G8 English / Listening

Fast speech is not faster words, it is joined words.

The problem is rarely speed. It is that the spaces you expect between words are not there.

Writing has gaps between words. Speech does not. In ordinary talk the end of one word runs into the start of the next, sounds get swallowed, and whole syllables vanish. What do you want to do arrives as one connected run of sound. Did you eat yet is shorter in the mouth than on the page. So when you say someone spoke too fast, what usually happened is that they spoke normally and you could not find the joins.

That reframing matters, because the two problems have different cures. You cannot train yourself to think faster in any useful way. You can absolutely learn where words meet. The way to do it is to take a short piece of natural speech, listen closely, then look at the words written down, then listen again while reading. The moment where the blur becomes separate words is the moment the learning happens. After a few of those, your ear starts doing it alone.

Accents work the same way. An accent is not worse speech, it is a different set of habits about vowels and rhythm, and unfamiliar habits sound fast. A few hours with one accent makes it dramatically easier, and this is why the person you live near becomes easy while a stranger from a different region stays hard. That is not a failure. It is just exposure, and exposure is fixable.