Intensive English Listening Sarah's Morning sentence Four

October 14, 2025 Episode 459

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Hi and welcome to English Listening world, incentive Listening podcast.

I'm Les Paris and I'd like to bring some of my 20 plus years of teaching experience to help you become a better English listener.

Today we're going to talk about.

Sentence number 4 from the Sarah's Morning story.

Let's listen 3 times to this sentence to begin with.

She starts making fresh coffee.

Good.

Now, this sentence is quite straightforward.

I'd like to talk about reductions, liaison, and consonant clusters after rhythm.

So we'll start with the rhythm.

OK, number one rhythm.

I'd like to keep it simple.

Let's say English has a constant rhythm.

She starts making fresh coffee.

So it sounds like we've got basically two strong words there.

Starts.

Fresh.

OK.

Now, there's a third one there, coffee.

It's fairly clear to here.

However, if we keep it simple and say English has a constant rhythm.

Then it becomes a little bit easier to see there's two main beats, OK.

You could say she starts, starts is strong, fresh is strong.

Some people would say coffee is also strong, but let's keep it simple.

Regular rhythm.

She starts making fresh coffee.

OK, and coffee's gonna be a little bit faster in there because it's a little weaker.

Now, after that, there's not too much to talk about in this sentence.

Reductions, there's no significant reductions.

Liaisons, there's nothing significant happening here.

Each word is fairly clear to here.

There are some consonant clusters.

Starts plus making.

The end of starts is a and a and then making is a m sms.

Arts arts arts tartstarts make tarts make starts make, starts make, starts making, OK? That's one of the consonant clusters.

The next one is with the End of making and the beginning of fresh.

Making mm fro fro infra king fret king fret a king fret, making fret, making fresh, making fresh and we get that consonant cluster that is a little difficult for some other language speakers.

OK, now, we've covered all the difficult points that could come up in this sentence.

Now let's get into shadowing.

I'm going to say this sentence 3 times for your shadow.

Let's see, here we go.

She starts making fresh coffee.

Good.

3 times, 3 times is nowhere near enough practice to get that real intonation, the rhythm, the consonant clusters going.

You want to train your mouth to see it, then your ear can hear it easier.

As your mouth gets better, your ear gets better.

As your ear gets better, your mouth gets better.

So, you want to shadow this about 20 times a day until you've really mastered it, and you can do that easily on the English listening World website.

You'll find a link in the description below.

That's about it for today.

I'd like to thank you for listening and good luck with your listening homework.