Intensive English Listening Sarah's Morning sentence Five

October 28, 2025 Episode 461

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Hi and welcome to English Listening World intensive listening podcast.

I'm Les Paris, and I've been teaching English for over 20 years, so I hope that I can help you out with some of the things that I've learned for listening practice.

Today we're going to do sentence number 6 from Sarah's Morning.

Sentence number 6 is a little longer and a little more complex.

There's quite a few things going on here.

OK.

Let's listen to the sentence.

Sarah walks outside and picks it up.

There, that's the 3 times as a preliminary listening.

Let's get into the rhythm of this.

OK.

Again, I like to emphasize English generally follows a regular rhythm.

Strong beats follow the regular rhythm.

Sarah walks outside and picks it up.

So we get 3 strong beats, 3 strong words.

That's gonna be our core meaning from which we have to put together everything else we listen to to get the meaning.

So let's see, walks, that's the first one.

Sarah walks outside and then outside.

The emphasis on the second part of the word, but let's say outside.

And then the last strong beat is picks.

Walks outside picks.

OK, now let's look at the reductions.

There's one reduction going on here.

That's again with the word and and and the the sound gets dropped very commonly in spoken English and becomes an and.

OK, that leads us into liaisons, OK.

And and and and the word before it is outside, ending in a sound, a consonant, and Side and outside and that's our liaison outside in.

But we have several other liaison, OK? We have walks and outside, walks outside, walks outside, and they get linked together with that S joining out.

We have another liaison with picks and it.

Picks has a si sound at the end.

It picks sit, pick sit, picks it up.

And then we have it up and then up it up.

Now we also should mention the T sound in it becomes a little bit softened.

We have it up.

It has a sound a vowel up has a a sound a vowel, and in between is the t.

so it up it ta.

That sounds like British English to me.

Some British speakers might say that.

The t often becomes softened to a D sound picks it up, picks it up.

So Sarah walks outside and picks it up.

Now, let's practice the shadowing.

Where your speaking is on top of my speaking, try to say the same word at the same time as me.

I'll repeat 3 times.

Here we go.

Sarah walks outside and picks it up.

Naturally, 3 times is not nearly enough for good intensive practice.

You need to do about 20 times, and that's easy on the English listening world site.

I have a link in the description below that'll take you exactly to the page.

There'll be a big button that says 20 times for your 20 times shadowing.

If you can do that 2 times a day for a few days, you should be in good stead.

Do it for a week if you want.

Then you'll be excellent at this sentence.

Thank you for listening and good luck with your listening homework.