In this listening exercise, you will hear a lot of the contractions we looked at last week. If you have not read this blog post on contractions then read this first. There are also a lot of other contractions in today’s listening exercise.
Contractions you will hear are:
we are contracted to we’re
you are contracted to you’re
there is contracted to there’s
we would contracted to we’d
he is contracted to he’s
I will contracted to I’ll
we have had contracted to we’ve had
I would contracted to I’d
These contractions are very hard to hear in natural speech. There are lots of contractions in this sound file to give you lots of listening practice in a more natural context.
It’s Friday night….and people are going for a drink after work.
We’ve been listening to these conversations for a few weeks and it’s time we gave the caller a name. So let’s call her Julie.
Listen to the phone call and write down everything that you can hear.
Remember – this is natural conversational speed English. Julie is chatting to Jane, asking what time Jane will be arriving at the pub where they are meeting for a drink after work. The sound quality is not great, everyday life is not usually silent in the background.
How to use this exercise.
You will not hear all the words, as they are not all pronounced fully. What is important is to write down what you can hear. After listening multiple times, look at the transcript and discover what words you could not hear. The next stage is to work out why you could not hear those words. Are they words you did not know? Are they words that are not fully pronounced? Are they verbs that are contracted? Are they words pronounced in a different way to how you expected them to sound?
You can download the sound file here if you want to listen offline.
Hi Jane……. Hi…Where are you? Have you left work? OK… well… there’s a crowd of us, from our office, we’re all meeting up in the pub opposite the train station. Yea…we thought we would have a quick drink or two before we get the train because it’s Friday. We’ve had such a busy week. OK – do you know where we are? Yea, opposite the station, next to the coffee shop. OK well phone Stuart, tell him to come down here too… Oh! He’s already here? He has texted you he’s in the pub. Where is he? Oh, ok, oh I can see him. He’s at the bar talking to a woman… oh ok I’ll go and talk to him, I’ll see you in a bit. I’ll tell him that you’re on your way down…. Bye…
If you find this exercise useful please let me know.
Also if you let me know in the comments which parts are difficult I will write more exercises to help with those problems.
We hate SPAM and protect your data in accordance with our privacy policy.
Hello Helen, it is very handy exercise, I really enjoyed it, but I found this sentence a little bit difficult, “we’re all meeting up in the pub”. Thank you for your help, Helen. 🙂
OK so “We’re all meeting up in the pub”
With connected speech it would sound like
we’r⤻all meetin⤻upin the pub”
Oh, thanks a lot, Helen. Happy Sunday. 🙂