How to Understand a Lecture When the Professor Is Hard to Follow

Q: Can I ask the professor to slow down?

Yes — a polite request at an appropriate moment ('Could you slow down a bit — I am having trouble following at this pace?') is reasonable and most professors appreciate the feedback that their pace is too fast. Some professors cannot significantly alter their natural pace; others are genuinely unaware that they are speaking too quickly and adjust when asked.

Q: What if the professor has a strong accent I find hard to understand?

Familiarity with a specific accent improves rapidly with exposure — the first few lectures with an unfamiliar accent are often the hardest and comprehension typically improves significantly over the semester. Use recordings (where permitted), slides, and supplementary resources for content you miss while you are adjusting. It is appropriate but requires care to ask for clarification tactfully — frame it around specific content rather than the accent.

Q: Should I take the same course with a different professor?

If another section is available and the scheduling works, yes — professor compatibility matters for your learning experience and outcomes. Check rate your professor sites for student perspectives on teaching clarity, but weight your own experience in lectures more heavily than aggregated ratings. If you have attended two or three lectures and find comprehension consistently very difficult, considering a section switch early in the semester is reasonable.

Q: How do I take notes when I cannot follow what is being said?

Mark what you do not understand rather than leaving it blank or guessing. Note the topic headings and any key terms you can catch. Flag the sections you need to fill in after the lecture. After the lecture, use the textbook, recordings, or classmates' notes to fill the gaps systematically. Incomplete notes filled in afterward are more useful than notes that misrepresent content you did not understand.

Q: What if the professor is widely regarded by the whole class as unclear?

A formally organized petition to the department about teaching clarity issues — made through appropriate channels (class representative, department feedback mechanisms) and focused on specific teaching behaviors rather than personal criticism — is legitimate collective feedback. Individual students making this feedback alone is less effective than organized collective feedback through official channels.

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A difficult teaching style is a problem to solve, not a reason to give up on the material.

Prepare Before the Lecture

Preparation before a difficult lecture significantly improves comprehension during it. When you arrive with some prior exposure to the topic — even a brief read of the relevant textbook section, the previous lecture’s notes, or the outline of the current lecture’s slides if available — you have enough prior knowledge to make the professor’s explanation more legible even when it is unclear.

Your brain processes new information by attaching it to existing knowledge structures. A lecture on a topic you have zero prior exposure to is maximally difficult to follow regardless of the professor’s clarity — you are building the knowledge structure from scratch in real time. A lecture on a topic you have briefly previewed is easier to follow because you have partial structures to attach new information to, which makes unclear explanations more recoverable than they would otherwise be.

In-Lecture Strategies

For difficult-to-follow professors, changing your note-taking approach from transcription to question-marking is more effective than trying to keep up with content you cannot fully process in real time. Mark the moments where you lose the thread — a question mark in the margin or a bracketed note — and focus on getting the structural outline of what is being covered rather than the full detail. You can fill the detail from textbooks, recordings, or classmates’ notes after the lecture.

Sitting closer to the front improves audibility and comprehension for lectures that are difficult to follow due to the professor’s speech patterns or volume. Reducing competing distractions (phone, laptop tabs unrelated to the lecture) is more important in difficult-to-follow lectures than in clear ones, because every moment of distraction when you are already struggling to follow is a larger percentage of comprehension lost.

Recording and Playback

With professor permission (always ask first — recording policies vary and some professors specifically prohibit recording), recording lectures from professors who are hard to follow allows you to replay unclear passages at your own pace. Playback at 0.75x speed for sections that were unclear is more effective than trying to process unclear explanations at delivery speed.

Lecture recordings provided by the institution — increasingly common in contemporary universities — serve the same function without requiring individual recording permission. Check your course page for available recordings before assuming none exist.

Supplementary Learning Resources

When a professor’s explanations are consistently unclear, the most effective response is supplementing with alternative explanations from resources that suit your learning style better. Khan Academy, university YouTube channels, textbooks by different authors in the same field, and online course platforms (Coursera, edX) all provide alternative explanations of most undergraduate topics.

The goal is understanding the material, not understanding the professor’s specific explanation of it. If one explanation source is consistently unclear, finding a different one is not giving up — it is the rational response to an information source that is not working for you.

Office Hours With a Specific Question

Professors who are hard to follow in lecture are often significantly clearer in the one-on-one office hours context. The lecture format requires them to explain to a large audience without feedback; the office hours format allows them to respond to your specific confusion and calibrate their explanation to what you specifically do not understand yet.

Come to office hours with a specific question — not ‘I did not understand the lecture’ but ‘I am unclear about the relationship between X and Y that was discussed in the last section.’ A specific question produces a targeted explanation that is more useful than a general request to re-explain everything.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I ask the professor to slow down?▼

What if the professor has a strong accent I find hard to understand?▼

Should I take the same course with a different professor?▼

How do I take notes when I cannot follow what is being said?▼

What if the professor is widely regarded by the whole class as unclear?▼

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Written by Theophilus Mburu

Theophilus Mburu is a dedicated dentist and a contributing writer at Edunotes, bringing a unique blend of scientific insight and creativity to the blog. Beyond the clinic, he enjoys immersing himself in video games and exploring music, adding a fresh and relatable perspective to his content.