{"id":740,"date":"2022-01-12T22:22:07","date_gmt":"2022-01-12T22:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.yabla.com\/yabla-blog\/?p=740"},"modified":"2026-02-10T17:39:59","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T17:39:59","slug":"how-to-understand-native-speakers-in-other-languages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.yabla.com\/yabla-blog\/how-to-understand-native-speakers-in-other-languages\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Understand Native Speakers in Other Languages"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I just can\u2019t understand when they talk. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can read fine \u2014 but forget it, as soon as someone starts speaking, I\u2019m lost. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can\u2019t figure out how to understand native speakers. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I should be able to understand native speakers, but I can\u2019t. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyone who\u2019s ever learned a language is familiar with this scenario. They can read. They can write. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They can watch a movie in their target language \u2014 as long as it\u2019s subtitled. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As soon as they need to rely on their listening abilities, though, they\u2019re lost. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem is that this compounds a common problem: It\u2019s simply harder for most people to understand a foreign language when it\u2019s spoken than when it\u2019s written out. That\u2019s made more difficult by the fact that reading is usually a private act \u2014 but listening happens in company with other people. That means other people are waiting for you to understand what they\u2019ve just said \u2014 which ups your stress level. According to no less august an institution than the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, stress is one of the biggest problems encountered when learning a language. Get stressed out and your learning abilities tighten up. And chances are, if a new landlord just gave you a speech about which circuit breaker is yours and which is the one you are never, ever supposed to touch \u2014 yeah, you might be pretty stressed out, especially after a late-night session at a crypto casino<\/a> left you reeling from unexpected losses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scribe is for people who can\u2019t understand native speakers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scribe is a modern update on the centuries-old language instruction tool known as dictation training. Someone speaks and you listen \u2014 and you listen so well that you write down what you\u2019ve just heard. In a way, it\u2019s what we\u2019d all like to do when we can\u2019t understand someone in their native language: listen to what they\u2019ve said over and over again, until we can figure out what we\u2019ve just heard. (This process is made up of phonemic awareness and lexical segmentation \u2014 basically, gaining the ability to understand the unfamiliar sounds you\u2019ve heard as well as the ability to understand where one word stops and another one begins). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Scribe, you can listen to the text of a given video ad infinitum \u2014 or ad nauseum. (Unless you have a very <\/em>patient language partner, you\u2019ll find this sort of perpetual-rewind hard to locate outside of Scribe.) Play it once or 50 times, at regular speed or slowed down. Keep listening, and listen well, and you\u2019ll begin to suss out different words. That\u2019s dictation training. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yabla\u2019s Scribe makes this kind of practice easy. As you watch \u2014 and listen to \u2014 each video, you\u2019re tasked with filling in the blank spaces beneath it, Hangman-style. Any missing accents? You\u2019ll need to figure out where those go. Any weird \u201cum\u201d-style words \u2014 the bens, the ugh, the uhs, the heins? You\u2019ll need to understand those words\/utterances and spell them correctly in order to move on to the next section of the video. The good news is that you can try as many times as you like \u2014 you\u2019ll never flunk out. Get it right faster, and you\u2019ll earn extra points, which will make a difference if you\u2019re paying attention to the Leaderboards. If you\u2019re just there for the skill building, though, you can take your time and totally focus on distinguishing an \u201con\u201d from an \u201cin\u201d from an \u201cen\u201d \u2014 or whatever it is in your target language that trips up all the newbies (and many of the vets, too.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are a lot of ways to learn to understand native speakers. Among the best, though, the options are limited to those that are expensive (see: extremely patient teachers) or possibly more all-encompassing than you can handle (see: moving to a small corner of the country where your language is spoken, and ensuring that you never speak anything but that language to anyone, even if they\u2019d prefer to speak their pretty good English rather than your beginner-level take on their native tongue.) Scribe is inexpensive, fun, and effective. Outside a very patient partner, who falls in love you with a little more with each pronunciation error, it\u2019s quite possibly the best option on the planet for learning to understand native speakers. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just can\u2019t understand when they talk.  I can read fine \u2014 but forget it, as soon as someone starts speaking, I\u2019m lost.  I can\u2019t figure out how to understand native speakers.  I should be able to understand native speakers, but I can\u2019t.  Anyone who\u2019s ever learned a language is familiar with this scenario. They can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":786,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yabla.com\/yabla-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yabla.com\/yabla-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yabla.com\/yabla-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yabla.com\/yabla-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yabla.com\/yabla-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=740"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.yabla.com\/yabla-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1015,"href":"https:\/\/www.yabla.com\/yabla-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740\/revisions\/1015"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yabla.com\/yabla-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yabla.com\/yabla-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yabla.com\/yabla-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yabla.com\/yabla-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}