Do you understand native English speakers?

You're in a meeting with some colleagues from around Europe: French, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, British and Irish....who do you understand the least?

I bet the answer is the British and Irish colleagues. Am I right?

So why is that? Well, there are few reasons why you don't understand native English speakers:

1. Vocabulary: people who have grown up speaking English have a wider range of words than people who learn it. According to the Oxford English dictionary, native speakers have a vocabulary of 25,000 - 30,000 words, whereas non-native speakers have an average vocabulary of 200 - 3000 words. Native English-speakers tend to use more "everyday" words and phrases, which are often difficult to understand: expressions, idioms and phrasal verbs.

2. Connected speech: have you ever thought that native English-speakers are eating their words? In fact, they really are! The way English is spoken means that any word that isn't part of the main meaning of a sentence becomes really short and sometimes totally disappears. We also connect words together: any word starting with a vowel is connected to the previous word. hot air is pronounced as hotair. So if you think that you didn't understand because you didn't hear every word, you have to know that every word didn't exist!

3. Accents: if your ears are not used to an accent, it takes some time to be able to understand it. If you find yourself wondering what a Scottish colleague just said, it's normal. (Did you know that sometimes native English speakers can't understand each other?) Listening to as much English as you can will help you.

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If you want more information on understanding native speakers on conference calls, download our free guide here.

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But don't worry - you probably understand more than you think! Why? Because of sentence stress. All the important syllables in the sentence are accented so the words you hear the most contain the information you need to hear. Even if you don't hear all the words in a sentence, you can still understand the meaning.

Watch this video to hear more about understanding native speakers.