Listening Practice Glossary

Dictation: you type every word you hear. It is the precision drill — it surfaces the exact words, endings, and small grammar sounds you missed instead of letting them slide past.

Blanks: you type only the missing words. A lighter version of dictation that works well as a warm-up or a review pass on material you already know.

Echo: you listen and complete the line first, then say it back aloud and compare what was recognized. It trains recall and pronunciation in your own voice — you hear yourself say the sounds, not just recognize them.

Shadowing: you echo the speaker aloud while the audio is still playing, staying a heartbeat behind. It builds rhythm, intonation, and the real-time speech reflexes conversations demand.

XP (experience points): points earned for each completed attempt — a running measure of your total practice volume.

Streak: the number of consecutive days with at least one completed attempt. It resets when a day is missed.

Accuracy: the share of a segment you got right, tracked separately for each practice mode.

Segment: a short chunk of audio — usually a sentence or two. Every exercise is broken into segments so practice happens in small listen-attempt-check rounds.

Transcript: the written text of what the audio says, used to check your answer after each attempt.

CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages): the standard six-level scale — A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2 — used to tag exercise difficulty. A1–A2 is basic, B1–B2 is independent, and C1–C2 is proficient.

Use the labels as a guide, not a gate. Pick material you mostly understand and nudge the level up over time — a label tells you about the exercise, not about what you are allowed to try.

Connected speech: the way words blend together in natural talk — did you becomes didja, going to becomes gonna. It is the main reason spoken English is harder to catch than written English.

Linking: a sound that joins two words, like the /j/ in I agree. Reduction: a word said in a weakened form, like to said as tuh. Weak forms: grammar words (a, of, was) spoken softly and quickly. These three phenomena are what dictation trains your ear to catch.