Episode 80: How to Understand Long Sentences in English

[00:00:00] Welcome to English, please, the podcast where we explore interesting topics in under 10 minutes in clear, intermediate English. I’m your host, Christopher. I live in New York City, and I’ve always been passionate about languages and how we learn them. Whether you’re listening on your way to work or while cooking dinner at home, this show is designed to help you with your English listening and comprehension skills.

Sometimes you understand every word someone says and you still miss what happened. This happens a lot with long sentences. Listen to this one, which is the kind of thing you could easily hear from a neighbor in New York: “The woman who lives in the apartment above mine, the [00:01:00] one with two big dogs that bark all night, finally moved out last week.” You hear about a woman, then an apartment, then two dogs, then barking, and by the end, you’re not sure what actually happened. But the most important part is just four words: the woman moved out. Everything else is extra information.

In this episode, I want to show you how to find those few important words in a long English sentence, even when people speak quickly. And to do that, we need to start with something that happened to the English language a very long time ago.

About a thousand years ago, English worked much more like German does today. Words changed their endings depending on their job in the sentence. One [00:02:00] ending showed who was doing the action, and a different ending showed who the action was happening to. Over several hundred years, English slowly lost almost all of those endings.

That change had a big result. Without the endings, English needed another way to show who did what, and the answer was word order. For example, “The dog bit the man.” Now, change the order. “The man bit the dog.” The words are exactly the same, but the meaning is completely different. The only thing that changed is the position of the words.

German kept this system. In German, the word for “the” changes its form depending on who is doing the action. Because of that, a German speaker can put “the man” at the beginning of the sentence, [00:03:00] and it’s still clear that the dog bit the man. The small word in front of each noun shows who did what, so the order can change. Russian works in a similar way, with endings on the nouns themselves. And if you grew up speaking a language like this, your brain learned to look for these small signals to find the meaning. In English, you need to listen for position instead.

English did keep a few pieces of the old system, by the way. “He” and “him” are still two different forms of the same word, and so are “she” and “her.” That’s why we say, “He called her,” and never, “Him called she.” But for almost every other word, the word order shows who did what.

So what does this mean for listening? It means that [00:04:00] most English sentences follow the same basic pattern. First comes the subject, the person or the thing doing something. Then comes the main verb, what the person or thing did. Everything else adds details.

This sounds very simple, but in long sentences, these two parts can be far from each other. The speaker says the subject, then adds several details about it, and only then gets to the verb. Your job is to hold onto the subject and wait for the verb. If you catch those two pieces, you understand the most important part of the sentence, even if you miss some of the details in the middle.

In episode 72, I said it helps to hold on to the beginning of a sentence while you wait for [00:05:00] the end. Now you know exactly what to hold on to, the subject. And you know what you’re waiting for, the verb.

Let’s practice a little bit. I’ll say three long sentences at a natural speed. For each one, listen for the subject and the main verb. Try to find them before I tell you, and then I’ll give you the answer. If you’d like to see these sentences written down, every episode has a full transcript at englishpleasepod.com.

Okay, first: “My friend from work, the one who just got back from a trip to Japan, brought everyone in the office a small gift.”

The subject is “my friend” and the main verb is “brought.” “My friend brought everyone a gift.”

Okay, [00:06:00] next: “The new café on the corner, which opened about a month ago and often has a long line in the morning, is closing next week.”

The subject is “the new café” and the main verb is “is closing.” “The new café is closing.” Notice how much information came between those two parts.

The last one is a little harder. “Most of the people I talked to at the party last night had never been to Brooklyn before.” The subject is “most of the people” and the main verb is “had never been.”

This one is tricky because “talked” is also a verb, but it’s part of the extra information. A textbook might say, “the people that I talked to,” but in natural speech, most people drop the word “that” and just say, “the people I talked to.”

So a second [00:07:00] subject and verb, “I talked,” appear in the middle of the sentence without any warning. When that happens, keep waiting. The main verb is still coming. “Most of the people I talked to at the party last night had never been to Brooklyn before.”

This skill takes practice, but it changes the way long sentences feel. Instead of trying to catch every single word, you listen for two things: who and what happened. The details will get easier with time. You don’t need to understand every word to understand what happened.

If you’d like more practice like this every week, join the free English, please newsletter at englishpleasepod.com/free. When you sign up, you’ll also get two free guides, one with 25 idioms and one with 60 everyday [00:08:00] phrases that native speakers use all the time. Newsletter subscribers also hear about new things first, like the private English conversation sessions that are starting this month.

And if you want to train this kind of listening, step by step, that’s what my English Listening Accelerator is for. It’s a workbook with audio and ten lessons. In each lesson, you listen first, try to understand on your own, and then check yourself against the transcript, a lot like the practice we just did. You can try a free sample lesson at englishpleasepod.com/learn, and the full workbook is only $7. It’s also the best way to support this podcast and help me keep making new episodes.

Again, I’m Christopher, and I want to invite you to join me in future episodes of English, please to hear about a variety of [00:09:00] topics, all focused on helping you with your English. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts, and let’s continue this adventure together in clear, understandable English.

Sincere thanks, as always, for listening.

See you soon!