When I am in the gym trying to sweat my kilos away I’ve sometimes considered not listening to music and instead ,making a better use of the time I spend there. Today I’ve bumped into this page and I have thought :” That’s what I was looking for!” So instead of running with Lady Gaga I’m going to start running with Jane Austen, Mark Twain or Virginia Wolf.
In Books Should Be Free you can find a lot of free audio books divided according to their genre: adventure, comedy, romance, fairy tales, poetry…etc and you can download them in mp3,iPod or iTunes format . Now, you have no excuse for not practising English, even when you’re at the gym!!
Tag Archives: pronunciation
You’ll never forget how to pronounce “would”
Learning and mastering English pronunciation can sometimes feel like a daunting task. I have been marking heaps of exams lately and now it’ s time for the oral test and if you want to know the truth… I ‘m dreading  it!! Students insist on mispronouncing words they have heard a thousand times, like the word “since”, which they insistently pronounce as /sains/ and the “l” in words such as: walk, talk, should, half .… and would, when I’m well aware they know the “l” in these words is never pronounced.
By the time you finish watching this video, I bet you won’t forget how to pronounce “would”.
This clip from the movie “The Pink Panther”  is probably one of the funniest I have ever seen and Steve Martin is at one of his best performances
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Howjsay.com : A Pronunciation Dictionary
I’ve been using this pronunciation dictionary for quite a long time and I love it for several reasons:
♥ You can find almost any word here and this includes proper names as it is the world’s largest English pronouncing dictionary.
♥ You enter the word and you submit it. When it appears in pink, mouse over it to hear it spoken as often as you want. You don’t have to wait a second as it is individually pre-recorded!!
♥ You can translate the word into Spanish or any other language using the Google Translate and then get the definition for the word .
I hope you like it as much as I do.
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Listen a minute
That’s the name of this superb website for pre-intermediate students to practise listening
and this is what they promise. This site is still growing and at the moment of publishing this post you could only  find alphabetically-listed topic- based activities going  from A to H. That’s it, you can find listenings about Airports and Harry Potter but don’t try Vegetarians yet.
You can do the quizzes about the listening on line and it also gives you some writing ideas. What’s more,  you don’t even need to register. It’s completely free!!
One minute a day… that’s all they are asking and in return… you’ll be passing your listening tests with flying colours.
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Some help with pronunciation
I know some of you, dear readers, have problems with
English pronunciation. No wonder!!! English pronunciation is , arguably, unpredictable. Maybe some of you won’t agree with me that much if you have never experienced the frustration of not being understood but if you don’t believe me , read this article I published last year https://www.cristinacabal.com/?p=295 where I challenged my advanced students to read it without mistakes … the prize? Not taking the final oral test.Actually, the title of the post was I am feeling generous . Only one of them accepted the challenge,( dear Mario I hope you’re reading this ) and I still take my hat off to him (what a hard slog it must’ve been looking up all the words ) but he only managed to read two paragraphs and this, with some mistakes.
Anyway , some of you have been asking me how to improve pronunciation. I advised you to borrow books from the library with audio to listen and read along and here I’m going to show another nice way to improve pronunciation should you get tired of reading in the traditional way. This comes from a well-known site where there are plenty of things to do, should you have some time to spare.
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If  you want to do some more go to http://www.manythings.org/listen/ and help yourself.
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