“I Don’t Understand Anything” - Why You Can’t Understand Fast Speech [and How to Fix it]
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This article was last updated on March 31st 2025
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“How can I understand fast-talking native speakers?”
When we’re learning a new language we’re quickly faced with the problem that native, everyday speech is so difficult to follow. It feels like our brains and ears are being peppered by a machine gun. The words are thrown at us at a rate where it feels impossible to keep up. Understanding the words feels like trying to catch a fly with chopsticks (like Daniel-san in The Karate Kid).
Feels familiar? If so, you’re in good company. We all have to face this when learning a new language and it’s one of the most frustrating things in language learning! Native speakers speak at break-neck speed and make it sound so easy, but for us—it’s not.
Comprehending rapid speech is one of the most important keys in our target language. Because when we can understand fast-talking natives, it opens up a world of content to enjoy and meaningful conversations we’re able to have.
Let’s talk about why you can’t understand fast, native speech—what the issue actually is. Then I’ll offer some practical tips that has helped me over the years to learn to understand several languages—even when they’re spoken quickly.
The Problem: Why it’s So Difficult to Understand Native Speakers
There are several factors that causes you not to understand fast speech. Let’s break down each of the main problems that is making this such a challenge.
1. People speak differently when speaking fast
When people speak fast (which is the way people normally speak) they speak differently than when they speak slow—people drop syllables and slur words together.
Here are some examples of what happens in English (when spoken with an American accent):
“It is going to be” → “Iz gonnabe”
“What are you" → "Whatcha”
"How are you doing" → "Howya doin’" (Joey-style from Friends)
If you’re already at a high level in English, then you probably don’t even think about this. But this blending of sounds is one of the biggest challenges in understanding fast speech!
It could be that you actually know the words people say but you just don’t recognize them. This is because you’re not used to hearing them in their fast and spoken form… yet.
Understanding natural speech is not like building lego blocks—adding one word a time, once after the other. It’s built up by internalizing combinations of two or more words which form fluent speech.
To understand fast speech our ears need to be able to pick up these sets of words and instantly connect them with meaning, something most language apps don’t teach us how to do.
2. Listening is more difficult than reading
When you read, you can take as much time as you need before moving on to the next sentence. But when you listen, you’re at the mercy of the speed of the speaker. Listening is also more concrete since you can see the words in print, while listening has a much more ambiguous nature to it.
Part of what makes listening difficult is also that our pride takes a bit of a hit. If we understand quite well when reading, it feels very discouraging when our comprehension drops significantly to what feels like a beginner level when listening.
It doesn’t mean that your skills are lost, it just means that there’s a gap between your reading and listening ability.
3. There are too many unknown words
At first, it might seem that speed is the main issue. While this plays a role, it’s not the biggest factor. Getting used to the speed does take a bit of time, but it’s relatively quick to get used to compared to many other things, such as building your vocabulary.
Which is exactly the thing. What seems like a “speed issue” is most often a vocabulary issue. There are too many words that you don’t know, which causes overwhelm and this feeling of “it’s too fast!” since it’s too much to process all at once.
You don’t necessarily need to know every single word to understand. Context alone can often help us figure out the meaning, even if we miss a word or two. But if there are too many unfamiliar words, there’s not enough context to fill in the gaps, making comprehending what people say difficult.
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The Solution: How to Fix it and Start Understanding Fast Speech
Listening comprehension is quite a complicated process, however, the solution isn’t.
And there are few things more rewarding in language learning when you’re able to understand fast speech, whether it’s when watching a movie without subtitles or having a conversation with a native speaker. Luckily, with the right strategies you can overcome the challenges in understanding fast, native speech.
These next practical steps will help you decode native speech, and turn your listening from a weakness into a strength.
1. Be okay with NOT understanding
This first step is mostly about attitude and something we just need to get used to—which is to continue listening even when we don’t understand everything.
This can be very challenging at first, but with time you start building up this “tolerance for ambiguity” (a concept I first learned from Matt from Matt vs Japan but that also language pioneer and father of comprehensible input Stephen Kraschen has talked about). The better we’re able to tolerate ambiguity, the less frustrating listening becomes.
