Understanding spoken English is difficult for beginners. If you want to listen to TV programs and movies, you need to know many English words (and their pronunciation).
If your vocabulary is poor, you will never understand natural spoken English. Often, you will not even know where one word ends, and the other begins. Everything may sound like one long, strange word. If you're talking to a person, they will probably repeat and explain things to you. But this is a special situation. Nobody will explain anything to you if you're watching TV or listening to a presentation. In general, understanding spoken English is hard.
Listening to English is much more difficult than reading. Of course, you need a good vocabulary to understand written English, too.
But reading is still easier than listening, because of these differences:
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You have lots of time. When reading, you can always stop and
look up a difficult word in a dictionary. With listening, this is not always possible. You can stop and rewind an audio recording or a taped movie, but the TV the movie theater, or a native speaker will not wait for you.
-
You know the 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 spoken English, a sentence is often spoken very quickly, and you don't know where the unknown word begins. And even if you know where the word begins, you often don't know its spelling. For example, if the unknown word sounds
like this (which is transcribed [i'n@kt]), can you
look it up? Not really. Is it spelled
inact or
enact or something else? Should you look under
I or
E or another letter?
An example
Listen to this mp3 recording of Tim Berners-Lee talking about the new technology for the Web. (Tim Berners-Lee is the person who created the World Wide Web.)
Now try to write down all the words that you don't know. Then look them up in a dictionary.
If you can't do it, it's because:
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The speaker is talking very fast. If you don't understand part of the sentence, you may not know how many words the speaker said.
-
You don't know the spelling of the words that you didn't understand.
Now you can read the text of what Tim Berners-Lee said. Look how easy it is to write down and look up all the difficult words. They are simply there, you can read them as many times as you want, and you know their spelling.
The conclusion: you can't do without reading. Listening is great — for example, watching movies in English helps you to learn slang vocabulary, pronunciation, and intonation. But if you are a beginner, you simply can't understand natural spoken English. Reading is the best way to learn a lot of English words. Only after you have learned a large vocabulary can you try to understand natural spoken language.
