Intensive English Listening Sarah's Morning sentence Two

Hi, welcome to English World intensive listening Practice podcast.

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

I hope to help you with a little bit of some of the things that I've learned for listening.

Today we're gonna do sentence number 2 from the Sarah's Morning story.

We're gonna start off with rhythm.

First of all, I'll tell you this sentence.

She checks her phone quickly.

She checks her phone quickly.

She checks her phone quickly.

Now the rhythm If we put it to a crap.

There's basically 3 beats going on there.

I'm going to clap and say the sentence 3 times so you can hear the clear rhythm.

She checks your phone quickly.

She checks her phone quickly.

She checks her phone quickly.

OK, now we've got the 3 beats.

Check.

Great OK, now we've got an idea of what the sentences say.

Those three strong beats give the core meaning of the sentence, but we have to string them together with all the weakly stressed words.

We're gonna use our, we're gonna look into the liaison, the reductions in the consonant clusters to see if we can go deeper into this sentence.

Reductions.

One of the words is quite strongly reduced.

He.

He starts with a sound, and that sound, the h sound, is often dropped out when native speakers speak English.

So we have her becoming her.

OK, that's our number one reduction.

There's no other significant reductions in the sentence.

Next, we should go on to the liaisons.

Liaison is where the last sound of one word joins up with the first sound of another, and it happens right at our reduction.

He becomes er.

er starts with a vowel sound.

The word before it checks is the consonant sound, sir.

Sir, sir, sir, X, X sir, check sir, check sir.

And that's two words, but it kind of sounds like one.

Now let's move into some of the consonant clusters.

Jacks cus is not what it sounds like it's.

Kind of like the X sounds, and we get X checks, check here.

OK.

There's no other significant consonant clusters going on here.

You could say at the end of quickly.

The last word, that would be wrong quickly.

So there's our second consonant cluster.

OK.

Now, let's see, we've talked talked about reductions, we've talked about the liaison and the consonant cluster.

It's time to practice shadowing.

I'm going to say this sentence 3 times.

I want you to try and shadow me.

That means to speak at the same time as I speak.

Your words and my words should overlap as perfectly as possible.

We'll do it 3 times here.

She checks her phone quickly.

She checks her phone quickly.

She checks her phone quickly.

Now, 3 times isn't nearly enough practice, and you don't need to play this video back, back again and again.

I made it really easy for you to practice shadowing this sentence.

In the description below, you'll find a link to this page where you can have the audio play 20 times in a row, so you can shadow it very, very easily.

And I recommend shadowing it 20 times.

Every day.

Until you master it.

You might master it in one day, you might master it after a few days.

At any rate, even if you master it today, go back in a few days and try again, because your your skill goes down after a few days.

Well, thanks for listening today and good luck with your homework.