Where to find daily conservation

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Hello everybody, I am going to take an English listening test in my school. They will test me with daily English conversations. Those talks are very "usual" English, people talk fast and in noisy setting.

Could one tell me a website to download that kind of sound files to practise listening?

Tanit · Accepted Answer

Hi,

If you're interested in British English, this website is pretty good both for speed and variety of accents. Lots of topics, too.

Kooyeen · Answer

Hey there Tanit,
that link was interesting. Can I ask you a question? How can you understand people in the UK, with all those different accents? I'm not used to British accents, and I have to say that when I sometimes listen to someone form the UK, I sometimes can't even understand a single word. Really, it depends on the accent, but there have been times when I don't think I understood more than 5%, LOL

Tanit · Answer

Hi K.,

I spent a whole year in the UK, doing a postgraduate course. To make things worse, I chose to go to Wales because Cardiff Uni is at the cutting edge in my field. Have you ever heard somebody speaking with a Welsh accent? For the first two months there, I only wanted to cry... In spite of my excellent performances during tests and exams (I had taken the FCE, the CAE and the TOEFL), I could understand very little outside the Uni

You know, most teachers' accents were pretty standard and easy... something like BBC's anchors, and my classmates were mostly international students, each with their own accent (we were a funny bunch!). I simply became accustomed to them... Welsh English (there was a girl who had a nice Swansea accent), Scottish English, Cornish English, Virginia English (AmE), Indian English, but also French-English, Chinese-English, Pakistan-English, Greek-English and lot more! Oh, I really miss them!
However, cashiers in supermarkers and kids playing in the parks were too hard for me... real English, lots of phrasal verbs I had never heard before, lots of contractions, and intonation quite different from the one I am used to!!!
Funnily, for a piece of coursework I had to interview six people. I was quite discouraged when I had to do the write-ups of the interviews (I remember you posted in the thread I created, "Spoken English").

Anyway, what I wanted to say is: formal education (all of the four skills) has helped me a lot to deal with University tasks, or with "formal" situations; it was not of (great) use, though, when it came to "real", daily life. I had often to guess, but people were usually kind, and when I made it clear I hadn't understood, they would repeat slowlier what they had just said, or rephrase it.

Kooyeen · Answer

I see, thanks.
I wonder how long it would take to go nuts if I had to move to some random place in the UK and had to change my Yoon-eye-did Stay-ts to something like You-noy-tid St-eye-ts.Whoa. LOL

Tanit · Answer

KooyeenI wonder how long it would take to go nuts if I had to move to some random place in the UK and had to change my Yoon-eye-did Stay-ts to something like You-noy-tid St-eye-ts.

Don't worry... after crying for some months, eventually you'd become accustomed to that, I promise you!
You might even find out you could do with a cockney accent

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