English Listening Comprehension: Native Speaker Conversation

Hello, and welcome back to engVid with me, Benjamin, and special guest, Rich.

That's right.

Two people, one video, two native speakers for the price of one.

Well, actually, it's free, isn't it, because it's on YouTube.

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Now, what are you going to get in this video today?

You are going to get authentic listening practice of a real-life conversation, at the end of

which you'll be able to do the quiz to make sure that you've understood basic elements

of the conversation.

Rich has a fascinating sort of life-work experience that he's going to be sharing to do with coming

from the UK and coming and working in North America, and also he - because he's moved

to Canada, he's had to do the IELTS test, so we'll be hearing first-hand experience

of a native speaker of English who has had to do the IELTS and how he found that.

So, Rich, tell us, whereabouts are you from in the UK?

I am from a county called Essex, which is just northeast of London, so I grew up there

until I was 17 years old, went to university in Brighton, about 50 miles south of London,

went to study English and linguistics in Brighton for three years, stayed there for another

seven.

So, I was in Brighton for roughly a decade before coming here to Canada, so.

So lots of people, when they go and visit the UK, tend to go to London and not many

other places outside of that.

That's true, yeah.

Would you recommend a little sort of jaunt down on the train down to Brighton?

Yeah.

Brighton is - Brighton's a beautiful city.

It's quite easy to get to from London.

You can take a train within about 45 minutes from London to get down to Brighton.

Fantastic nightlife, great restaurants, great people, there's a beach there, it doesn't

have sand, it has pebbles, which is not quite the same experience, but yeah, it's a great

city.

I hold Brighton in a very special place in my heart.

And it was there that you started your professional career as working in sales?

Yeah, yeah.

I had a few different jobs coming out of university.

I worked in a bar for a few years, as most people do.

That bar was next door to an office space, a lot of the people from that office used

to come and drink in the bar.

I got into a conversation with one of the managing directors in the patio, having a

cigarette break.

They were having a conversation about English and semantics, which I'd just written my dissertation

about.

So, I joined in a conversation with those guys, they asked me for a resume.

And then about three or four weeks later, I had a job, fairly entry-level job.

And was there for some time, ended up working for a different company just down the street,

kind of a small software company, software as a service company, quite niche in what

they do.

And that's the company that I've worked for now for eight years.

So that's interesting that you got one of your first jobs from a conversation from your

social skills and not being afraid to talk to someone outside of like a, you know, purposeful

conversation.

Yeah.

Well, there's the old saying, right?

It's not what you know, it's who you know.

So it was a fairly unorthodox route into what I do.

What I do now is kind of still loosely related to that very first job I had.

So if I kind of - if I look back over the timeline of my career, I owe a lot of what

I do now.

I owe where I live now to one conversation in a patio, in a bar, over a cigarette break.

Really?

And where do you live now?

I live here in Canada, in Toronto.

I've been here for about four years, just coming up to four years.

I worked for - I still work for the same company.

So I essentially relocated with the same business to help them grow in - right the way across

North America.

So you travel quite a lot for work?

Lots of travel.

Lots of travel.

I'm on a plane roughly every 10 days.

So it's a lot of travel to the US.

Our clients and our target market tends to be membership-based organizations, so large

trade organizations for engineers, for scientists, for mathematicians.

So it's a very niche customer base.

Most of those organizations are based in Washington DC, New York City, and Chicago.

So a lot of travel to all three of those cities, all three of which are quite close to Toronto.

They're all less than two hours on a plane.

And how is life on the road?

You were saying earlier that it's actually quite a lot of work, and although you sort

of take pictures of monuments when you go past them, it's, you know, most of the time

you are working hard.

Yeah, it's not as glamorous as it seems maybe in the movies or on Instagram.

It's a lot of hotels, a lot of airports, a lot of meeting rooms.

It is tiring, it's a lot of work, but it's fun as well.

I've been lucky enough to see some of the most wonderful cities in the US, you know,

Boston, New York City, Chicago, DC, you know, all these beautiful places.

Often I don't get much time to see them as much as I'd like.

So it's tiring.

I think the thing that makes it time well spent for me is as a salesperson, I really

value any face time I can have with a potential customer.

