These last few weeks we’ve been looking at contractions and the missing T sound in spoken English.

If you’ve not seen these videos and blog posts they are here.

Video 3 Contractions in Spoken English

Video 4 The missing T sound in Spoken English

Advanced Listening Exercise – Contractions.

Today’s listening exercise has lots of contractions and lots of missing T sounds.

Whilst I am mentioning T  I will also give you some cultural information about life in the UK.

We eat tea in the North of England as well as drink it.

You may have heard that we drink a lot of tea in Britain.    Personally, I hate tea to drink.  But the word tea has another meaning that you may not know about.   In today’s phone call  you’ll hear the speaker ( we have named her Julie) asking “can you get the kids their tea?”      She then goes on to suggest that there is some Pizza in the freezer they can have for their tea.     In the North of England ‘tea’ is the name of the early evening meal.      In the North we eat ‘dinner” around midday as that’s  “dinner time” or what my husband from London used to call “lunchtime” before he met me.  Up North, we eat our  “tea”  in the early evening, a meal which my husband used to call “dinner”.  He has since seen the error of his ways and calls meals by the correct term now he lives in the North of England.

So did you know this use of the word tea?   Confused?   Well hopefully you will now remember that if you are talking to someone from the North of England and they invite you round to their house for tea, then you will probably be invited for an early evening informal meal not a cup of tea to drink.    If a Northerner invites you for dinner then I would ask them what time they want to meet as they may be inviting you for a meal at lunchtime, not an evening meal.

Being born and bred in the North West of England I always use the words dinner for the midday meal and tea for the evening meal.  It seems that Julie the character in our phone call must be from the North of England as she does the same.    Have you heard anyone else use the word tea in this way?  What region of the UK did they come from? Let me know in the comments.    I find regional variations in language fascinating.

So here is today’s listening exercise.   As usual, it’s noisy.   Julie’s on her way home from work and there’s a problem with the trains.   Listen out for all the contractions and the missing sounds.

Here is the sound file to download and listen to on your phone.

Missing Sounds

Did you notice any missing T sounds?    Did any surprise you?  Did you recognise all the words without the T sound.   Let me know in the comments.

Did you notice any other missing sounds?    Let me know in the comments.    What other sound did I often not pronounce?

Bonus question

Did anyone notice any strange and incorrect grammar in the contractions?    When we use contractions in the spoken language we often say something that is grammatically incorrect.     Did anyone notice this?     Let me know in the comments or email me if you spotted this.

If you have any questions about anything in this lesson please get in touch.

I also would really like to know if you like this new way of giving the transcript to you ie making it into an exercise.

Or do you want me to provide the full transcript in the usual way?

Please tell me which you prefer before next week’s lesson.