You understand written English. You can write an essay or letter that other people can understand
Why Can’t you understand what other people are saying?
Why do they not understand what you are saying?
Written english is made up of 26 letters ( the alphabet) that are combined into separate chunks ( words) that are joined together to make sentences. When the letters are joined together to form a word there is usually only one way to spell it. The meaning of the word can change depending on the words around it, but the meanings are limited for each word.
The dog chased three cats around the tree. A simple sentence that should be easy to listen, and understand and repeat this sentence. Why might you not be able to understand it?
There are 26 letter. 6 vowels. 21 consonants ( y can be both a vowel or a consonant). But there are 44 sounds in spoken English. These sounds are made up with different vowel and consonant combinations. To be understand what a speaker is saying, you need to be able to listen and hear the difference in these 44 sounds. Your native language might not have these sounds. Before you can start speaking the sounds of English you have to be able to hear the sounds of English.
Using our example sentence The dog chased three cats around the tree. If your native language does not have the “th” sound in three, you will not be able to hear the difference between three and tree.
You have to learn and practice the difference between English and your first language.
Once you can hear the differences in the sounds, you are on your way to being able to understand spoken english.
There is a lot of other things to learn such as stress and intonation.
A good interactive guide to the sounds of english can be found here:http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/phonemic-chart
You can also check out my Quizlet page https://quizlet.com/126543845/word-pairs-l-r-listen-and-practice-difference-flash-cards/
