I’m delighted to say that the company I’m currently working for has wholeheartedly supported my desire to learn a skill often associated with undercover intelligence gathering and the murkier underworld of international espionage.

The skill I’m referring to is ‘lip reading’ – the ability to determine what somebody is saying without actually hearing the sounds they are making.

The majority of us lip read to certain extent even with good hearing. No doubt you can recall a time when you found it more difficult to hear someone because their face or mouth was covered. I’ve also heard some people say they hear better when they are wearing their glasses.

I’m now 8 weeks into a 30 week beginners class and it seems I have some apptitude for it. This is probably due to the fact that I put off wearing hearing aids until I couldn’t really function well without them so I imagine I’ve been compensating for poor hearing for quite a number of years by using my own efforts at lip reading.

At the end of 30 weeks I will gain a qualification and the option to move on to intermediate level. Despite the fact I clearly have some self-taught experience, learning to lip-read is not easy. It’s more appropriately called ‘speechreading’ as only 30-40% of words are visible on the lips and the rest of the comprehension of speech comes from  facial expression, body language and context.

So far, we have covered things like ‘confusion sounds’ (ie; p, b, m and ch, sh, j – that all make the same shape on the lips) and ‘homophenes’ – an expression I’d never heard before and raised a few eyebrows in the office but basically means words that look the same on the lips – such as ‘share’ and ‘chair’.

Based on the experience so far, this looks like being one of the hardest qualifications I’ve ever studied for. Hopefully once I’ve completed it I’ll open up new employment opportunities with the Secret Service. However, given all the complexities of trying to read lips, I’ll only be able to help if the people I’m lip reading speak English, in a regional accent I’m familiar with (Hampshire Carrot Cruncher), are only 3 to 6 feet away, are in good light, looking straight at me and not covering their mouths in any way. I reckon the work’s going to flood in 😉