【音频完整文本】
Hey everyone! This is Alison from HJ English. Today I want to talk about some of the common problems I noticed in this week's episode of "English Unraveled: The Basic". This week, we talked about informal English to use with your friends and fellow classmates. It's important to remember that there are lots of different ways to express your feelings in English, so you can be really creative when telling people how you feel.
It's also important to remember that it's ok to tell people WHY you feel happy, sad, tired, nervous or excited. If you want to become better friends with someone, you share more with them, right? If you share something about yourself when you're talking with someone, it makes it easier for them to find something in common with you. Once you find things that you have in common, conversation becomes much easier.
For example, listen to me read this conversation between two classmates, Lauren and Bethany:
"Hey Lauren, long time no see! How's it going?"
"Hey Bethany, it's going alright. I'm a little nervous about my exam tomorrow though."
"Oh I know how you feel! I had a huge exam last week, and I didn't have much time to study".
"Ooh, that's scary. Did you get your marks back yet?"
"Nope - we get them tomorrow."
"Oh ok. Well good luck - let me know how you do, and then we can celebrate finishing our exams together!"
"Definitely! See you tomorrow, and good luck!"
This conversation demonstrates why it's important to explain your feelings when someone asks you how you are. None of that conversation would have been possible if Lauren would not have shared her fear about her exam.
Now I'd like to talk about some common speech problems for this episode. First, pay attention to the Long-A sound, like in the words "complain" and "lately". Long vowel sounds need to beemphasized and stretched out. ["Com-PLAIN, LATE-ly, Com-PLAIN, LATE-ly"].
The last thing I'm going to talk about today is how to connect your words together to help phrases flow smoothly. Let's look at the phrase "one of those days". When you say the words "one of", the 'n' sound connects the two words. It pulls them together so that they really sound like one word. This happens because the word 'of' starts with a vowel. Listen to how I say it: ["one of those days. One of those days"]. The phrase "what are you up to" uses the same idea. ["What are you up to? What are you up to?"]
I hope you find these suggestions useful. Overall, the homework for this week was excellent. Don't forget to connect your words and emphasize your long vowel sounds in next week's episodes! Bye for now!
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