In this episode, I'm joined by Cara Leopold from Leo Listening. Cara is an online English listening skills coach, and movie fan who helps adventurous expats and intrepid travellers harness their love of movies to understand authentic English, so they can connect with the cultures behind the films and other movie lovers around the world.

Cara has an amazing community called 'Movie Club'. 'Movie Club' is a community for movie lovers who want to understand authentic spoken English and speak it too. You’ll find new confidence in your listening, speaking and pronunciation skills because you’ll use short, regular activities that work to help you improve. And you’ll have a native speaker (Cara) watching alongside you to offer a quick explanation…or a little feedback when you need it.

She is a language learner herself as she's from Scotland but speaks fluent French, so you'll hear us talk about:

• understanding fast speech
• living abroad
• the importance of noticing language and active listening
• what's wrong with the way listening skills are taught
• watching movies in another language
• English accents and the sexiest English accent in the world

She also shared her own story about a photo of a dinner with her colleagues she took in Turkey (link below)

Given that this is mainly an episode about listening skills, at the end of it I decided to focus on a little pronunciation feature I'd noticed in Cara's speech: the glottal stop. This is a type of consonant sound that might make native speakers of English hard to understand. You'll find a link to a YouTube video below if you want to explore this in more detail.

Episode Links

• Cara's photo (www.stolaroid.com/cara)
• Cara's website (leo-listening.com)
• Cara's Movie Club (leo-listening.com/movie-club)
• Cara's free guide on how to understand movies (leo-listening.com/understand-movies-in-english)
• The Ricky Gervais Show (Season 1, Episode 1) Lots of glottal stops there! (youtube.com/watch?v=aRhiEhz5EIM)
• The Kiwi accent is the sexiest in the world (article) (lonelyplanet.com/articles/sexiest-accent-suvey-kiwi-new-zealand)
• The glottal stop explained (YouTube video by Pronunciation with Emma) (youtube.com/watch?v=chcjHwWwVxQ)
• My podcast page on my website (stolaroid.com/stories)

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