Why You Can't Understand the Fast Pace of Spoken Spanish ♫ 33

Bienvenidos. Welcome to the learn Spanish con Salsa podcast, the show for Spanish learners that love music, travel and culture. Close your grammar textbooks, shutdown the language apps and open your ears to how Spanish is spoken i nto the real world. Let us show you how to go from beginner to bilingual. Here is your host certified language coach, Tamara Marie!

Hola y bienvenidos al episodio 33. Welcome to episode 33 of the Learn Spanish con Salsa Podcast. In this episode, we're going to talk about one of the most critical skills to develop when learning Spanish: and that's listening comprehension. If you're like most Spanish learners, you probably find that you can understand Spanish better when you read it, you can figure out what many of the words mean, even if your vocabulary is limited, and that's because there are some similarities between Spanish and English.

But when you're listening to Spanish, even if you hear the exact same words, you can understand perfectly when you are reading, you might find it difficult to make out what's being ais. And even worse, when someone starts talking to you in Spanish or if you're just eavesdropping on a conversation between native Spanish speakers, you're unable to keep up with the fast pace of spoken Spanish. While you're busy trying to catch everything being said, the conversation has moved on and you've missed something critical and now you are completely lost.

This makes the idea of starting a conversation with someone in Spanish, really intimidating and it's why you might even shy away from actually speaking the Spanish you do know, even if you feel like you know what to say, you're afraid you won't be able to understand someone when they respond to what you're saying. Now, this can be frustrating, especially if you've been making an effort to learn Spanish and to improve your listening skills.

And I get it, it's completely normal. Believe it or not, this is a pretty common experience among language learners. I've had many of my coaching clients and members of the Spanish con salsa community express the exact same frustration that you might be having with your Spanish listening skills. The problem is with the way Spanish is generally taught and the way that we're told, we should approach language learning, but don't worry, you are in good hands.

I'll be going into some reasons this happens to us and how we can overcome it. Understanding spoken Spanish is an extremely important skill and you have to get over this hurdle if you're going to reach true Spanish fluency, there's just no other way. Think about it. Would it be nice if you can understand Spanish with the same ease that you understand English well?

I'm going to share with you the five top reasons that you struggle to understand fast spoken Spanish and more importantly, I'm going to share with you what you can do to really begin to improve your Spanish listening skills. Now, this is important because when you started learning Spanish, I doubt your goal was to get really good at reading and only vaguely understanding Spanish spoken very slowly by other native English speakers. I'm pretty sure that's not what you wanted to do.

Most likely, you want to have conversations with native Spanish speakers. You want to connect with real people in your community, your family and friends. You want to travel throughout Latin America and be able to talk to people without fumbling around with Google translate. So let's get to it. I'm going to explain exactly why you might find it difficult to understand spoken Spanish and a few tips to reverse this problem so you can get on the path to effortlessly understanding Spanish you hear from your friends, on the radio and in your favorite songs.

The first reason you might be struggling to understand spoken Spanish is really simple. It's a lack of vocabulary. Now, I know this might seem obvious, but the first obstacle that keeps us from understanding spoken Spanish is not having enough Spanish vocabulary in our word bank, sort of speak. So if you don't know enough words in Spanish, you most likely will get lost when you're listening to any amount of extended speech.

And if you learn words in isolation without any context, you're much less likely to remember them. Add to that the mini idiomatic expressions and phrases in Spanish that you might not even notice because you haven't been exposed to them. You may not even realize that combinations of words can have completely different meanings of words on their own. For example, the verb"dar" means"to give" and the word" cuenta" means"accounts" or"story". But when you put the phrase"darse cuenta" together, then you add that reflexive a form of" dar" with the word"cuenta".

It actually means to realize. So, if you hear someone saying" me dícuenta de que...", You might be thinking, why are they giving themselves an account? Does that make any sense? But it's a really common phrase and if you haven't learned it or ever come across it before, and even if you came across it before but no one told you what it meant, you'll be really, really lost in a lot of conversations because again, it's a pretty common phrase.

Another example that you may already have heard about is the very common verb"tener"which means"to have" when it's on its own. But if it's followed by the word"que": Q-U-E. It means"must" or"have to" such as" tengo que irme", which if you're unfamiliar with" tener que" it means the person is telling you"I have to leave". So simply knowing enough words and phrases can be a real impediment to your ability to both hear and understand spoken Spanish.

Now the second reason, understanding spoken Spanish can be difficult, is what I call sound deafness. So sometimes we get very confused or we simply can't hear sounds that we're not familiar with. There are several letter sounds in Spanish that are similar to English, but the ones that are new to our ears can really be hard to comprehend. Letters like"eñe"(ñ),"doble ele"(ll) and the trilled double-R sound or"erre"(rr) can really trip up non- native Spanish speakers. This is because these sounds truly are foreign to us. We hear them, but we usually don't know how to properly pronounce them ourselves. This makes it even harder to recognize them and they tend to divert our attention away from really trying to understand what we're hearing. That's because for us, these sounds truly are new and our ears kind of need to adjust to hearing them because we may recognize them, but again, in a string of spoken speech, they really are just distractions that take us away from focusing on listening comprehension.

