“Whenyou takethis coupling off
youllbeableto flex that universaljointin onedirection
but not theother
Because people make few pauses between words, when you don’t understand something, it often sounds like a long string of sounds. You have no idea how many words you heard. Even if there are some words that you know, you may not be able to recognize them because they may be glued together with other words.
There is no quick solution to this problem. You simply have to know a lot of words and phrases (and their pronunciations). If you know all the words in a sentence, you may be able to recognize them when you hear them, even if they are glued together. I said may, because there may be other difficulties:
•While you can read a sentence as slowly as you want, you cannot listen as slowly as you want. Some speakers talk quite fast, which can be a challenge.
•While spellings are the same all over the world, there are differences in pronunciation between different parts of the English-speaking world. Some speakers have unusual accents.
The only real way to learn to understand fast or accented speech is to spend a lot of time listening to many different speakers.
That is why understanding spoken English is so difficult for beginners. Without a large vocabulary and lots of practice, you are in serious trouble. Everything will sound like one long, strange word.
It’s easier to build your vocabulary with written English
While reading, you have as much time as you want. You can always stop and look up a difficult word in a dictionary. You can direct your attention to different parts of the sentence. You can re-read a sentence as many times as you like. With listening, this is troublesome. Stopping and rewinding a recording is inconvenient and sometimes impossible (live TV, movie theater, live person).
Another problem is related to spelling. If you want to look up a word in a dictionary, you have to know what the word is. In a book, the word is simply printed on the page. In speech, you may not know where the unknown word begins and how it is spelled. For example, if you hear something like this (/ɪnˈækt/), is it inact, enact or perhaps an act? Should you look under I, E or A in your dictionary?