You may have recently seen a video circulating the internet in which you hear a crowd chanting a phrase and, depending on what your eyes see as you listen, you hear the phrase in different ways. Depending on what you are reading at the time, you may hear “Baptism piracy”, “That isn’t my receipt”, or “That is embarrassing.” If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check it out:
That video, and its variants, are all over the internet and so you’ve probably seen it. What you probably haven’t seen is this video about “audio illusion” called the McGurk Effect:
The McGurk effect is when your ears “hear” one sound, but your eyes “see” a different sound being pronounced…and your brain values the input of your eyes over your ears. Go ahead and watch the video, it’s fascinating—even though you know the sound hasn’t changed, you still hear the sound that your eyes are telling you is being made. It’s absolutely fascinating.
Why do I bring this up on a blog about surviving and thriving as an expat? Because both videos helpfully illustrate how we often hear wrong. In order to learn a language, though, we have to hear correctly. Thus, the first task of learning a language is learning to hear.
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Why you hear wrong
We rarely think about this, but the words that we hear in our brains are not actually the words that others speak. There’s a lot that happens “behind the scenes” that turn sounds in the air into words in our heads.
How we hear
Without digging into the fascinating weeds of how humans hear, these are the steps of how we hear a sound:
- A sound wave enters the outer ear and impacts the eardrum.
- The eardrum vibrates because of these sound waves and transmits these vibrations to the bones in your inner ear.
- These bones, in turn, send the vibrations to the cochlea in your ear, which is filled with fluid.
- The vibrations cause the fluid to move and microscopic things like hairs move in response to the vibrations.
- Those hairs bend and move and, as they do, channels open up, chemicals rush in, and an electrical signal is created.
- That electrical signal is transmitted to the brain and interpreted by the brain as a “word.”
Even if all your body is working correctly, you don’t actually hear sound waves. What you hear is your brain’s interpretation of electrical signals created by hair movement inside fluid that has received a vibration from bones that, in turn, received it from an eardrum which received the sound waves through your outer ear. If any of those parts of the process breaks down, you won’t hear accurately or at all.
But even if everything is working perfectly, notice the key part of the last step: your brain interprets those electrical signals as words. And that interpretation can easily be inaccurate. Because typical brains give greater importance to visual electrical signals than auditory signals, what you see can easily influence and even change what you hear, as those videos above illustrate.
Interpreting what we hear
It’s not just seeing, though, that can mess up our hearing. What our brains expect to hear and what they’re used to hearing also influences the interpretation of what we hear. This reality hit the news a few years ago where a Professor at University of Southern California used a Mandarin disfluency (like “uh” or “um”) that is similar to a racial slur in the US. What he said wasn’t the English word, but what people heard was not the Chinese word because there is no word in English that is the same sound as that Chinese word. Instead, what people in the US heard was the English word closest to the Chinese word — and it happened to be a racial slur.
You hear your brain’s interpretation of sounds, not the sounds themselves.
You don’t hear sounds in their “true” form; you hear your brain’s interpretation of those sounds, and your brain interprets sounds according to what it is used to hearing both phonetically and culturally.
How your brain misinterprets sounds
Your brain is constantly receiving sensory data, and most of it is ignored as unimportant. Your brain has learned, over time, to discard what is unimportant and focus on what matters. However, what “matters” and what is “unimportant” are highly dependent upon what language we’ve heard frequently.
Linguist Gabriel Wyner, in his excellent book Fluent Forever, helpfully illustrates why this is the case with the example of how US American and Japanese people hear “L” and “R” sounds:
US American brains hear these sounds as distinct and, since the different sounds influence meaning (e.g. low v. row), our brains have retained this distinction and hear it quite well as two separate consonants: L and R.
Japanese people, on the other hand, hear these sounds and their brains interpret them as one consonant that isn’t quite an L and isn’t quite an R. It’s a different consonant altogether. And while their brains could have learned to distinguish L and R sounds, that distinction isn’t meaningful and so brains efficiency “lump” those sounds together.
What this means is that when US Americans hear Japanese, they hear either an L or an R, but not what the Japanese sound actually is. In contrast, Japanese people hearing English have difficulty distinguishing between L sounds and R sounds because they’re not used to hearing those as distinct sounds. In either case, our brains have efficiently learned to interpret sounds according to usage and what makes a difference for meaning in our respective languages.
But when you’re learning a new language, all that efficient “grouping” and distinguishing go out the window. Sound distinctions that used to matter in your mother language no longer matter in your host language and your host language uses sounds you’ve never heard before and makes distinctions that you’ve never needed to hear before.
We don’t actually hear what others are saying. We hear our brain’s interpretation of what our brain expects to hear based on what it’s used to hearing. That’s served us well with our native language; it horribly misleads us when learning another language.
The first task of language learning, then, is actually learning to hear.
The first task of language learning, then, is actually learning to hear.
How to learn to hear again
We never thought about how we hear sounds in our native language, but if you’re learning a second (or third or twentieth) language, you’ll have to consciously learn to hear again. Here are some practical strategies to help you learn to hear.
1. Be silent at first
When people begin learning a language, one of the most natural impulses is to try to mimic the words that other people are saying. This is understandable, but if you think of this mimicry in light of what we just learned about hearing, you’ll quickly realize why it can be unhelpful. You are never mimicking what others are saying, because what you are hearing isn’t what others people are saying. You are, instead, mimicking what you hear people saying, and what you hear isn’t what they’re actually saying. Your mimicry will never be right until you can hear what people are actually saying.
