How to do speed up my words?
Hello there! I am going to go to Purto Rico some year and I have one big issue though. How do I talk and/or even understand their speed? My mind is in tune to Mixican speed because I have friends that are from there. I've been watching a lot of tour videos on youtube. But the words go by so quickly that I have to rewind the video a lot just to get it all in. Any advice would be kindly appreciated. What ever you people say for me to improve on, I will do it. Thank you so much for helping on improving my speed.
5 Answers
The biggest issue with "fast" speech is vocabulary. IfIsaidthisinEnglishveryfastyouwouldstillbeabletounderstand. Why? Because your mind recognizes the words and thus can separate the stream of sound into words. I am a firm believer that vocabulary is by far and away the most important thing you can learn to improve your ability to converse.
Have no doubt that for a long time you are going to screw up the tenses, the matching, the word order and many other grammar rules and you will still be understood 90% of the time if you use the right words. Why? Context. The person you are talking to pretty much knows if you are talking about the past, present or future, or if it is a fact or a wish, etc. And saying something like los niñas may draw a smile or chuckle but it will be understood. But if you don't have enough vocabulary to form thoughts you are sunk before you start. And then you need even more vocabulary because you don't know what words your conversational partner is going to use and you can bet his/her vocabulary is bigger than yours. So study vocabulary every single day.
Why don't you try watching a puerto rican movie? Try watching it without subtitles and understand. Also you can try to imitate some dialogues.
Anyway I don't think all the puerto ricans speak fast. And of course if you tell them you're a foreign they'll slow down a bit they speech and they'll try to make you understand.
I hope you have a great time there!
You can try what gartic suggests and also reading my blog.
Please, please, let me know whan you have a good answer.. In the meantime, maybe I will go and live in Mexico, if they really, really speak nice and slowly..
Something important to keep in mind is that a lot of Puerto Rican speakers swallow their 's' sounds. This means that if 's' is at the end of a word, it is not pronounced.
For example:
'no te cances' becomes 'no te cance' and 'los lugares' becomes 'lo lugare'.
