You understood the question. Yet the answer sounds as if it is sliding off into a different topic. In an English-language interview, this is usually the moment when you get left behind. But the person answering has not missed the question. They are reframing the question itself. Whether you notice that changes completely how a long answer sounds.
Read, on TED's official website, the transcript of an interview with writer Jennifer Egan, published on July 21, 2022. Interviewer Steven Johnson's question starts at 08:31, and Egan's reply begins at 09:33. It is only a single exchange, but there are few examples in which a reframing appears this clearly.
A binary question makes you wait for one of two answers
Johnson's question is simple. When you write a novel, does the structure come first, or do you start with the characters?
Asked like that, a listener naturally waits to hear either “structure” or “character.” But if the reply starts with neither, we assume the real point is still to come. The way we wait pushes the answer away. The first thing to question is not your ears, but that way of waiting.
The answer has already begun in the first words
Egan's reply begins like this.
It's a little bit of a combination.
Not one or the other. It is a combination, she states right in her first words. If you accept here that “no single answer is coming,” the long explanation that follows will not lose you. All that remains is to listen for what is being combined with what.
What the “combination” contains is not structure + character
The explanation that follows divides into two parts. One is that she keeps at hand a list of forms she wants to try. The idea of what shape she would like to write in exists before she starts writing.
The other is that the actual entry point for beginning to write is time and place. This is the crucial point: what she names as the entry point is neither the structure nor the characters mentioned in the question. Words brought in from outside the question become, just as they are, the center of the answer.
So if you take “combination” to mean starting to write from both structure and character at the same time, you will misread it. What Egan showed is that the idea of a form she wants to try and the actual opening of the writing exist separately. The real reason the answer felt off track lies in this bringing-in.
質問：構成から始めるか、人物から始めるか 返答の出だし：どちらか一方ではなく、組み合わせ 続く説明：形式は「試したいリスト」として持つ／実際の入口は時間と場所
Reduced to three lines, you can see at a glance that the long explanation was talking about the contents of the “combination,” separated out. Listening comprehension is not only a process of reading ahead from context. As the British Council's explanation of listening discusses, both understanding that uses context and the process of recognizing words from sound are necessary. Forming a prediction from the question is the former; picking up the first words of the reply and the words newly brought into it is the latter. If you listen with prediction alone, you will miss the reframing.
When it feels off track, go back to the first words
The shape is the same in other interviews. After a binary or yes/no question, if the first words of the reply begin with a word that is neither option, that is the signal of a reframing. Listen closely for whether, in the explanation that follows, the words of the question return, or whether words that were not in the question are brought in. In Egan's case, the time and place that were brought in were themselves the answer.
Of course, there is no need to dissect every episode this way. It is enough to use this view only on a single exchange that interests you, and, as in For Not Turning All Your Favorite Shows into “Study Material”, there may be episodes you deliberately keep solely for enjoyment. Only when you feel an answer has gone off track, before returning to the question, try lining up the first words of the reply with the words that appeared for the first time. That alone makes the place where the reframing happened visible.