Practice English Listening C1 Exercises – Changing language

1   Mairi   Scotland

2   Justin   Canada

3   Jerry   England

4   Andrea   Australia

5   Lily   the US

6   Paul   South Africa

1   Mairi

I’m from a small village on the southeast coast of Scotland, it’s a very small place, not very many people live there. I liked growing up there, but I think it’s a better place to visit than it is to actually live because there isn’t very much for young people to do there. The people are quite nice and friendly, but most people have spent their whole lives there and their families have been there for several generations, so sometimes it can seem a bit insular.

2   Justin

I’m from Vancouver, which is on the western coast of Canada, in the province of British Columbia. It’s a great place to raise a family, uh, it has a good mix of city things and outdoor activities to do. Vancouver has a population of around 632,000, so it’s quite a big city, but it’s not so big that you feel overwhelmed. I’d say the people there are friendly and quite welcoming.

3   Jerry

I’m from Oxford in the southeast of England, I, I was born here and I’ve, I’ve lived here my whole life. Difficult to say what the people are like because it’s, in a way it’s a city of two halves, famous for its university, but also, which obviously has people from all over the world, but also it’s a city in its own right, it has a very large BMW factory where they make Minis, so, but it’s a nice place, I like it, I’ve lived here my whole life pretty much so, so there we are.

4   Andrea

So I’m from Melbourne which is on the southeast coast of Australia, just in, in the state of Victoria, this is a really cultural city, very European, you’ve got everything from beaches to art galleries, lots of shopping, and bars and restaurants, so it’s a fantastic city to be in. The people are really laid-back and and quite friendly there. We’ve got a very big mixture of cultures there, so a very multicultural city. So it’s quite diverse and a really interesting place to be.

5   Lily

I’m from New Jersey and it’s a nice mix between rural and city life because it, it has a lot of nature and nice kind of mountain landscapes where you can go hiking or walking, but it also has nice access to the city and lots of nice little shops and restaurants as well.

6   Paul

OK, I was born in Johannesburg in the late 50s. I moved to Cape Town when I went to university and of course it’s a very beautiful old colonial center, with lovely buildings, and the aspect of Table Bay with the beautiful backdrop of Table Mountain, and wonderful vegetation and a wonderful friendly community of people. It’s very vibrant and exciting, people like bright colors in the strong sunlight, it’s a very creative environment.

B

1   She is used to both native and non-native speakers of English. However, she sometimes has trouble understanding people from the South (of the US). She also finds it more difficult to understand people on the telephone than face-to-face.

2   She says that people don’t often correct her, but she doesn’t mind when they do. Sometimes she corrects her own mistakes.

C

regional US accents: She still sometimes has trouble with Southern accents.

talking on the phone: She finds talking on the phone to be the most stressful thing because you don’t have the face-to-face interaction.

what happens when she’s tired: She might make a mistake with the third-person form.

I = interviewer, C = Cristina

I   Do you find it easier to understand native or non-native speakers of English?

C   Well, I’ve been in the United States for seven years now, and I’ve been exposed to a lot of different accents, not only people from the United States, but from different parts of the world, so I’m used to it. In terms of regional accents in the US, I still sometimes have trouble with Southern accents…they’re a little more challenging for me, because I don’t live in the South. The most stressful thing, I think, is talking on the phone, because you don’t have the face-to-face interaction, so it can be tricky.

I   How do you feel about having your English corrected?

C   Well, it hasn’t happened much lately, but I don’t mind, because that’s how we learn, you know, we learn from our own mistakes. Sometimes when I’m tired, I might make a mistake with the third person form, you know, but usually people are quite tolerant. And sometimes I catch my own mistakes, so I’m able to correct myself.

E

3   She tried to organize an evening out with some friends and she misunderstood the name of the bar.

4   She finds that certain idioms related to sports don’t come easily to her.

F

the word hideout: To Cristina, it sounded like “high doubt.”

baseball, basketball, and American football: There are quite a few idioms in American English that come from these sports. the difference between Romanian spelling and English

spelling: Romanian is a phonetic language, so spelling isn’t as important as it is in English.

I   Do you have any funny or embarrassing stories related to misunderstanding someone?

C   Yes, this happened a few years ago. I was trying to organize an evening out with some friends, and one of my friends picked a place for all of us to meet, and he said, “Let’s all meet at Hideout.” He meant H-I-D-E-O-U-T, you know, like a hiding place, which was the name of a bar. But I completely misunderstood him and thought he said “high doubt,” two words, like H-I-G-H D-O-U-B-T.

So, this caused a lot of confusion because I passed on the information to a bunch of other people and everybody got extremely confused and we couldn’t find the place. We had to call him to find out where it was, and then we all figured out that I had misunderstood and gotten the name of the place wrong. Yeah, it took us a while, but in the end we all got together and had a good laugh. So, it all worked out.

I   Is there anything you still find difficult about English?

