Intensive English Listening Sarah's Morning sentence Three

Hi, welcome to English Listening World intensive listening podcast.

I'm Les Paris, and I hope to bring my 20 years of experience here to help you with your listening.

Today we're going to listen to sentence number 3 from the Sarah's Morning story.

If you want, you can also practice this listening later on my website, the English Listening World website.

You'll find a link in the description below.

Now, let's get on to the the sentence itself.

Here's the sentence.

The kitchen feels cold and empty.

The kitchen feels cold and empty.

The kitchen feels cold and empty.

Let's focus on the rhythm for this sentence.

If I clap, you can hear the strong beats.

The kitchen feels cold and empty.

The kitchen feels cold and empty.

The kitchen feels cold and empty.

So now, the first strong beat is kit from kitchen.

The second strong beat is coal, and then the third strong beat is empty.

So we've got the three meaning words there, and then we've got a lot of function words around them which are weakly stressed, but the strong stress words give us the main meaning.

Let's move on to the liaison in the story.

No.

Let's do reductions first.

OK.

We have a reduction going on with the word and.

And a and and the sound frequently disappears because and is weakly stressed.

We need to squish it in to be able to meet the rhythm that we've set for our sentence.

So and becomes um um, OK.

Now, That helps us do the liaison between the word before and and the word after and.

OK, there's a liaison with cold and and.

Cold has a du sound, a consonant sound at the end, and starts with a vowel, Colen, colder.

That happens with the next set, and plus empty, empty starts with another vowel sound.

An empty and empty.

OK, so those are the two principal liaisons going on in our sentence.

We also have some consonant clusters.

OK.

Kitchen ends with a mm sound.

That's a consonant, the N sound.

The next word feels.

OK.

It starts with another consonant foot.

And, and, and fe Chenfe Chenfield, Chenfield itch and feel itch and feel, kitchen feel, kitchen feels.

So I built it up from a few sounds longer and longer kitchen feels, but you still get that mfu sound.

ne would be incorrect.

It's a fu.

Which is a consonant cluster specific to English.

OK, now we've talked about, uh, let's see, we did the rhythm, we did the reductions, we did the liaison, we did the consonant cluster.

Now we can move on to shadowing.

Shadowing is when you say the sentence at the same time as me.

Don't say it a little bit after.

Try to say it at the same time.

The first time is difficult.

You'll probably have your timing off.

As you practice, your timing gets better and better.

I'm going to say it 3 times here.

The kitchen feels cold and empty.

The kitchen feels cold and empty.

The kitchen feels cold and empty.

Good.

I hope you had no not too much difficulty shadowing that.

But 3 times is not enough to really, really get a good sense of practice.

You need a lot of practice.

It's only 3 seconds long.

Try shadowing 20 times in a row.

That's very easy on the English listening world site.

And as I said before, there's a link in the description that will take you to a page where you can practice those 20 shadowing very easily.

Just hit the big button for 20 times, shadow it 2 times, less than a minute.

That's it for today's podcast.

I've wrapped up the sentence.

Thank you for listening and good luck with your homework.