Why can't I understand REAL people in my target language?

Learn how to teach yourself a language with our course: refold.link/te...
Have questions about language learning? Ethan and Ben have the answers! In this clip, they tackle the question: "Why can I understand Spanish podcasts, but not people in real life?"
This is a common phenomenon. You can understand native media, TV, KZbin videos, and podcasts clearly-but the moment you try to listen to people in real life, it's like you've never heard the language at all! What's going on? Are your ears broken, or is there something else at play? Tune in to find out!
Want your question answered LIVE on stream? Submit your questions in the official Refold Discord before the next stream airs! Ben and Ethan will answer the questions with the most upvotes on the last Thursday of the month!
👉 Ask your questions: refold.la/join
👉 Teach Yourself a Language Course: refold.link/te...
------
Refold is a company dedicated to helping language learners achieve their goals. We think it's crazy that only 1% of language learners achieve their dreams, we're here to change that.
Looking for structured guidance on your language journey?
Check out our Teach Yourself a Language course. Complete with 30 days of immersive video instruction, assignments, and hand-picked resources, we provide you with everything you need to become the master of your own language journey!
👉 Get started today: refold.link/te...
☆☆ Read our FREE guide ☆☆
🗺️ Achieve true fluency via immersion with our step-by-step roadmap.
🔗 www.refold.la/
☆☆ Vocabulary Decks ☆☆
💬 Learn the most common 1k words with example sentences and native audio.
🔗 refold.la/decks
☆☆ Refold Community ☆☆
🗣️ Wanna talk about language learning? Chat with the 30,000 learners in our Discord!
🔗 refold.la/join

[@lexica510]

The "careful speech" idea seems to point to one reason that flash cards can only be so helpful - even if the examples are recorded by native speakers, the pronunciation still isn't the way you'll actually hear it in speech.

[@stevencarr4002]

Especially, IMO, in English, where you will hear a lot of weak forms in everyday speech , and contractions like 'Waddya gonna do?' for 'What are you going to do?' You can spend all day looking for a 'd' in 'What are you' and never find one, but many English speakers will put one in.

[@futurez12]

It's like going from just about being able to grasp elementary school math to bring asked to understand quantum physics. It really does seem like _that_ big of a gap.

[@F61Wolf]

I've been studying Spanish for a number of years now. Extremely frustrated how I can understand tons of media yet street Spanish seems like a completely alien language. I've recently found more KZbin channels that are more amatuer-vlog esque in Spanish (no real "production"), just people lugging around their phone and talking about random things, talking to other people, grabbing groceries, selling elotes from their street stand etc... KZbin also has lots of livestreams in Spanish. Those don't sound like any podcast, video, movie, telenovela I've ever watched. I have integrated it into my active listening rotation. I listen to see how much I understand, then I try again with subtitles. It's really amazing how we are in an era where KZbin can make subtitles for us automatically. I make Anki sentences with the most juicy stuff (staying away from any sentence where I suspect the subtitles could have been wrong). Then I download the audio to my phone for later passive listening. It's early on, but I hope it helps.

[@courtneytaylor1841]

Hi, thanks! Could you recommend some of your favorite channels?

[@madredeus1978]

Deberías de practicar platicando con alguien que sepa español.

[@F61Wolf]

@@courtneytaylor1841 The most two recent videos I enjoyed mining were "Comiendo con mis Papás..." by Yaqui Vlogs y Familia and "Feliz Lunes con Positividad" by Hola Soy Ali! I used a subtitle downloader extension so I could save time copying sentences to Anki. I'm sure there are tons of good channels. Eventually your algorithm will show you random new channels if you scroll through your KZbin Shorts.

[@DoughBrain]

This was incredibly helpful. Thank you so much!

[@modalmixture]

One suggestion is to listen to podcasts that have two or more people chatting with each other, as opposed to one host reading from a script. I also *love* the Easy Languages videos bc you get very spontaneous speech from all kinds of speakers and accents, but it’s all on a known theme, and has good sound quality and transcriptions.

[@Edunow]

For crying out loud! Stop with the ridiculous, inappropriate background musak!

[@Gigusx]

lol

[@Boss_Scaggz]

"they" 🙄

[@donnie1725]

I'm not sure they exact context of this. But if you're pressed about singular they, it has been used in English for over 600 years. Come on, now

[@Boss_Scaggz]

@@donnie1725 No, it absolutely hasn't. It has always been a plural pronoun. You have no idea what you're talking about.

[@Refold]

"The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375, where it appears in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf." www.oed.com/discover/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/?tl=true

[@alenaphoenix]

​@@Boss_Scaggz This is functionally not the case. "They" is the most common and accurate gender-neutral pronoun that exists in the English language, and this is not a particularly new phenomenon. Pushing for less accurate language seems rather selfish, no?

[@Boss_Scaggz]

​@@alenaphoenix Point me to a single piece of great literature that demonstrates this. Thinking that grammatical gender and biological gender (sex) are equivalent is where you have failed. You're watching a video about language learning, yet you're blinded by your anglocentrism. "They" is not a singular pronoun (if it were, we would say things like, "they is"). Think about how this video would go if we were speaking Arabic? The problem is since English lost the vast majority of grammatical gender (the male book, the neuter car, the female penis), anglophones can't perceive these issues, or rather they make issues out of nothing. This is made worse by most people who use the Internet being borderline illiterate in English. What's more, anglophones are essentially "colonizing" other languages now like Spanish with these ideas. This is my opinion and I'm entitled to it. I'm not a prescriptivist, but I can still have an opinion when I perceive a logical fallacy. I'm against politicizing language and I am willing to die on that hill.