16. The English You Never Hear in Class

Star-Spangled Stories. Article 16.

The English You Never Hear in Class

Why do we know all the words and still not understand a native speaker?

Between the textbook and an ordinary conversation, English does not change its vocabulary. What changes most is the way it links familiar words together.

A sentence has no spaces between words

When we read I want to see it, our eyes clearly separate each word. But sound is not cut into separate boxes like this. In natural speech, sounds run into each other, some are shortened and others adapt to the sounds next to them.

It is especially tricky for students that they usually know the dictionary pronunciation of every word. But in a real conversation they hear connected speech. Not being able to separate the sounds immediately is therefore not the same as poor vocabulary.

Words that almost disappear: weak forms

English mainly stresses content words: nouns, main verbs, adjectives and important adverbs. Short grammatical words like to, a, of, and, can or have often lose their stress and are pronounced in a weakened form.

Look at the difference between I can SWIM /aɪ kən swɪm/ and Yes, I CAN /jes aɪ kæn/. In the first sentence can is an ordinary auxiliary verb; in the second it carries the contrast and can get its full pronunciation. It is not "lazy English", but the normal alternation of stress and no stress.

Schwa: a small vowel with a big role

The symbol /ə/ is called schwa and stands for a very common reduced vowel. It appears in many unstressed syllables. In some pronunciations, the phrase a cup of tea sounds roughly like /ə ˈkʌp əv ˈtiː/.

A Czech student may feel that the speaker left out half the sentence. In fact it is a natural distinction between the more and less important parts of the message. Pronunciation is not the same everywhere, either; it depends on the region, the speed, the style and what the speaker wants to stress.

Linking, assimilation and elision

Linking means joining sounds across the boundary between words. In an apple we hear the /n/ run smoothly into the following vowel. In go out, a gliding /w/ sound can appear between the vowels; it is not a new written letter.

Assimilation means that a sound becomes more like the next sound. In green park, the /n/ before /p/ can sound like /m/: roughly "greem park". Elision means leaving a sound out: in a fast next day, the /t/ may not be clearly heard. These are tendencies, not something every speaker must do.

Wanna and gonna: a different spelling, not new grammar

The forms wanna and gonna record certain common reductions of want to and going to. We meet them in subtitles, songs and informal transcripts. But the written form wanna is not a universal replacement for every want to; the pronunciation and the use depend on the particular grammatical structure.

For a maturita essay or a work email, the standard spelling want to, going to is safer. For listening, on the other hand, it is useful to know that not every to sounds like a clean /tuː/. The goal is not to copy every reduction, but to learn to recognize it.

How to train your ear: three listenings instead of ten translations

First play a short sentence without the transcript and mark the words with the strongest stress. Then read the transcript and notice the words you "did not hear". Finally, play the recording again and imitate the rhythm of the whole sentence, not sound by sound.

Start with stretches of five to ten seconds. BBC Learning English – Tim's Pronunciation Workshop and the British Council materials on weak forms are very useful. The video about English rhythm from the previous article is an ideal addition. When you start listening for weak forms, you will find that native speakers do not leave out most words: they just pronounce them differently from what a textbook transcription expects.