Would
you study at an English school that promised to teach you 1/3 of the language?
When
we're dealing with languages, and English is no different, we make use of two
kinds of words, to put it simply: content and function words. The latter are
those terms that don't carry meaning, they exist to form the text, not to give its
content. (e.g.. In the previous sentence: the, that, do, they, to, its:
; can
be used as examples). By elimination, content words are the ones that carry the
intended message. You would probably be able to understand the model sentence above just using these words: latter, terms, not, meaning.
The
idea is more or less what happened because of text messaging."pub tomorrow
8. Everyone!" replaced "let's meet up tomorrow at the pub at 8pm?
Everyone's gonna be there". Our brains automatically fill in the missing gaps,
enabling us to decode the message even though it's not complete. Or perhaps not
fully written is more appropriate.
This
means that you can use the very same principle in reading and listening in a
foreign language. But turning a blind eye, or deaf ear, to the
"irrelevant" words is not easy. They usually distract you, and when you realise,........................................., you have already missed what the
speaker said. Let's give it a go with reading? The following words belong to a text. What
is it about?
America, not, spying,
people, intelligence, information, protect
Congratulations,
you've interpreted a text using 07 out of its 31 words. It's actually less than
a third. Check it out below:
“America is not interested in spying
on ordinary people. Our intelligence is focused above all in
finding the information necessary to
protect our people, and in many
cases protect our allies” Barack Obama
Or watch the video (1m06s)
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