Tandem Hour Languages

Tandem Hour LanguagesCourse 01Sounds and greetings for travellers

Beginner4 weeks5 lessons

Sounds and greetings for travellers

This course trains your ear for the sounds English speakers tend to miss. You hear short arrival scenes at natural speed, then repeat them slowly with a partner.

By the end you can

  1. Recognise where one spoken word ends
  2. Greet staff politely at any time of day
  3. Pronounce the sounds English speakers often swallow
  4. Compare formal and informal hellos

Lessons

  1. Hello and goodbyeGreetings for morning, afternoon and evening.20 min
  2. Sounds we lackThe vowels and consonants English speakers find hardest.25 min
  3. At the hotel deskGiving your name and confirming a booking.25 min
  4. Please and thank youSmall courtesy words and when locals use them.20 min
  5. Role-play: arrival dayOne full arrival scene, practised aloud in pairs.30 min

Plenty of people arrive in Seville or Lyon with years of school grammar behind them and still go quiet at the hotel desk. The problem is rarely vocabulary. It is sound. If you cannot hear where one word stops and the next starts, even phrases you know will slip past you, and your own replies come out slowly because you are reading them in your head before you speak.

Why we start with the ear

This course trains listening and speaking before anything else. Each lesson takes one short scene, such as checking in or saying hello to a shopkeeper, and plays it at natural speed. Your teacher then slows it down, marks the sounds that trouble English speakers, and has you repeat it with a partner inside a small live group class.

You choose the language: Spanish, French, Italian or German. The scenes are the same in all four, so if your trips take you to more than one country you can pick up a second language later and recognise the shape of each lesson straight away.

Greetings come first for a plain reason. They set the tone of every exchange that follows, and a warm, clear hello usually buys you a little patience for the rest.

Fig. 01.3 — Small phrases join up into one confident café order

Course outline

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