I saw a post in the forum saying that the OP had difficulty in distinguishing places or names in a conversation and sometimes it gave him a hard time understanding what the other people were saying.

Someone believes mistaking a person’s name Brown for the same-spelt common word brown may be the main cause. As a non-native speaker, I don’t see Brown for brown a challenge as long as I am clearly aware that there is a person named Brown in the context. From my own experience, there is another explanation for why proper nouns are difficult to understand in a conversation.

I reckon very few non-native English speakers will fail to recognize New York or London in a conversation, but the same cannot be said of Baltimore or Norfolk. The reason is that when we read proper nouns in a passage, we can instantly distinguish them by the capital letters and tend to skip the pronunciation instinctively because we know we will not have any trouble understanding the context without knowing the sounds of these words (especially many of them sound weird). As a result, we usually pretend to know these words but we have never managed to read them aloud. When it comes to listening, we are likely to find ourselves unable to decipher the pronunciations of these proper nouns and easily confuse them with other common words and we will soon totally get lost in the conversation as the missing words stacking up.

See? Basically the difficulty in identifying the proper nouns in a speech is more due to our unfamiliarity with their pronunciations. We just can’t match the sound we hear with a right word in our mind. It explains why we rarely get confused with those most popular place names like New York or London. Frankly speaking, Baltimore and Norfolk are not that obscure in print for most non-native English speakers but I bet only a small bunch of them are able to pronounce them in the correct way.

Speaking of the proper nouns in my own language, I believe we keep them in a separate category in the memory with both pronunciation and meaning records. Especially for those borrowed words from foreign languages, we will coin a new word in our own language with similar sounds that we are more familiar with. Therefore, when we hear the pronunciation in our own language, the right word will automatically spring to our mind. That is why we don’t have the same problem in our own language.

In a nutshell, I suggest familiarising the background information before the conversation and I hope it is of help.