C   I find that certain idioms related to sports don’t come easily to me because I don’t know anything about baseball or basketball or American football, and there’s quite a few idioms in American English that come from those sports, like “hit it out of the park” or “slam dunk.” So even though I do understand them in context, I don’t use them, because I don’t always see the connection…Oh, and spelling. Romanian is a phonetic language, so spelling isn’t necessarily as important as it is in English. Sometimes I have to write words out in English, maybe because I’m a visual learner. I have to visualize the letters in my head before I can spell the word.

A

1   Do you find it easier to understand native or non-native speakers of English?

2   How do you feel about having your English corrected?

3   Do you have any funny or embarrassing stories related to misunderstanding someone?

4   Is there anything you still find difficult about English?

B

1 W   2 B   3 M   4 B   5 W   6 M

Interviewer   Do you find it easier to understand native or non-native speakers of English?

Yiming   For me, non-native speakers of English are easier to understand when it comes to direct instructions. They would usually use plain language and basic words. And I find it easier to grab a sense of what to do. But they would probably have an accent … and have pauses while talking, and they would probably mumble also and which would make their, um, instructions, uh, hard to understand. Uh, native English speakers, on the other hand, are of course fluent in English. Uh they are a lot better in oral presentation. Uh, they would speak faster usually, and I feel better when communicating with native speakers about indirect feelings and complex tasks. As far as the idiomatic expression or cultural reference, I don’t think the difference um, between native speakers and non-native speakers is caused by their individual um experience, but by the environment in which they grow up in. Or the environment where they learn English, um, and I don’t think non-native speakers um that I’ve met would use um the heavily localized terms, and in that sense I don’t think it’s comparable to say whether um native speakers or non-native speakers are the same.

Interviewer   How do you feel about having your English corrected?

Yiming   I would love to have my English corrected. Although I’ve been learning English for years, my pronunciation and grammar are still not as good as native English speakers. And also, I always consider myself an English learner and I’m happy to have my English corrected by my native English speaker friends. And sometimes when native English speakers from different places correct me, say the spelling of a word uh say the word “color”, I find it really interesting and am amazed by this inclusive language of English being spoken worldwide. It accepts many different ways of spelling for the same word.

Interviewer   Do you have any funny or embarrassing stories related to misunderstanding someone?

Yiming   Yes. Once on a geology fieldtrip, a friend of mine said, “Something smells funky.” Um, based on the pronunciation of the word solely, I thought the word meant ah something related to “funny,” which is not actually a taste or a smell, so I got very confused on what kind of smell this word actually means and then I asked my friends about this word “funky” and it turned out that “funky” isn’t a particular smell but rather an arbitrary word to describe something abstract, like something is “off.” And I remember my friends to trying to raise examples to help me feel what “funky” means, but nobody was actually able to define the word “funky” in plain words, yeah.

Interviewer   Is there anything you still find difficult about English?

Yiming   Like just now, abstract and arbitrary …! still find it hard to tell the difference. Maybe I just mixed up the spelling and the meaning of the word, yeah. Um my pronunciations definitely need to be corrected very often. I definitely need more vocabulary uh for daily use and I think uh for the slang that refers to facts or things that happened decades ago I find them really hard to follow because l didn’t experience that and didn’t learn that when I was growing up with English, yeah.

Interviewer   Do you find it easier to understand native or non-native speakers of English?

Cristina   Well, it all depends where they come from. I suppose it’s more or less the same. Some non-natives are more difficult than others if you’re not used to the accent. For instance, l used to find some Japanese and Chinese speakers difficult to understand, but then because of work I went to the Far East lots of times and then it became OK. Natives, again it all depends. I was taught RP and one assumes that everybody speaks that, and of course I had friends from lots of parts of Britain who did not speak RP. In fact, it is a pretty rare thing these days. So we have a good friend from, from Glasgow and it was always embarrassing for me because I could not understand most of what he was saying. I still don’t.

Interviewer   How do you feel about having your English corrected?

Cristina   I don’t mind. My children used to love correcting me. They still say I speak very funny English, but usually adults in this country do not correct you. I would like to be corrected.

Interviewer   Do you have any funny or embarrassing stories related to misunderstanding someone? Cristina Um yes, misunderstanding and being misunderstood. Several! Some I don’t think I would like to tell you about, but I’ll tell you one. I was a student at the University of Michigan in the United States and my phonetics professor was very handsome and therefore I did extremely well, not in all subjects, but it was worth studying that one. But I remember my first tutorial when he said “See you later” and I thought, “Hmm, interesting. Where?” And in class he said, I’d asked a question and he’d said, “Interesting question” so I thought, Great! He thinks I’m clever, and maybe he thinks I’m interesting to meet somewhere else, but I couldn’t understand how I was going to find out where or when. I luckily didn’t ask. It would have been very embarrassing.

Interviewer   Is there anything you still find difficult about English?

Cristina   Yes, I think there are things that have especially to do with cultural aspects. I used to find when my children were little that I didn’t know the same nursery rhymes that you know here. I didn’t know the actions, and I still don’t know lots of things. It’s, I don’t know, to give an example, say I had learned American English, but I still didn’t know who the Simpsons were.