The Sunday Phone Call

Beginner

3 min

Pro

A weekly phone call home, with family news about rain, a fan nobody wants to pay for, and the quiet afterwards.

A beginner-level session of about 3 minutes. A 121-word passage, scored word by word.

"The" is the commonest word in English and it opens with the sound this passage is built on, which means you have already either made it or missed it a few hundred times today without once thinking about it. That is the whole difficulty in a line. This sound lives in small grammatical words that go past unstressed and fast, and the substitute for it, a d with the tongue behind the teeth and the airflow stopped dead, is quicker to produce than the real thing. Speed is not the enemy, though. These words are meant to be light and quick. What they cannot be is closed: the tongue still has to reach the teeth and the air still has to keep moving, even when the whole word lasts a fraction of a second.

Angles worth taking

Put two fingers on your throat for one read, and check that the buzz begins before the vowel does.
Keep the small words fast and light; change what the tongue does, not how long the word takes.
After a word that ends in a consonant the tongue takes a shortcut backwards, so check those joins first.
Do not fix it by leaning on the little words, which leaves the reading odder than the substitution ever was.

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.

the

this

that

they

then

there

weather

brother

How the passage opens

My brother called on Sunday to complain about the weather. He said rain came without warning and soaked all the clothes on their line. My mother laughed at him for leaving them out. Then she told me about another argument.…

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

121 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

Let the th buzz with the voice on in the small everyday words - the, this, that, they, then, there - as well as in mother, brother, weather and breathe.