The Day We Shifted House

Advanced

3 min

Pro

A first-person account of moving house, and of getting one heavy almirah up a narrow staircase.

An advanced-level session of about 3 minutes. A 125-word passage, scored word by word.

Two things can go wrong at the end of these words, and they are opposites. One is that a consonant goes missing, so a word with three sounds stacked at its end arrives carrying two. The other is that a small vowel appears between the consonants to make them easier to get through, which keeps every sound present but adds a syllable the word does not have. The second is much harder to catch, because nothing is missing; the word is complete, merely longer, and from the inside it sounds like careful reading. English allows longer runs of consonants at the end of a word than many languages do, and the grammatical endings stack on top of those runs, so a single word can finish on three consonants with no vowel anywhere among them.

Angles worth taking

Slow the word before the cluster rather than the cluster itself, since slowing the cluster is what invites a vowel in.
Release the final consonant cleanly and then stop, with no small vowel trailing along behind it.
Count on playback how many consonants you actually produced in the longest endings, instead of trusting the read.
Where the next word starts with a consonant, the cluster gets simplified without you noticing, so take those joins singly.
A grammatical ending stacked on a cluster is the deepest case of all, and the sound most at risk carries the meaning.

Phrases to reach for

These are shown to you before the session starts. They are what you are asked to use, not a list the scorer is checking off.

last

month

hardest

wrapped

steps

bursts

breathed

against

How the passage opens

We shifted house last month, and the hardest part was the staircase. My father had wrapped the glass in newspaper and written on the lid of each box. The steps were narrow, so we turned the almirah on its side…

Ready to speak?

Part of Pro. You need a TalkDrill account on a Pro plan to speak — reading this page does not.

Browse all read-aloud passages

The format

Passage length

125 words

Modes

Learn (guided) · Mock (exam-real)

How a read-aloud session works

Pick a passage

Passages are graded from short and simple to long and dense. The length and the level are on every card.

Read it aloud

The text stays on screen while you record. Read at a normal pace — rushing to finish is itself one of the things being measured.

See it marked up

Every word comes back scored: accurate, unclear, or missed. The problem sounds are highlighted where they occurred.

Re-record the hard line

Go back to the sentence that scored worst and read it again. That single loop is where most of the improvement happens.

What you're scored on

A read-aloud report has four numbers, and knowing which one is low tells you what to practise — they are not interchangeable.

Your objective

Keep every consonant in the cluster, add no vowel between them, and do not let the last sound drop off the end of the word.

Accuracy

How close each word was to the expected pronunciation, scored per word rather than averaged into one verdict.

Fluency

Pace and pausing. Pausing at commas reads as fluent; pausing mid-phrase to decode the next word does not.

Completeness

The words that never arrived — skipped articles, dropped past-tense endings, swallowed plurals.

Prosody

Stress and intonation: whether the sentence lands with emphasis in the right place, or flat from end to end.