of it, like "therefore" and "animals", but it wasn't a good experience.
His point was that when you stop the speaker, you give more importance to the rationalisations of your brain, and you stop yourself forming the emotions and the context. Language sticks with emotion and context. In his words, that's the base where it sticks in the long term. The best way not to learn a language is to rationalise everything and ignore the context.
Emotion and context, not tables
I asked: is that how many language courses do it? You learn "the table, the cat", why it's "the" and what the plural is, and you're studying grammar before you can say "could I have a beer, please". You're focusing on structure rather than understanding as it flows and accepting you won't know every word.
He said yes, until roughly B2 level the learning is mostly emotional. The way languages are taught focuses on the rational mind and its constructs: tables, lists, endings of prepositions, conjugations. These are the byproducts of the rational mind. That's not how languages are really learned. What he's saying is complementary to that. It tackles the subconscious side of things.
Think about kids. A two-year-old's rational mind isn't even there. Their crying and arguing isn't logical. So how do they learn a language? Purely through emotion. Kids speak two or three languages without any cognitive effort and without knowing what a rational mind is.
My thought was that when people say you're best learning languages when you're young, it's probably because kids use emotion 100%, while as adults we use logic too much.
How to be a child again as an adult
Jeppe said you can be a child as an adult. Be more silly. Find how languages are weird. He told me about the Italian numbers from 11 to 19 and how they're made, and how funny that is. If you're curious and notice the weirdness and the emotionality of languages, you'll have much more fun with it, and the language bypasses your rational mind and goes into your emotional mind.
That makes sense to me. The Italian word for car is "macchina", and in my mind it's a machine, and it literally means machine. If you can relate a word to something funny, it sticks.
His three rules for memorising: make it a movement, make it weird, and make it emotional.
What to do when someone speaks fast
- Don't stop them to decode every word.
- Listen for the key words, not the connecting ones.
- Use the context and the emotion to follow where they're going.
- Make it fun. Notice what's weird.
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About me
Hi, I'm James Hutchinson
I'm a native English speaker, and I've spent 13 years learning Spanish and Italian. I've lived abroad too, so I know exactly what it feels like to freeze mid-conversation. I make videos on the psychology of speaking a new language, and I built Voco so you can practise real conversations without the pressure.