🏢 REF - ARCHIVED: "NEW UX Train Your Ear: 3rd bite" (with the old structure: isolation -> integration)
✅ Appetiser
🔒 Train Your Ear:
____ ✅ 1st bite
____ ✅ 2nd bite
____🧑🎓 3rd bite 📍
____ 🔒 4th bite
____ 🔒 5th bite
____ 🔒 6th bite
🔒 Dessert 🍇🍒😋
🎯 Purpose → By the end of this page, this part of the video will make sense:
How are we going to achieve this? 2 steps:
- 🧱 Isolation — First, Get The Building Blocks: Become able to recognise each word by ear, in isolation.
- 🏗️ Integration — Then, Put it all together: Become able to catch those words in the overwhelmingly uninterrupted flow of sounds we call 'sentences'.
I'll help you tackle each challenge one by one.
Step 1/2: Get The Building Blocks 🧱
Explore the following Ear Trainers, and remember: you're not supposed to get them right. So you may wonder...
Why are the answers hidden?
They're hidden to help you:
- be active and fully present, so your energy-conscious brain can’t just coast on autopilot.
- focus on one thing at a time: first the sound, then the spelling, and finally the meaning. Brains absorb more this way than by skimming.
- retain what you learn — if you always follow the GPS, you’ll never learn to navigate for yourself. In other words: giving the answer = stealing the learning.
Listen to the recording:
Now, open the folded sections one by one:
🗣️👂What you hear: Honest Spelling
õ-né-par-ti
🔍 The problem with sounds is they vanish the second you hear them. But Honest Spelling captures them on the fly and puts them on pause, giving you all the time you need to try to identify words.
🔡📜 What we write
on est partis
🔍 Sadly for us all, French Spelling loves playing hide-and-seek with sounds. By comparison, Honest Spelling looks foreign — but only because we’re not used to seeing what our ears actually hear.
🇬🇧🇺🇸 What it means
we left / we have left
🔍 Have you noticed? These questions mirror the natural way your brain processes spoken French:
- Pure sounds come into your ears
- You map those sounds to French words you know
- You connect them to English words (and later, directly to meanings)
For now, we're walking through these steps carefully, but with practice your brain will get better at doing them automatically.
🗣️👂What you hear (Honest Spelling)
🔡📜 What we write
🇬🇧🇺🇸 What it means
Feeling frustrated? Click here.
🗣️👂What you hear (Honest Spelling)
🔡📜 What we write
🇬🇧🇺🇸 What it means
🗣️👂What you hear (Honest Spelling)
🔡📜 What we write
🇬🇧🇺🇸 What it means
Feeling frustrated? Click here.
Note to Valentin: Bake spacing in: at the bottom of A2, put an Ear Trainer with the A1 sentence/phrase again. Etc.
👉 Next step: TK
Make It Second Nature
Natural spoken French can sometimes feel like a machine-gun firing word-bullets at dizzying speed. To keep up, you need to train your brain to turn effortful recognition into instant reflexes.
How?
By doing the Ear Trainers again and again, until you can recognise the words in a split second.
/toggle: Learning Is Not a One-Time Event
It's no coincidence that most words related to successful learning start with "re":remember, recall, retrieve, reconnect... rappeler, retrouver, relier.... Each time you pause, recall, and re-connect the dots, you create deeper, more resilient memories. You transform fleeting sounds into lasting, physical neural pathways.
You can do that by redoing the Ear Trainers on this page, or by using the Fluency Workout: a mini-game that randomly tests you on each Ear Trainers until you can catch every word in the blink of an eye.
Note: the Fluency Workout is normally a Doer-only feature — but for the first bite, everyone gets access.
Don't have access? Go back to the Ear Trainers and scroll up and down randomly to avoid relying on the questions order. Click here to refresh the page and close the 'click-to-reveal' sections. TK LINK#ear-trainers.
Shuffle's 2 answer buttons:
- Green: Let's Get More Practice On This One / Not Quite Instantaneous Yet 😌
- Red: Got it right EASILY & In a Split Second ⚡
- "Note: We're used to Green = Correct and Red = mistake, bad grade, bad person, YOU HOPELESS IDIO... Red is often used for danger and things to be be extra careful with, like ⛔ 🆘 👹. I purposefully
👉 Next step: TK
Step 2/2: Put it all together 🏗️
Time to go from isolated words to flowing French sentences. Here's the plan:
- Step 2.2: 🕵🏻♂️ Train Your Word Detection Skills
- Step 2.3: 🍇🍒😋 Harvest What You Learned
2.2 - 🕵🏻♂️ Train Your Word Detection Skills
- 🎯 Your goal: Catch every word in Syllable Spacing — not just in Word Chop.
- 🍴 How? Go back and forth to connect the dots between the two recordings as many times as needed.
- 😩 If you're stuck, take a break — go for a walk without your phone, have a drink... And come back with a fresh mind.
Let’s sharpen your ability to hear where words begin and end in the middle of real speech.
First, listen to Syllable Chop and see how many words you can catch:
Then, use Word Chop to confirm or revise your guesses:
Can't recognise some of the words in Word Chop? No problem. Click here to train your ear on individual words again. You've got this 🙌
👉 Once you can catch every word in Syllable Chop, head to step 2.3 below.
2.3 - 🍇🍒😋 Harvest What You Learned
Time to reap the fruits of your labour: watch the clip again.
🐢 Still challenging? Slow and steady wins the race, so take your time:
Watch the video at 0.5x speed, over and over until you can catch most of it, then gradually increase the speed.
- Click the gear icon ⚙️ (bottom-right corner of the video player)
- Click Playback speed
- Select 0.5×.
🗣️📜 Real Transcript
🖋️📜 Polished Transcript
🇬🇧🇺🇸 Direct Translation
🇬🇧🇺🇸 Natural Translation
TK VALENTIN: Spaced Rep baked in: give a clip that combines this part and previous parts. This way you give a feeling of compounding progress, upward trajectory, building on what you've just learned.
"Last bite" page: last bite clip + penultimate bite clip. Keep the full vid for the "Dessert" page.
Only move on once you're happy with your progress.
This isn't a sprint.
Be French: take your time, savour the process. 🍷
- If you don't understand enough in the video, go back to Syllable Chop.
- If you don't understand enough in Syllable Chop, go back to Word Chop.
- If you can't catch every word in Word Chop, train your ear on individual words again.
- And if none of those help, give yourself a break. Take a walk, a nap, a drink. Come back with a fresh mind.
FREE USERS ONLY TALLY FORM
👉 Let's replicate your first success with the rest of the video:
VALENTIN: CAREFUL WITH WHAT IS GREYED OUT WITH THIS
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