Based on our extensive research at LEC, we have concluded that it is very important to expand your English vocabulary about the issue of how to improve your English listening skills. You may understand this by reading our previous post about how our brain understands English. Knowing vocabulary only, however, is not enough to understand English by listening.
If you try to listen to Hollywood movies, documentaries or TV dramas without subtitles, and then discover later when you read the script that the sentences you did not understand were actually just easy expressions, you may learn quickly that English native speakers enunciate (sound-out) their words differently for different situations.
American people usually pronounce [innər|nӕʃnəl] rather than [int ər|nӕʃnəl] for “international”. “should have been” is ‘ʃurəbin]. Of course, people from UK or Australia may pronounce the same words in different ways. Also, a person’s English may sound a bit different when they are talking with friends, as opposed to talking with co-workers at the office. The rule that you need to learn phonetics applies for the case of any type of English.
Learning English phonetic rules is not difficult. You can learn this rather quickly, perhaps over a few days, by reading a book on English phonetics. Once you learn about this, your listening skills advance rapidly.
