Listening to English is difficult. There might be noise, you might be tired, the other person might not be speaking clearly... there are a thousand things that could influence the way you listen. It isn’t a precise science, and it never will be. But the good news is that you don’t need to understand every word in order to follow things. Experts have shown that we only actually hear/understand about 40% of the words during a conversation – our brain fills in the rest for us. Take this as an example. Imagine you’re in the street. All of a sudden, someone stops you and starts to say something to you. At the same time they pull back their sleeve and point to their wrist. Without even listening to the words, your brain tells you that they’re asking you for the time.
Before listening, you need to activate your existing knowledge of the topic. You can do this by thinking about the context and the general theme. Once your existing knowledge has been activated, you can predict what people are going to say. For example, if you know that everyone is talking about global warming, you can be more or less sure that they are going to mention things such as “CO2, carbon, Kyoto, Copenhagen” and “scientists”. And if they’re talking about tax, then you can be fairly sure that they’ll talk about “money, payments, the government, increases” and “decreases”. The fact is that 90% of the people in the world say the same things as you and I – they just do it in different languages. Remember that! This means that 90% of the time you can probably guess what someone is going to say – you just have to trust your intuition.