This used to be a big problem for me and it seriously hindered my listening comprehension. I thought I needed to understand every single word in order to progress. Because of this, I had a stretch of about two years where I didn’t listen much to Cantonese and it’s definitely my biggest regret in my learning journey.
Then I started listening more—just putting in the minutes and hours, without worrying if I understood of not. The more I did it, the less it bothered me when I didn’t understand. I just continued listening anyway, trying to enjoy what I did understand. My listening ability improved dramatically as a result.
We’re also not ready to learn everything right now, and some things are just too difficult to comprehend at the moment. By going for the low-hanging fruit—what is accessible to us now—the faster we’ll progress. Once we grasp those, some of those harder concepts become more ripe for us to learn. Language learning isn’t a linear process, but there are some things we might need to learn first in order to unlock the things that are currently out of reach.
2. Use a transcript to verify what you heard
Using a transcript—whether in the form of text or subtitles—is super helpful since we’re able to match what we hear with what we see. Like getting the correct answers to the questions of a test we just took.
However, when we’re reading and listening at the same time we’re splitting our attention between the two, with reading tending to take the bulk of our attention. That’s not bad in and of itself, since reading is an amazing way to learn a lot of words. But to truly train your ears it’s important to purely listen, without any text.
Instead, start with listening to the audio and then listen while reading the transcript. Use the transcript to verify what you heard. You’ll completely mishear things at times, and verifying it will help adjust your listening so that what you think you hear, is actually what you hear.
3. Make expanding your vocabulary a priority
As mentioned earlier, a lack of vocabulary is one of the biggest obstacles to our understanding.
If you don’t know the actual words, you often won’t be able to understand, even if you heard the same sentence said slowly. Also, learning new words becomes easier the more words you know since there’s more context to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words.
For example:
If you know 9 out of 10 words, you’re much more likely to be able to guess the meaning of that last word, than if you only know 3 out of 10.
That’s why focusing on expanding your vocabulary is such a crucial thing. The most effective way I’ve found to expand vocabulary is through reading since we’re then exposed to a larger variety of words than in spoken language. My favorite reading tool is LingQ where you can import any text, article, or e-book to grow your vocabulary while reading what you’re truly interested in.
Building up your “known word database” is a long-term process, but reading a little each day will gradually make listening comprehension easier and easier.
Learn more about vocabulary expansion through reading in these posts:
4. Learn phrases, not just separate words
While expanding the amount individual words you know is key, it’s also very important to learn combinations of words. That way, common combinations like “iz gonna be”—that we talked about earlier—is going to be processed like “one thing” rather than each word separately.
This is one of the key reasons why people can effortlessly understand fast speech, and it’s why it’s so important to learn everything in context. It’s one of the reasons why language apps that teach you random vocabulary with no connection to each other—or phrases people don’t even say in everyday life—aren’t helping you.
Instead, by simply using content and material with real native speech—such as what is spoken in TV shows & movies, conversations, podcasts, or vlogs—you’ll pick up many of these phrases.
Once you’ve picked up a particular multiword phrase your brain no longer has to detect every single word. Just by hearing it your mind instantly connects the whole phrase with its meaning.
These combinations are actually pre-rehearsed, even for native speakers, so it’s just a matter of hearing them enough times to get used to them. This is why people are even able to speak fast in the first place—they speak in phrases of multiple words that are strung together, not one word at a time.
5. Listen to what grabs you—skip the boring stuff
It’s been proven that we learn faster when we do what we’re interested in. It makes sense, right? If you’re interested in what you’re listening to, you’ll pay more attention. And the better you pay attention, the faster you learn, while having a good time doing it.
So try to listen to material and content that really captures your attention. Not boring exercises or uninteresting material, but a story, a podcast about a topic your passionate about, or a captivating TV show.
This is harder to do as a beginner, but it gets easier and easier the more your listening develops since it opens up the options of content you’re able to listen to.
The curiosity of wanting to actually hear the messages behind the sounds of the foreign language will boost your learning. Because now you’re not just trying to understand the language for the sake of it, you’re actually wanting to understand what they say because you’re interested in the content.
6. Set a daily routine and let time do the heavy lifting
Once you have the right listening methods in place, it’s just a matter of putting in the time. Time can feel overwhelming if we think of the big end goal because learning a language is a process that usually takes years.
