Intensive English Listening Sarah's Morning sentence Eight

November 11, 2025 Episode 463

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Hi and welcome to English Listening World intensive listening podcast.

Thanks for joining me.

I'm Les Paris and I've been teaching English for over 20 years.

I hope I can help you with some of my experience.

Let's jump right into it.

We're going to do sentence number 8 from the Sarah's Morning story.

I'm going to read the sentence 3 times so that you can hear it at the beginning.

The coffee smells amazing this morning.

OK, let's go through rhythm, reductions, liaison, and consonant clusters for intensive listening practice.

First of all, the rhythm.

English follows a regular rhythm.

So I'm going to say the sentence to that rhythm.

The coffee smells amazing this morning.

OK, I think we can get basically 33 strong beats.

Coffee, amazing morning.

Coffee amazing morning.

We've got a good idea now, the meaning of the sentence.

Let's get into some of the reductions, hmm.

There are no reductions.

I can't find any significant reductions in this sense.

Liaison.

We've got a really strong liaison between smells and amazing.

Smells amazing, smells amazing, smells amazing.

They're linked together.

Now, if we go on to the consonant clusters, there's a consonant cluster in smells.

Smut, smut, smut, smut.

There's another consonant cluster, Osos.

And we get smells, smells.

There's another consonant cluster between two words with amazing and this amazing this amazingness, this, this, the the the in the in the in the amazing this.

And we could have another consonant cluster with this morning, this morning, this morning, this morning.

Those are where the consonants are tightly together without a vowel sound in between them.

Now we've gone through all the different sound changes in the sentence.

Let's practice shadowing, where you get to talk on top of me at the same time as me.

I'll say the sentence 3 times, and you can try to shadow along with me.

The coffee smells amazing this morning.

Great, I hope that you could do it reasonably well, but 3 times is definitely not enough.

In order to get that link between listening and speaking really strong, shadowing has to be done a lot.

That's what I mean by intensive listening.

I recommend 20 times.

Just about everybody who does it 20 times becomes really highly skilled at that sentence about 20 times later.

OK? Now, you can do that on my site.

I've got it set up where there's an audio player with a button that plays it 20 times, so you don't have to keep clicking and you don't have to count.

You just listen and shout.

You can find the link in the description, and that'll take you exactly to that page on the English listening world site.

20 times would take you less than a minute.

It should be really, really easy as long as you focus hard for less than a minute.

You should be really good after 20 times.

Do it once a day and you're gonna be excellent.

So, that's it for today.

Thanks for listening and good luck with your homework.