The third complication we run into when hearing Spanish is being able to distinguish between words when they are linked together. Now I'm talking about the way people speak in the real world, not the slow, comforting speech in a Spanish course. Native Spanish speakers tend to say a long string of words all linked together, which is the main reason why Spanish sounds so fast to us. What we hear as fast is actually just normal pace Spanish speech.

Now, I know some Spanish speakers speak faster than others and sometimes I almost think it's a competition between Spanish speakers from different countries to say who speaks to fastest. But in general, it all just sounds faster than we're comfortable with. And if you're not familiar with the intonation of the speaker, you'll find it almost impossible to differentiate between the words. We really do the same thing in English. When you think about it, rarely do we say, what did you do? It would sound more like what'd you do? We're just used to it so it doesn't sound fast to us. The thing is, when we learn Spanish, we usually learn one word at a time and only listening to excrutiatingly slow speech. This is a mistake. Imagine if someone were to speak to you that way. In English, people usually don't talk in single separated, one word sentences, right? That would be very painful to listen to: it is even painful to talk that way. So if you think about it, if you're a native Spanish speaker, it doesn't sound natural to you to hear words separated and broken up and slow the way that English speakers who are learning Spanish may speak the language. But unfortunately, this is how we learned Spanish and so we speak at the same way. This means when we're exposed to Spanish, the real world, we are in shock because they speak at a normal pace.

The fourth obstacle to improving your listening skills is brain freeze. Now, I'm not talking about the type of brain freeze you get when you eat too much ice cream too quickly, but I'm talking about when your mind literally freezes out of fear, anxiety and intimidation. You might have experienced something like this before when taking a formal test in school or if you've practiced a dance choreography or playing a song or an instrument, you might actually know the material. I mean, you've reviewed and practiced it over a hundred times, but you get this type of performance anxiety when it comes time to take the test or play or perform in front of an audience.

The same thing can happen with listening in Spanish. This is especially true if you've tried to listen to Spanish several times and you couldn't understand what you heard. This gives your brain the signal:"Oh-oh! Here's that thing we failed at again", and if it w as i n a social situation, meaning around at least one other person, our brain interprets that type of pain the same way as physical pain.

So if you think about that, it really has an impact on us. When we tried to listen to Spanish before it sounded too fast, or we didn't recognize a word or a phrase and we got demotivated, but our brain really recorded that memory as something that can to being almost stabbed, right? I know that sounds dramatic, but your brain really doesn't know the difference between social pain from being embarrassed in front of other people or feeling like you made a mistake and actual physical pain sensations to the body.

So that's really powerful and we might not think about it when it comes to listening comprehension. We may think about it more when it comes to speaking, but it really does color our experience. The minute we know someone is about to speak to us in Spanish, our brain literally goes, OMG, what's about to happen? I'm not g oing t o get this. And that sets us up for failure. So when you have these type of moments, the part of your brain responsible for this phenomenon is called the amygdala. And that's what goes into our fight or flight mode, which usually results in us freezing or getting stuck. Now, once this part of our brain is aroused and activated, it can be almost impossible to understand anything. It literally shuts down our ability to access the thinking parts of our brain, such as the prefrontal cortex that are responsible for our executive function. And I'm getting a little bit into sort of the neuro-science basis for this, but the important thing to just keep in mind is that when you are in that state of fight or flight or freeze, really it's impossible for your brain to access the parts that it needs to actually retrieve the vocabulary to retrieve those previous memories of,"Oh, I heard that word before and I know how it sounds and I've heard these connected speech patterns before so I can actually recognize them". When you are in that fight or flight or frozen mode, you really can't access that part of your brain. So this can be a big problem. Even if you already know the vocabulary and you're familiar with the sounds of Spanish. The last thing that makes it hard for Spanish learners to understand spoken language is unfamiliar accents and dialects. Sometimes, you may come across someone that just sounds strange to you. It's not that your listening skills are poor, but no matter how hard you try, you may just struggle to understand anything this person says. In that case, you may have come across an unfamiliar accent or dialect of Spanish that you haven't heard before. And as a beginner, you probably won't be able to hear the differences and nuances of the Spanish language from different regions. Now while this might be frustrating, you should be comforted to know that there are some dialects that even native Spanish speakers have a hard time understanding.

