Lesson 5: How To Train Flow
Languages can be very large and diverse in their meaning, but they will always be relatively simple and repetitive in their sound.
Take English as an example: over time it has amassed over 1 million words, but these words are all constructed with the same 30 something consonant and vowel sounds, occurring in the same few hundred syllable combinations.
Also, these syllables are always arranged in the same few dozen rhythmic and intonation structures.
Since it requires almost no effort to mimic the sounds, it doesn’t take much energy for you to pick up new words and expressions from simply listening to people speak English.
The reason you can process these sounds so easily is because you’ve heard them hundreds of millions of times already and are used to them. In fact, you have become so accustomed to these sounds that you don’t even need to hear all of them to understand the meaning. For example, in the recording below, I say something in English while holding an apple between my teeth:
Chances are that you understood what I was saying, even though the apple distorted my articulation of all the phonemes. This is because you could use the rhythm and intonation to fill in the blanks.
In the next recording, I actually digitally edit the track to silence out random syllables.
Once again, you should have been able to understand this phrase even though the sound was incomplete. That’s because we never focus on every single sound nuance in the first place.
Instead, our brains just focus on the most important signals, then they fill in the blanks based on familiar sound patterns.
- When I talk about the “The Flow” of a given language, I’m talking about its recurring rhythmic, phonemic and intonation patterns.
- When I talk about a person “Feeling the Flow” of a given language, I’m talking about his ability to use an internalized mastery of these sound patterns to process speech effortlessly.
Consider the fact that the average English conversation speed is a remarkable 30 phonemes per second! If our brains hadn’t evolved a system for filtering out most of that acoustic information, they would overload and pop like water balloons before the speaker even finished his sentence!
Therefore, it’s no exaggeration to say that Feeling the Flow of a language is vital to oral communication.
The Problem with Foreign Language Flows
Each language has its own set of sound patterns or Flow. Therefore, native speakers of each language have their own sets of hearing and speaking patterns to fill in the blanks with.
As someone with English hearing/speaking patterns, you were able to fill in the blanks of the distorted recordings above and understand the meaning.
But if you were a native Spanish speaker, you would fill in these blanks differently and completely lose the meaning.
In other words, our native Flows will always clash with our target language flows.
- This is why we stutter in foreign languages and speak with accents.
- This is why it’s difficult to mimic foreign language grammar structures.
- This is why we can’t understand native speakers when they talk “too fast” (aka at normal speeds)
There is, however, a way to overcome this clashing of Flows: Training.
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The same way you can train yourself to do a handstand, juggle tennis balls, or play a melody on the piano, you can train yourself to hear and articulate the sound patterns of a foreign language. It’s just a question of of sticking to the right training program… |