Listening practice for the commute
Short listening exercises built to fit a journey, from three stops to a ride across town.
Study time is hard to find. Commute time is already gone, which makes it the best time there is to practise listening.
These exercises are cut to fit a journey. The short ones run about as long as three stops on the Red Line. The longer ones fill a ride from one end of town to the other, with a natural stopping point in the middle in case your train arrives first.
Each one has the same shape: listen once without stopping, listen again with the script, then listen a third time without it. The third pass is the one that does the work, and it is also the one people skip. Do not skip it.
The audio is news-shaped rather than textbook-shaped — real speed, real accents, people talking over each other occasionally, because that is what you will meet. Headphones help. So does resisting the urge to look up a word the moment you miss it; the sentence usually explains itself two seconds later.