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When you don’t know a language, your brain doesn’t yet have the map for it. In your native language, you subconsciously recognize where one word ends and another begins because you know the sound patterns, rhythm, and typical word shapes. Your brain automatically chunks the stream of sound into meaningful units.
With an unfamiliar language, that scaffolding is missing. You hear every syllable as part of one continuous wave because:
You don’t know the language’s phonemes (its meaningful sounds), so similar sounds blur together.
You haven’t learned its rhythm and stress patterns, which normally signal word boundaries.
You lack vocabulary, so nothing “pops out” as recognizable.
Your brain can’t predict what’s coming next, which is a key part of how we parse speech.
To a native speaker, “Did you eat yet?” sounds like a smooth, almost mumbled “d’joo-eet-yet,” but they still perceive four words. To a learner, it can feel like a single, fast noise. The same happens in reverse: your own language sounds like an indistinct blur to outsiders.
As you learn even a little of a language, something magical happens: the blur starts breaking into pieces. Individual sounds become distinct, familiar patterns emerge, and suddenly you can hear words that were always there. The change isn’t in the sound—it’s in your brain.
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