A voicemail message

Listen to a voicemail message and answer the questions to practise your listening skills.

Do the preparation task first.

Then listen to the audio and do the exercises.

Preparation

Transcript

John: Hi, this is John. Thanks for calling. I'm not here at the moment, so please leave a message and I'll call you back.

Marina: Hi, John, this is Marina Silva calling from Old Time Toys. Your colleague Alex gave me your phone number. She said you can help me.

I need some information on your new products. Could you please call me when you are back in the office? My phone number is 0-2-0-8, 6-5-5-7-6-2-1.

Also, can you please email me your new brochure and information about your prices? My email address is Marina, that's M-A-R-I-N-A, dot Silva, S-I-L-V-A, at O-L-D-T-I-M-E hyphen toys dot com.

Thanks a lot. I look forward to hearing from you.

Task 1

Exercise

Task 2

Exercise

Discussion

Do you ever make phone calls or leave voicemail messages in English?

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Worksheet70.36 KB

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Language level

A1 Elementary

Marina said some words unclear, for example, she said "all" instead "old", and she pronounced "a" instead "e" for "oldtime(a)". In those moments I'm starting to worry and become distracted. Anybody knows how to overcome this?

Hello AzizKA,

One of the things about English is how many different ways of speaking it has. Sometimes these are dialects connected to where a person comes from. In the UK, for example, it's enough to travel 50km - say, from Manchester to Liverpool - to hear a completely different accent. In addition, there are many non-native speakers of English. In fact, English has the distinction of being the first living language (i.e. not a dead language like Latin) which has more non-native speakers than native speakers. All this means that you will hear many different ways of speaking and we try to reflect that in the texts on our site. Marina is a fluent speaker whose English is excellent but she is a non-native speaker and has a Portuguese accent.

The best way to get used to the range of voices you will hear in English is to listen to a lot of them. Familiarity makes it easier, and this is why we have such a range of voices on LearnEnglish.

Peter

The LearnEnglish Team