Week 2 · Session 3
One sentence, taken apart
Fifteen seconds understood completely beats an hour half-followed.
~35 minWarm up
3 minutes
Someone says “wow” in the middle of your sentence. They want you to:
One sentence, taken completely apart
4 minutes
Rachel calls this a Ben Franklin exercise. You take a few seconds of real conversation and study every single sound in it — every dropped T, every reduced word, every join.
This is slow work and it feels inefficient. It is the opposite. Twenty seconds of speech understood completely teaches your ear more than twenty minutes of listening you half-follow.
Watch: a full analysis of two lines
12 minutes
The whole video is about two short sentences. That is the point. Watch how much was hiding inside them.
Now do it yourself
8 minutes
Go back to Meet Stoney from Session 1. Pick any fifteen seconds. Play it over and over — ten times if you need to — and write down every word you hear.
- First pass: write what you catch. Leave blanks.
- Second pass: fill in one more blank.
- Keep going until nothing new arrives.
- Then turn on the captions and see what you missed.
Whatever was still blank on your last pass — that goes on your Couldn't-Catch List, word for word. Those blanks are the most useful thing you will produce this week.
Record your voice note
3 minutes
“Describe a conversation you had recently with two other people. What was it about, and how did you know when it was your turn to speak?”
Save it as “Week 2 — Voice Note 2”.
Couldn't-Catch List
ongoing
Add the blanks from your fifteen-second exercise. Mark them W2-S3 so your teacher knows they came from careful listening rather than a passing moment.