English Listening
As you know, we (and 250,000 other English students) believe listening to English conversation is the best place to start when learning to speak English fluently. Each of our podcasts provides you with great listening English practice.
the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
⭐ John Keat
We are really careful to make sure every English listening exercises is interesting enough for you to listen to it over and over. We pick topical words and interesting contemporary English stories which are actively in use in everyday English in the UK.
Most Unusual Words
Splurge
Splurged
Stickler
Most common 2 word phrases:
| Phrase | Count |
|---|---|
| A Splurge | 9 |
| English Listening | 6 |
| Splurge In | 4 |
| You Can | 4 |
| Of Money | 3 |
Listen To The Audio Lesson Now
The mp3 audio and pdf transcript for this lesson is now part of the Adept English back catalogue . You can still download and listen to this lesson as part of one of our podcast bundles.Transcript: English Listening Mp3 Designed To Improve Your Spoken English
Hi, there I’m Hilary and welcome to this, the short podcast from Adept English, which goes out on a Thursday. There are lots of other websites which help you learn English, but many of them don’t publish something every week, and they don’t provide you with a free transcript. They also don’t cover the breadth of topics which we do. And, especially on YouTube – quite a lot of them contain grammar mistakes. Ouch! Rest assured, my first degree was in Latin, and I’m what you call ‘a stickler’ for correct grammar.
A ‘stickler’ is a word that we use for someone who is pedantic, who doesn’t like to make mistakes. I still communicate from time to time, with my old Latin teacher from school. I wouldn’t like to think of him listening to my podcasts or checking my transcripts and finding any errors, any mistakes! It’s probably highly unlikely, but that thought alone means I check everything thoroughly before it’s released, which means you can have confidence that it’s all correct!
You can treat each of our podcasts as an English listening lesson
Anyway, today’s short podcast. Let’s go for another English word which is a piece of slang, but which you’ll hear commonly in English. Do you know what the word ‘splurge’ means? Well a splurge, S-P-L-U-R-G-E can be a noun or a verb. And take a moment to appreciate what a lovely English word that is ‘Splurge’. Say it to yourself. ‘Splurge’. You can really put some effort behind that one.
ARTICLE Image
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A photograph of a young boy about to kick a football.
Listening to English trains your brain to spot when to pay attention
Well, a splurge is a sudden spending of money. The implication is quite a lot of money. But of course, that’s relative, depending upon how much money you have. If you have had a splurge, then it means that you’ve spent more money than you normally would. And as I say, there’s a verb ‘to splurge’, meaning the same. So, I have splurged, you have splurged, he has splurged etc., or we can all ‘have a splurge’. In its meaning there’s the idea that there’s a bit of extravagance, you’ve perhaps gone a bit OTT or ‘over the top’. You’ve perhaps spent more than you really needed to, but it was enjoyable. Perhaps we all do this once in a while. As long as it’s not all the time, it should be fine to have a splurge.
It takes a lot of listening skill exercises before your brain can automatically recognise spoken English.
Learn English 125 Podcast English Listening Mp3 Designed To Improve Your Spoken English
Example Sentences
So here are some example sentences where you might use this. I’ll pause after each one of these, then you can have a go at pronouncing them too – rather like we do on our courses.
Adept English Courses
Here goes:
- Many football clubs splurge on expensive players, before the start of the new football season.
- We went to an expensive restaurant last week and we splurged on a four-course dinner. It was lovely.
- In the UK, there’s a splurge in spending in the run-up to the Christmas period.
- The splurge in lending led to many of the problems with banks in 2008.
- Last month I had a bit of a splurge and bought some new clothes and new shoes.
OK, I hope that helps anchor the word ‘splurge’ in your mind. And remember to ‘have a splurge’ doesn’t mean that you have to spend an enormous amount of money. It’s just you do something that you don’t do all the time. So you could splurge by going to get an ice cream. I hope you manage to have a splurge this coming weekend.
Download The Podcast Audio & Transcript
Goodbye
Anyway enough for now. Have a lovely day. Speak to you again soon. Goodbye.
PS: Lots More English Listening Practice
Well, I hope you enjoyed this listening English conversation audio, as much as we at Adept English did putting it together. We have lots of other English listening practice audio podcasts ready for you to listen to right now.
Each of our English listening podcasts is available to download as an mp3 and as always we provide a full script. We put out a longer podcast on Mondays and on Thursday we put out a shorter listening English story both are excellent listening activities for students and will improve your English listening skills.
