hello I'm Julian Northbrook from doing
english.com why is it possible to
understand one type of English perfectly
but then really struggled to listen to
another I'm moving out of this apartment
tomorrow and into a new one so it's time
to pack up you know I'm gonna kind of
miss this quintessential New York yard
view so one of my extraordinary English
speakers members asked me a good
question about one of the listening
exercises that we use that is an
exercise for developing listening skills
she said she's been doing the exercise a
lot and she's basically got to the point
where she can understand conversational
English perfectly but then when it comes
to things like BBC news broadcasts she
really struggles and she can't keep up
or follow what's being said does this
mean she just needed to do the exercise
more or is there a deeper other
underlying problem now the answer to
this question really is the latter by
way of analogy think of music somebody
who is really good at playing classical
piano might not necessarily be good at
playing a rock guitar and somebody good
at playing rock may not necessarily be
good at jazz they are different styles
of music what we call different genres
of music conversational English is very
very different to news broadcast in
newspaper English and there is very very
little overlap between the two Peabody
who came to my master English fast
QuickStart event in Taipei last year
will remember me showing them the data
from an analysis that I did of the
differences between conversational
English and news broadcast English
basically I showed two graphs of the 500
most common chunks in those two
different types of English and I showed
that really only about 3 percent of
those chunks actually appear in both
types it's a very very small number of
items that are actually used in both
conversation and in the news and what
this therefore means is that studying
conversation will not automatically
translate into being good at
understanding the news and studying the
news will not translate into you being
good at conversation this is a big
mistake I see again and
again and again people are studying the
newspaper but what is their goal to
speak better and conversation
well the assumption is is that English
is English is English but it's simply
not true the language you are learning
from studying a newspaper or news
broadcast is totally different to the
language you are going to need and hear
in conversation therefore you've got to
be using materials that are tailored
specifically to the things you actually
want to do want to get good at the news
that's what you need to study one get
good at conversation that's what you
need to study and it's the same for any
other type of English now I realize this
is a pretty quick explanation but if you
want a deeper one that goes into well
more detail head over to doing English
comm slash free training and I will
teach you the five key changes that you
need to make to see rapid progress in
improving your English speaking and as
part of that I am going to talk in
detail about what I've just talked about
here the materials that you use the role
of materials and why you need to be
matching them to the things that you
want to do cool cool
I'll see you on the other side and this
is me Judy northbrook's signing out from
this video bye bye