Apprehended by ear

What is the best way to listen so as to understand?

To the eye, on the page, English may be open and obvious (ignoring the oddities of orthography), but to the ear, in the air, it may be an stream of fragments of sense separated by sections of unintelligible sound, clearly a medium of communication but only generally, and often mistakenly, understood.

A key to developing better listening, to winning access, may be in attention to details such as individual contractions and liaisons, and painstakingly mapping every word in a transcript to some sound in the audio stream.

Not easy work. We, baffled student and I, wrestled yesterday, for instance, with whether a particular word was 'is' or 'was', a small but crucial distinction. One way to test the alternatives was by how they felt to lips, tongue, breath when said. It may be that muscle mimicry may teach the ear to hear more precisely.

On the other hand, there's a value in listening for larger units. Robert Frost in a letter to John Bartlett in 1913, wrote, "A sentence is a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung. You may string words together without a sentence-sound to string them on just as you may tie clothes together by the sleeves and stretch them without a clothes line between two tree, but--it is bad for the clothes."

In my recent teaching, I've also been focussing on speech units just a few words long each which can be readily grasped as the natural modules of thought, sound and structure we construct our sentences with to present our messages.

Frost seems to be directing my attention to something larger: "the sentence is a sound in itself."  At that point in his life, this was one of the key principles on which he based his approach to poetry. He continued, "The sentence-sounds are very definite entities...They are as definite as words. It is not impossible that they could be collected in a book...They are apprehended by the ear...The most original writer only catches them fresh from talk, where they grow spontaneously."  What can I do with this intriguing idea? Is this something actors perceive and work with?

All this makes language seem a natural phenomenon to be learned in the same way we learn about nature itself; as, for instance, I would like to learn the message in the bird song I heard yesterday: three low notes, then two high, repeated over and over from somewhere overhead but near.