Why can’t you understand native English speakers?
You have taken English classes for many years. You have passed all your tests with great marks. You can talk with your classmates and teachers without any problems.
Why do you have trouble communicating with native speakers?
Many of my students who come to me are great at reading and writing english. They understand grammar and how to use different tenses and complex sentences. They have memorized a large vocabulary.
With all this knowledge they still have great difficulty with listening and speaking. The main problem is they don’t understand the stress structure of spoken english.
Native speakers, when listening to a sentence, do not listen to every word. They have learned that there are only a few important words or phrases in a sentence, and the rest of the words provide context or old information.
How do they know which words are important? By the stress placed on those words.
Communicating in Spoken english depends on factors that are not written on any pages. These include stress by pitch or intonation, stress by shortening and lengthen vowels, rhythm, and the understanding and use of the schwa sound.
To communicate in english with native speakers you need to learn how to listen to these stress patterns and how and when to use them.
The first step is to listen to podcasts or other material spoken by English speakers. Choose something that isn’t for ESL learners. Listen to how the speakers speak. Listen to the tone. Listen to the rhythm. This will give you a good start to learning how to communicate better with spoken English.
I recommend http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens as a great place to listen to good interviews.
In following articles I will explore the use of stress in more detail. Let me know if you want to learn more.