During my stroll today I was listening to a podcast for English learners with a focus on listening and understanding. Listening is now my main point in developing my English competence and it is – as I always notice again and again – my weakest point. Starting with understanding, going to speaking, and then further to reading and writing is the natural process of language acquisition. The podcast is at A1-level and very slowly spoken. In such a case of slow speaking I’m always suspecting if it was spoken in natural speed and but has been technically slowed down. But if I am increasing this speed the speech sounds natural in the beginning of speeding up and then at a factor 1.4 the speech becomes broken, seems choppy, seems stumbling. It’s not longer fluent anymore despite the higher speed.
Now, to the content of the podcast. It is nice, a little naive but it would not be fair to criticize the content because it is only created as material to improve my poor English. The podcaster was speaking about patience, about the overwhelming importance of patience in all interactions between people. By that I learned the idiom “be in traffic”, which means nothing moves forward. driving bumper to bumper. In this case you need patience without end.