Today, you’re going to learn how to understand someone when they speak English quickly. Here’s the trick: When listening to someone speak, it’s important to focus on what words are important. But how do you know what words are important if they’re speaking quickly? I’ll tell you how in today’s episode.

Let’s start here: Have you ever been listening to an English speaker and totally did not understand anything they were saying because you thought they were talking too quickly? Have you ever missed 10 minutes of conversation because you just didn’t know what was happening anymore? Then you’re just staring at the person with a big smile, and they don’t even know that you can’t understand them?

That situation happens a lot for second language learners, actually. I’ve definitely had this problem when listening to my second language of Spanish. It can be really embarrassing to stop understanding what someone is saying. You can feel confused and alone, and you can become frustrated quickly. You probably try to focus really hard to get back in the conversation. So you start focusing on easy words you can understand like “is” or “the”, but it’s just too difficult to understand the meaning from those easy words.

This is a normal problem to have, but I also know there is a solution. The secret to amazing listening skills is this: You have to pay attention to the right words.

What are the right words?

Well, let me start by tell you about the difference between function words and content words.

What are content words?

Content words are the most important words. They carry the meaning of the sentence. Content words are words like boss, school, drive, and beautiful. These words are powerful because they give sentences their meaning.

I want you to imagine this with me: You’re at a concert. There are 10,000 people all around you. But in that crowd of 10,000 people, who do you look at during the concert? You look at the rock star with the microphone. Why? Because the singer is doing the entertaining. The singer is the only voice that really matters during a concert. The crowd is wonderful to create context for what the singer is doing, but it’s the rock star whose voice matters most.

What does that have to do with content and grammar words? Content words are the rock stars of a sentence. They are the words you should pay attention to. You shouldn’t only be looking at the crowd (aka function words, which we’ll talk about next). You should be paying attention to the rock star content words.

Content words are usually nouns, verbs, adjectives, and sometime adverbs. Here are some examples of content words: play, driving, China, slow, plants, waited. Do you see how each of these words has meaning?

We will talk about several more examples of content words, but first let’s talk about function words.

What are function words?

Think of function words like the crowd at a concert. They support the rock star, but they aren’t the ones with the microphone. Both the rock star and a great crowd are necessary for a good concert, but the content words should be the ones you’re paying attention to. Function words are usually small words like to, on, will, is, and about. Function words can be prepositions like “before” and “at”. Function words can be helping verbs like “is” and “were”. Function words can be articles, like “a”, “an”, and “the”. Function words can be conjunctions like “and”, “or”, or “though”.

Function words are important, because they give us more specific detail about the main idea of a sentence. But function words are not the main idea by themselves. Function words do not usually carry much meaning. They just hold all the content words together.

So what do content words and function words relate to listening skills? Remember how easy it is to get lost in conversation? What’s the secret to understanding fast speech?

The secret to understanding English speakers is focusing on the content words, not the function words.

Let me give you an example sentence. “My sister went to Jamaica in June.”

Which words are the content words? Hopefully you know that the content words for that sentence are “sister”, “went”, “Jamaica”, and “June”. That means the function words are “my”, “to”, and “in”.

Listen as I say only the content words for this sentence: “sister”, “went”, “Jamaica”, “June”. Did you understand the general meaning? Sure you did!

Now listen as I only say the function words for this sentence: “my”, “to”, “in”. Did you understand the real meaning of the sentence? No way!

Why? Because function words mainly just carry grammar and syntax, and they don’t carry meaning.

When you’re listening to someone, you should listen for content words.

Here’s the big question: How do you know which words are content words and which words are function words while you’re listening?

You will know when a word is an important content word, because English speakers stress content words. That means they say content words louder, higher, and clearer.

Listen again as I say this sentence “My sister went to Jamaica in June.” Did you notice that I said “sister”, “Jamaica”, and “June” higher and louder? Listen again. “My sister went to Jamaica in June.” Those content words are higher in pitch and a little louder. They are the rock stars of the sentence, so I made sure to give them the microphone.

So try out this secret. Pay attention to when a speaker says something louder and higher. That will tell you what the content words are. You can ignore function words if you get lost in a conversation. Just jump back in by listening for those rock star content words.

Happy learning!

P.S. If you want to dramatically improve your pronunciation skills, take my latest course Clear English Pronunciation. People are changing their lives by taking this course! The results have been dramatic. Simply visit StudyWithAndrea.com/speak to learn more.