Intensive English Listening Sarah's Morning sentence Seven

November 4, 2025 Episode 462

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Hi, welcome to English Listening World intensive listening podcast.

I'm Les Perras, and I've been teaching English for more than 20 years in my own classroom.

I'd like to share some of my experience with you so you can be a better listener.

Today we're going to do sentence number 7 from the Sarah's Morning story.

You can find the audio on my site.

There's a link in the description below.

I'll say the sentence 3 times right now.

Her neighbor waves and smiles at her.

Let's start off with rhythm.

English typically has a generally standard rhythm or a regular rhythm with the strong beats and weak beats in between.

Let's set up a rhythm.

Her neighbor waves and smiles at her.

When I set it to a strong rhythm, it almost becomes like a song.

Now, let's take a look at some of the sound changes within this within this sentence.

First of all, we have two reductions.

There's a reduction at the word and and becomes uh.

And becomes.

So we get done.

In the middle of that sentence, and it's gonna join to the words before and after it.

There's another reduction with the word her.

He becomes her.

E Now, With that, we can also find liaisons.

That's the connection between one word and another word, so they almost sound like one word.

waves and, and gets reduced to waves joins up with and waves and waves in waves in.

There's another liaison with the word at and her.

He gets reduced to er ater, but in North American English, the T also gets softened to a D sound adder adder.

So there's our liaisons.

Now we also have consonant clusters.

There's a consonant cluster at the end of waves.

Visit, visit.

Apes, apes, waves.

OK.

There's another similar consonant cluster at the end of smiles.

This bus, aisles, aisles, miles, smiles.

Now if we put it all together, her neighbor waves and smiles at her.

Let's practice that with shadowing.

Shadowing is when you.

Say the words at the same time as me, right over top.

Not a little off, not a little bit later, not a lot later, at the same time.

I'm going to say this sentence 3 times.

Try shadowing with me.

Her neighbor waves and smiles at her.

How is that? I'm sure that it got better by the 3rd time, but it was still probably difficult.

Chattering takes a lot of practice.

3 times is definitely not enough.

As I said earlier, there's a link in the description below that will take you to a page on the English listening world site.

There you can listen to the sentence I just said, and you can press the shadow 20 times button and you can practice shadowing it 20 times.

The 1st 5 times is hard, the next 5 times you're getting better.

The next 5 times from 10 to 15, you should be pretty good.

And the last 5 times you should be hitting it right on.

Perfect.

20 times should take you less than a minute, so it doesn't take much time.

Go to the site right away.

Do the shadowing practice for today.

That's your homework.

That's the end of my video.

I wanna thank you for listening and good luck with your homework.