A better approach is to consciously imitate how babies learn a language: listen a LOT before you start to speak. Kids listen for thousands of hours before they start speaking. Now, as an adult, you don’t have to wait that long—you are aware of what’s going on and have a developed brain, after all—but it’s not a bad idea to focus on listening and responding for the first 30 hours or so of your language-learning experience. Your brain very quickly will begin to process new sounds and sound distinctions and, slowly, gradually, you’ll be able to hear accurately and thus have a shot at speaking accurately.
2. Practice listening to minimal pairs
What linguists call “minimal pairs” are a “pair” of words or sounds that are different to a native speaker, but which you have trouble distinguishing. So, for example, if you want to practice minimal pairs with “L” and “R” sounds, then here are some examples: pray/play, grass/glass, crown/clown, right/light, etc
The way you want to do this exercise is to have your teacher/language helper randomly speak one of the minimal pair halves and you have to respond to indicate which pair it is (e.g. pointing to an “L” or “R” on table, putting it in a certain pile, etc.). For this exercise, you want your language helper to give you immediate and visual feedback on your responses. That feedback will help your brain learn to hear again. This video can help you get an idea of what this activity can look like.
A great technique to help you hear and reinforce that hearing, is to have your helper say every sound that you’ve already sorted in the pile, and then the new sound that you think belongs in the pile. That repetition reinforces the sounds and can help you identify if the new sound is a true fit or not.
Do this in your own private study by having a native speaker record a bunch of minimal pairs, mix them up randomly, and load them into a flashcard program with the audio on one side and the answer on the other.
3. Practice minimal pairs speaking
Once you have a pretty good handle on hearing the differences between minimal pairs–which could after weeks of practice–now is the time to take the next step and try to speak the minimal pairs. Don’t shortchange the listening exercises above, though, and jump straight to this speaking practice. Why? Because you can’t pronounce something that you can’t hear. Until you can hear clearly the sounds in the new language, your attempts to speak them will always be flawed.
You can’t pronounce something that you can’t hear.
This is horrendously difficult and may test your patience, so make sure to be aware of your affective filter and the ZPD and don’t overdo it.
Here’s two ways to use minimal pairs to help you speak better:
Exercise 1
Find a minimal pair or sound that gives you trouble and have your language helper say it, then repeat it. You probably won’t get it exactly right and, even if your language helper says they understand you, keep going with this exercise because you can improve it.
Now, say the word two different ways, changing how you say it, and ask your helper which one sounds better. Some phonetics training here will be helpful here, but you can adjust tongue placement (where your tongue touches your teeth, roof of your mouth, etc.), tongue height (how high your tongue is in your mouth), roundedness (whether your lips are flat or pursed like you’re kissing), etc. Change how you say it and listen to which one your language helper prefers.
Keep changing how you say the word until it sounds better and better to your language helper. Take notes of what you’ve done so you can practice at home.
BTW, sometimes a native speaker may say they don’t hear a difference between two versions of how you said a word. That’s great to know, as it means you don’t have to be as precise in that variable because, like L and R for Japanese people, they don’t distinguish between those two sounds.
Exercise 2
Now that you know, roughly, how to say a difficult sound/word, practice back-to-back with minimal pairs with your language helper. Make up cards with the two different pairs, show them to your language helper, say one of the sounds, and have your language helper point to the sound they heard. If you got it right, they’ll hear the same sound that you intended. If you get it wrong, they’ll point to a sound you didn’t intend to say and you can know for sure if you’ve gotten it right or not.
See more tips on learning to speak again in: Phonetic Finesse: The Art of Being Understood.
4. Work with a linguist
This is not something everyone can do, but a trained linguist can help you learn how to get your tongue and lips in exactly the right position to produce the sound that locals are making. A good linguist doesn’t even need to be able to speak whatever language you’re learning, as they will be able to reproduce sounds based on a phonetic transcription of the language. Just search [language name] + “phonetic transcription” and share it with the linguist. He or she will be able to figure out how to get the sounds exactly right.
5. Listen, listen, listen
The way you learned to hear your native language is the same way your brain will eventually learn to hear whatever language you’re learning: listen, listen, listen, and listen some more. It helps if you understand what you’re listening to through high degrees of context (see Context is King), but even if you don’t understand what you’re hearing, listening will help your brain acclimate to the new sounds of your host language so that it can hear it more accurately. Listen, listen, listen.
And remember to sleep too because it is in dream sleep that your brain processes language information, including these sound distinctions. See Pillow Talk: How Sleep Solidifies Language Learning.
Conclusion
Learning to hear is the foundational step in acquiring any new language. By understanding how our brains interpret sounds and recognizing the ways in which visual cues and expectations can influence our hearing, we can better equip ourselves to overcome these challenges. Practical strategies such as being silent initially, practicing with minimal pairs, and seeking the help of a linguist can significantly improve our ability to hear and reproduce new sounds accurately. Consistent listening and patience are key, as the process of rewiring our auditory perceptions takes time and effort. Embrace the journey of learning to hear, and you’ll find yourself well on your way to mastering a new language.
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