Spoken reductions in American English can be a big obstacle for learners. Reductions exist in all languages. Introducing your learner to reductions can help them to improve their listening skills.
I'm going to talk more about spoken reductions in language in this blog post as I noticed that they were a big obstacle for me to learn English when I first started.
Some people may start wondering what are reductions? Reductions occur in speech when speakers reduce or eliminate certain sounds while speaking. For instance, in American English, "I don't know" is commonly reduced to "I dunno."
Without being aware of the reduced way of saying it, I couldn't even understand a single sentence as easy as "I don't know," which was frustrating when I first started and wasn't used to the reductions.
If reductions are hard for learners to understand, why do we use them? They are a fast and efficient way of speaking and saves a lot of time. They make our speech easier and more convenient. We use reductions because they are more mechanically efficient, not because we are lazy or sloppy.
At the beginning of my English study, I thought that people who spoke with reductions were mumblers. I couldn't catch what they said and I blamed them for not be able to speak in a clear way.
However, I gradually found out everyone spoke in a "mumbled" way sometimes that I wasn't used to. What I used to hearing all the time while learning English in China was clear and complete sentences that were pronounced by audio textbook readers. I realized the difference between the textbook readers and the real local speakers is their way of speaking with reductions. Textbook readers use very few reductions while local speakers use a lot of reductions.
As I moved forward with my English study, I realized there were a certain amount of words that reduced in the same way when being spoken in sentences, so I started to pay attention to them and wrote them down for me to remember. There are four common types of reductions that I had to get used to. I will talk them in my future post.
Why didn't I ever learn about reductions as they were used so common and often in every day conversations? One of the things that I noticed among English teachers and tutors is that they, like the English language tape readers, tend to pronounce every single vowel and consonance clear and complete in sentences when teaching. They want the learners to be able to read and write the words correctly. But in real life we prefer to use reductions more and I think for tutors, one of the ways to improve the learners' listening is to teach them how to understand reductions.
I'm going to talk about my social life in South Dakota which also affected my English learning in my next blog post.
Thanks for reading :)
Shiyi Zhang
ENGLISH AT LARGE
Literacy and Learning for Life
Join the conversation
I'm going to talk more about spoken reductions in language in this blog post as I noticed that they were a big obstacle for me to learn English when I first started.
Some people may start wondering what are reductions? Reductions occur in speech when speakers reduce or eliminate certain sounds while speaking. For instance, in American English, "I don't know" is commonly reduced to "I dunno."
Without being aware of the reduced way of saying it, I couldn't even understand a single sentence as easy as "I don't know," which was frustrating when I first started and wasn't used to the reductions.
If reductions are hard for learners to understand, why do we use them? They are a fast and efficient way of speaking and saves a lot of time. They make our speech easier and more convenient. We use reductions because they are more mechanically efficient, not because we are lazy or sloppy.
At the beginning of my English study, I thought that people who spoke with reductions were mumblers. I couldn't catch what they said and I blamed them for not be able to speak in a clear way.
However, I gradually found out everyone spoke in a "mumbled" way sometimes that I wasn't used to. What I used to hearing all the time while learning English in China was clear and complete sentences that were pronounced by audio textbook readers. I realized the difference between the textbook readers and the real local speakers is their way of speaking with reductions. Textbook readers use very few reductions while local speakers use a lot of reductions.
As I moved forward with my English study, I realized there were a certain amount of words that reduced in the same way when being spoken in sentences, so I started to pay attention to them and wrote them down for me to remember. There are four common types of reductions that I had to get used to. I will talk them in my future post.
Why didn't I ever learn about reductions as they were used so common and often in every day conversations? One of the things that I noticed among English teachers and tutors is that they, like the English language tape readers, tend to pronounce every single vowel and consonance clear and complete in sentences when teaching. They want the learners to be able to read and write the words correctly. But in real life we prefer to use reductions more and I think for tutors, one of the ways to improve the learners' listening is to teach them how to understand reductions.
I'm going to talk about my social life in South Dakota which also affected my English learning in my next blog post.
Thanks for reading :)
Shiyi Zhang
Social Media Intern, English at Large
Suffolk University, MA 2014
ENGLISH AT LARGE
Literacy and Learning for Life
Join the conversation
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