English Recordings

A. Have you read the article?
B．Yes, I did. I think it's absolutely ridiculous.
A．But you know what? I think there's some truth to it.

A．I went to Salvatore's last night.
B．How long did you have to wait to be seated?
A．For an hour and a half. But it was definitely worth the wait.

A. I finally got this new game.
B．You did? Do you like it?
A．Yes, it's a really good game. It was worth the wait.

Hello my name is Bastien, I’m 16 and I live in the South-East of France. French pupils go back to school the first week of September. It’s a new school for me this year! I hope I’ll make some new friends and my teachers will be cool. My new school is a vocational high school. I want to become a chef. I will study catering. I live far away from this new school. I will have to get up early to go to school. I will have to take the school bus at 7 o’clock in the morning. School starts at 7.45 a.m. and finishes at 5.45 p.m. I will have to be on time, I hate to be late. My mother will drive me to school on Wednesdays and Fridays. I want to become a Chef and work abroad. I’d love to work in the United States. Imagine being a French chef in New York !!! For the moment, I have to be ready for this new school-year!

baa'd bud
baas bus
balm bum
bastard bustard
branch brunch
calf cuff
calm come
can't cunt
dance dunce
dramas drummers
fast fussed
grant grunt
graph gruff
haft huffed
half huff
lakh luck
lakhs luxe
last lust
staff stuff
task tusk

curs cos [kɜr] [kəz]
diverse divers [ˈdaɪ vɜrs] [ˈdaɪ vərz]
earn 'un [ɜrn] [ən]
foreword forward [ˈfɔrˌwɜrd] [ˈfɔr wərd]
upturn Upton [ˈʌpˌtɜrn] [ˈʌp tən]

bull buhl [bʊl] [bul]
could cooed [kʊd] [kud]
full fool [fʊl] [ful]
hood who'd [hʊd] [hud]
looker lucre ['lʊkər] [ˈlu kər]
look Luke [lʊk] [luk]
pull pool [pʊl] [pul]
should shooed [ʃʊd] [ʃud]
soot suit [sʊt] [sut]
wood wooed [wʊd] [wud]

pronunciation

My name is Jane. I am ten years old. I have long straight hair and big blue eyes. My hair is black. I am tall and young. I am wearing a pink dress, purple shoes and a white hat. I'm also wearing my favorite black jacket!

MISSION : You’ve made Joe’s acquaintance, a Canadian from Ontario, on Skype. He is the same age as you and he complains about being constantly bullied by one of the pupils from his class (insulted, threatened, handled roughly…).
You send him a message in which you give him pieces of advice to try to get off this situation. Unfortunately, he doesn’t understand French… but English very well !
You will give him at least 3 tips and will finish your message in a reassuring way.

There is a problem that will touch us all – men, women and children – in the not too distant future, a problem that resolves itself into a question: what is education for? At the moment most of us can answer that fairly practically and without too much soul-searching. On the lowest level education is for enabling us to cope in an adult world where money must be added up, tax forms filled in, numbers looked up in telephone directories, maps read, curtains measured and street signs understood. On the next level it is for getting some kind of job that will pay a living wage.
But we are already peering into a future so different from anything we would now recognize as familiar that the last of these two educational aims may become as obsolete as a dodo. Basic skills (reading, writing and arithmetic) will continue to be necessary but these, after all, can be taught to children in from one to two years during their childhood. But education with a view to working for a living, at least in the sense of earning daily bread, may well be on its way out right now for the majority of us. Then the question ‘what is education for?’ becomes much more complex. Because what the future proclaims is: an education is an education is an education.
In other words, our grandchildren may well spend their lives learning as, today, we spend our lives working. This does not simply involve a straightforward substitution of activity but a complex transformation of motive. We work for things basically unconnected with that work – usually money, prestige, success, security. We will learn for learning’s sake alone: a rose is a rose because it is and not what we can get out of it. Nor need any cynic doubt that we shall not wish to work without there being any obvious end in view. Already, adult education classes are overcrowded – one friend of mine teaching French literature says she could have had 10 pupils for every one she has.
Nevertheless, we still live in a very competitive society and most of us will need to reshuffle the furniture of our minds in order to gear our children towards a future in which outer rewards – keeping up with the Joneses – become less relevant than inner and more individual spurs. The existence of competition has always meant doing things because they win us some essentially unconnected advantage but the aim of the future must be to integrate the doing with its own reward, like virtue.
Oddly enough it is in America, that citadel of competitiveness, that the first experiments in this change of mind are taking place. In that New World, there are already organisations set up to examine ways in which competitiveness can be replaced by other inner-directed forms of rewards and pleasures. Take one interesting example in a Foundation whose aim is to transform competitive sport. A tug-of-war, as we all know, consists of one team pitting its strength against another team. The aim is to tug the opposing team over a line and, by doing so, win.
In the brand-new non-competitive version, things are very different. There are still two teams on either end of a rope but now the aim is not to win but to maintain the struggle. As the two teams tug, any individual on either team who senses a coming victory must let go the winning end of the rope and rush over to lend his weight to the other side, thus redressing the balance, and keeping the tug-of-war going as long as possible. If you actually imagine doing this, the startling fact that emerges is that the new game offers more possibilities of individual judgement and skill just because victory is not the aim and the tug-of-war is ended only by defeat of those judgements and skills. What’s more, I think most people would get more pleasure out of the neo-tug than the old winners-take-all concept.
So could it be for learning. Most of us at some time or another, have glimpsed one of the real pleasures of education – a sort of one-person chase after an elusive goal that pits You only against You or, at the very most, against the discoveries of the greatest minds of other generations. On a more humble level, most of us have already got some pleasurable hobby that we enjoy for its own sake and become expert in for that enjoyment. In my own stumbling efforts, since last year, to learn the piano, I have seen the future and it works.
From an article by Jill Tweedie in the Guardian