Here’s my tip:
Stop thinking about the end goal altogether. Instead, set a daily listening goal, and set it low. While it’s true that the more you listen, the faster you’ll progress, you want it to be something you can actually accomplish every day. It should be easy enough to do but that also requires you to push yourself juuust a little bit.
Some days will feel easier, some days harder, but having a daily goal will ensure that you put the time in every day, no matter what.
Start with even just 5 mins, and then when that feels easy to do you can increase to 15, 30, and so on. Alternatively, you can have a low goal that you can do every single day, and then a higher stretch goal. I for example currently have a minimum listening goal of 30 minutes in Cantonese, but a stretch goal of 60 minutes (and when I get into the flow, I often do more than this out of pure enjoyment).
Once you get used to having a daily routine of listening, it actually gets really addicting to where it just feels natural to want to do more.
Also, we have a limited capacity each day—whether it’s learning new words or improving our ears’ listening ability—so daily consistency is the most efficient way of learning.
The beauty of having a time-based goal is also that it’s something we actually can control. Things like our level of focus, how fast we progress, and how many words we learn each day are outside of our control. Learning a language—especially improving our listening comprehension—is mostly an intuitive process that our brain takes care of when we’re immersing ourselves in the language—i.e., spending time with it.
Conclusion
Understanding fast colloquial native speech is a challenging task, but more than possible for anyone to learn by using the right strategies.
Developing listening comprehension takes time, so the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll be on your way to understanding your target language.
There’s really no other way to do it other than just throwing yourself in and starting the process to get used to fast speech. The good news? Today is as hard as it’s going to get—it will only get easier from this point!
Listening is also a skill that heavily spills over to being able to speak well. It will make your speaking ability develop much faster and also sound more natural and native-like—because you will have already internalized the way natives speak, making it naturally come out in your own speaking.
Best Resources for Transforming Your Listening
Here are my best recommendations to kickstart your comprehension and transform your listening.
These are two very different courses that will give you the tools you need to understand native speakers' fast speech.
Conversations
Suggested level: Upper Beginner/Lower Intermediate
Price: $197
StoryLearning’s Conversations 1 & 2, created by Olly Richards and StoryLearning, are designed specifically to help you understand fast native speech. If you already have a foundation in the language but struggle with rapid spoken language, this course will bridge that gap.
Conversations uses 2-3 minute chats between native speakers that follow a story over its 20 episodes—and turns them into effective listening comprehension exercises for rapid speech. You’ll get transcriptions, translations, vocabulary lists, and step-by-step guidance on how to improve your listening using these conversations.
Available in 8 languages: Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Chinese (mandarin), Russian, and English.
For ‘Cantonese Conversations’ (only $97) → click here
(a resource I myself used to kick-start my Cantonese listening comprehension)
Level Up Your Listening
Suggested Level: Intermediate and up
Price: $147
Refold’s Level Up Your Listening is the ultimate course to become an expert listener—using any content, in any language! This 28-day program is packed with the most insightful strategies for listening I have ever come across.
It teaches you everything you need to know about listening, including how to train your brain to decode rapid speech (the 3rd week about ‘intensive listening’ is great for this). You'll build a rock-solid listening routine from the ground up, with smart and fun daily assignments that develop key listening habits, skills, and techniques—using Refold’s brilliant app to track your progress.
This course completely transformed my listening—turning it from a frustrating struggle into the most fun part of my language learning! The tools and strategies you’ll learn here will stay with you for months and years to come.
Includes content databases for 10 languages: Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and English.
But you can use the course for any language! I used it for Cantonese—even though it’s not in their database—and got massive breakthrough in my listening game, and even helpful content recommendations from their coaches.
Which Course Should You Choose?
If you want structured listening material + a clear method to follow for 90 days, go with Conversations
If you want to truly master the skill of listening and build the ultimate listening routine using any content, go with Level Up Your Listening.
Both courses are investments in your ability to understand native speakers effortlessly—whether you prefer a structured program with ready-made materials (Conversations) or learn powerful strategies and game-changer tools that you can apply to anything you listen to (Level Up Your Listening).
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