slows their speech, making it painful and unnatural for the listener. Even
when they manage to speak correctly, they kill natural communication by
being so slow and hesitant.
What Real English Sounds Like
Real English conversation is tricky. Real conversation isn’t like what you
learned in school. In fact, it often feels totally different.
One key difference is the fact that real speech very rarely uses full or
“grammatically correct” sentences. Of course, in school, those are the only
kinds of sentences you learned. You learned about Subject-Verb-Object. You
learned to avoid sentence fragments.
Then you hear a real English conversation with real native speakers and
you discover that they MOSTLY use sentence fragments!
This is something I immediately noticed when I read the transcripts for
some of our Effortless English™ lessons. I knew that most of us tend to use
a lot of fragments in normal speech, but even I was surprised at just how
often we do this.
In fact, we constantly speak in partial sentences. We constantly use “run
on” sentences. We constantly interrupt our own sentences and change our
thoughts in the middle of speaking. A transcript of a real conversation – that
is, a totally spontaneous and natural conversation – is completely different
than anything you will find in a textbook.
And that is only one difference – there are many other major differences
between real English conversations and textbook conversations or so-called
“dialogues.”
This helps to explain why even “advanced” English students have such
trouble when they come to the United States. While these students may have
good individual vocabulary (usually formal), they have absolutely no
exposure to real spoken English. In school they learned how people “should”
speak English – but what they really needed to learn is how people actually
DO speak English.
