Anglický text článku
You have been studying English for years, but the moment a native speaker opens their mouth, the words seem to arrive twice as fast as they should. Almost every learner knows the feeling, and almost every learner draws the same conclusion: these people are talking far too quickly. Researchers have a name for that impression, and it is not a flattering one: the Gabbling Foreigner Illusion.
In a 2019 study, a French-led team compared speakers of seventeen languages and measured two things: how fast they spoke, and how much information each syllable carried. Individual speakers ranged from about four to nine syllables a second, yet the rate at which they delivered information hovered around thirty-nine bits per second, whatever the language. Basque squeezes fewer than five bits into a syllable, Vietnamese packs in eight, and the less a language carries per syllable, the faster its speakers talk.
So if speed alone does not explain that impression, why on earth does English feel so fast? The honest answer is that we are not fighting speed; we are fighting the fact that speech has no spaces in it. Writing gives us a helpful gap after every word, but the sound wave does not, and the listener has to work out where one word ends and the next begins. In your own language you do this thousands of times an hour without noticing; in a foreign one it takes so much effort that the speaker seems to be racing.
English then makes life harder for the listener by changing the shape of its own words. Little grammar words are almost never stressed, so their vowels collapse into the flat, neutral sound that phoneticians call a schwa. That is why the “can” in “I can swim” sounds nothing like the “can” in a dictionary, and why “to” and “of” shrink to little more than a murmur. Neighbouring sounds blend too, which is how “did you” ends up as something close to “didja”, and how the t in “next day” quietly disappears. None of this is lazy or sloppy; it is simply what fluent English sounds like, and the careful dictionary form is the exception, not the rule.
What does not work is asking people to slow down, because slow speech is not the speech you will hear outside the classroom. Play one short clip three or four times, then read the transcript while the audio plays, and your ear will start to find the joins; the words were there all along, hiding in plain sound.