Video 4 - the missing T sound in spoken English.

A city centre phone call to listen to for advanced learners. Lots of contractions and similar sounding words with busy traffic noise as well. Real life listening practice. Hurry up you're late, they're there already.

Lesson 3 in this video series on Understanding Connected Speech.

Here is part 2 of a free video series on understanding connected speech. If you would like to work through more online lessons in this free course then sign up to the mailing list and the next free lesson will be sent to your email address.

Video 1 - an introduction to connected speech -part 1 sound linking.

This listening exercise contains lots of contractions. Contractions are often difficult to hear. You can download the sound file and listen multiple times.

When you listen to spoken informal English you will hear that we use contractions all the time in informal conversations. You're, we're, they're. Can you recognise these contractions when you hear them? You are, we are, they are.  These are rarely pronounced in this full form and are usually contracted. This often makes them hard to hear in spoken English as when contracted they sound very similar to other English words.

We have looked at the elision of T sounds in consonant clusters,   the glottal stop  T and disappearing G  at the end of ...ing in many regional accents, and also the linking R sound in connected speech. New Listening Exercise to put it all into practice....

Video lesson on understanding connected speech.

In spoken English, we don't have big spaces between the words.  We blend sounds together to move from one word to another quickly.  This allows us to keep to the rhythm of English sentence stress.    This linking of words happens most often when one word ends in a consonant and the next starts with a vowel and we connect these words together.