So let's review the five reasons you probably find it hard to understand native Spanish speakers. They are, number one, lack of vocabulary; number two, sound deafness; number three, not understanding linked words; number four, brain freeze; and number five, unfamiliar accents and dialects. Now that we've got those five reasons identified, let's talk about how we can fix this listening comprehension problem once and for all.

Let's first talk about how to tackle the issue of vocabulary. That was the first thing we identified as a reason that you may struggle with listening skills in Spanish. So, first you'll want to change the way you think about learning vocabulary. Instead of just trying to memorize word frequency list. It's better to learn words in context. So what this means is you'll need to find authentic audio in Spanish that's spoken by native Spanish speakers, and it's really helpful if you can find that audio with an accurate transcript.

You might also want to change the way you study vocabulary. So, instead of just making flashcards with individual words, it's much better if you note complete phrases and examples of how to use the word in context. Now if you can make your example a little bit silly or funny or have some type of image associated with it that stands out, that's better. But you do want it to be a practical use of the word that will help you with the context. But these are things that'll help them stand out in your memory in the long term. So when you go back to review your vocabulary, you really want to have an idea of how it should be used. So this context also helps jog your memory, which helps with recalling the vocabulary later when you hear it.

Another thing you'll want to do is to learn common phrases. So, like I mentioned earlier, if you've come across a phrase that you're not familiar with, you'll completely get lost and you won't be following what's going on when you're listening to spoken Spanish. So it's really important to become familiar with the most common Spanish phrases and the idiomatic expressions that you'll probably hear a lot from native speakers. This is going to keep you from getting confused and you won't lose the context while you're listening to longer stretches of speech. And most importantly, for listening comprehension, you should review vocabulary with audio to avoid what I call"your inner gringo voice" from destroying your listening skills. Often when we're just reading in Spanish, we're reading along with our internal voice. Some of us would have read with a little voice in our heads and unfortunately, this voice probably is riddled with pronunciation errors and mistakes. That's why when you're learning new words, it's critical to hear how the word is supposed to sound first. So you get the sounds, syllable stresses, and intonation recorded in your brain properly. This will make learning vocabulary so much more effective and your ears will be much more likely to understand what they're hearing when you come across that word, again, spoken by a native Spanish speaker. Now to do this, you can use a site like" forvo" or"rhino spike" and you can actually hear native Spanish speakers repeating different words and phrases that have been requested by the community. And you can even post your own texts that you'd like someone to record for you, so you can hear how a word or phrase is pronounced. Now usually you'll also have to contribute to these communities by providing some English recordings as well, in response to other users requests. And that's just sort of the way that you get to get your personal requests answered as well.

But if you don't want to wait for that, another idea is to ask your tutor or a language exchange partner to record a quick MP3 for you with the list of words and their example phrases. This will create your own personalized listening comprehension resource that you can listen to while you're in the car or while you're going for a walk and it'll have content that's relevant to you.

That can be a great way to practice listening to spoken Spanish, to really start to train your ear for the language. This is a great technique that I've used before for myself and also for my son when I needed to get some more child appropriate phrases that he needed to say. I got an MP3 file created and it's something we can listen to in the car. And these can be pretty short. You can maybe include five to 10 phrases and their examples.

Give specific instructions for how you'd like it recorded. I usually recommend having them record the word once or twice, repeating it slower and then giving the example and repeating the word again. So however it works best for you, but just make sure you're very clear with what you want recorded. So it's a really powerful way to practice your listening comprehension and also improve your vocabulary at the same time.

Okay, so that's all I have time for in this episode, but we are not done. If you'd like to hear the rest of my Spanish listening comprehension tips, I'll explain more in my workshop how to train your ear to understand the fast pace of spoken Spanish. And you can sign up for that workshop completely free. Now it's online, but it will only be available for a short time. So if you're thinking about improving your Spanish listening skills, now is the time to sign up. Just go to learnSpanishconsalsa.com/listen, that's learnSpanishconsalsa.com/listen and you'll get immediate access to the free online workshop.

I'm going to go further into these solutions and address all five of those listening comprehension problems that I talked about today and I'll give you some practical steps that you can implement right away to start improving your ability to hear and understand spoken Spanish. So if this sounds like something you're interested in, check out learnSpanishconsalsa.com/listen listen and sign up for the free workshop.

That is it for this episode of Learn Spanish con Salsa. I hope exploring these five reasons you have trouble understanding native Spanish speakers, has given you some insight into why it can be a struggle to keep up with spoken Spanish and hopefully you've got some ideas now for how you can begin to tackle this hurdle to Spanish fluency. After all, if you truly want to be fluent in Spanish, you're going to have to be able to understand normal pace speech from native Spanish speakers. I hope today's episode is always has taken you one step closer from beginner to bilingual.¡Adiós!

Thank you for listening to the Learn Spanish con Salsa Podcast at learnSpanishconsalsa.com.