I'd much rather sit down in front of someone like we are now versus have a phone call or,

you know, speak on a kind of video conference or something like that.

I don't think you can ever underestimate the value and the power of having a face-to-face

conversation.

Interesting.

I'm going to take the conversation on a slightly different angle now.

So how are you enjoying life in North America generally as opposed to back home?

It's great, yeah.

It's quite cold here.

It was quite difficult for a British guy getting used to minus 30 degrees Celsius weather in

the wintertime.

But in general, I love Toronto.

The city of Toronto is beautiful.

Ontario as a province of Canada is stunning.

We're just coming out of the fall season now, the autumn season, which is absolutely magnificent

around here, just to drive around Ontario and see the trees changing color is stunning.

Looks like something from a postcard.

I am a big sports fan.

So, I mean, there's as much sport as you could possibly ever watch in a lifetime.

You've got used to ice hockey.

Yeah, I still get told off for calling it ice hockey and not hockey.

But yeah, I enjoy watching the Maple Leafs.

The Toronto Raptors had an incredible summer this year.

They won the NBA championship, which was basketball, yeah.

That was incredible.

There were tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people pouring onto the streets of Toronto

partying until three o'clock in the morning when they won the championship.

So it's great as a sports fan, this is a really cool place to be, quite literally, weatherwise.

And in terms of differences between here and back home, I mean, when I first met you, you

were talking about how you had to adjust the way you were speaking in business and you

had to kind of slow your speech down and that you were able to be a bit more direct.

Would you say there are communication differences between?

I think in business, yes, socially, not so much.

I think I don't have a problem so much with my British accent in Canada.

Canada, Toronto especially, is a very diverse place, you know, more than 50% of people that

live in Toronto were not born in Canada.

So it's a very, in fact, one of the most diverse cities in the world.

So here in Toronto, I don't have too many barriers, in fact, I don't think I have any

barriers socially.

Business is slightly different.

I deal with Americans quite frequently.

I think in some parts of America, a British accent is less common.

So as a result, I do have to slow things down a bit, just so they can pick up on certain

words.

"Numbers" is an interesting one.

Okay.

So if I say the number 14, I have to say "fourteen one four".

I cannot just say, you know, "This costs $14,000."

I have to say, "This costs fourteen one four thousand dollars."

Why?

What do they think you're saying?

Forty.

Right.

Because, you know, that's a small nuance to pick up in an unfamiliar accent for them.

Not for all of Americans, there's 350 billion of them.

So I cannot generalize everyone, but I'd say for some people, that's a challenge.

And I think I don't want to expect them to have to pick up on that.

If I understand and I know that that's challenging for some people, I want to make sure that

I'm being conscientious enough to help them understand, because I'm trying to be a consultant

to them as a business contact.

So that's an important consideration.

And one of the things you had to do coming to Canada was to do this IELTS.

Yes.

Was that a surprise to you that you were going to have to do that?

It was a surprise initially.

I studied English in England.

So it was a little bit surprising when I was told that as part of my application for permanent

residency here in Canada, I was required to do the IELTS test.

That being said, you know, it was an interesting experience.

It was actually the first exam that I'd sat since I left university in 2009, so just sitting

an exam was quite an interesting experience.

And you said to me earlier that you sort of aced top marks in the speaking, as no surprise

there, the listening, the reading, but the writing you found slightly difficult.

What do you think people might need to sort of be aware of?

Was it difficult to say?

I think the interesting part about the writing component of the test is you don't know the

situation that you're going to be given.

I did some, not so much practice, but I watched some YouTube videos, just like this one.

I read up on experiences that other people had had when they were sitting the exam, looked

at some example questions.

I even found some example tests online.

But I think the writing component is quite situational, so they give you a unique situation

that you need to replicate or to put yourself into.

So I guess in that way, it was a challenge because it was a new scenario for me to try

and replicate in some capacity.

Do you think for students who are trying to improve their writing, what kind of things

do you think they should do?

Is it about building their vocab, or what would you say?

So I think for the writing part, writing is almost becoming a lost art.

I mean, the scenario that I was given was primarily around letter writing, and it's

very rare, I mean, for me personally, but I think for a lot of people, to write a letter.

You know, if I write a formal letter to someone, I have to Google the format of it.

Where do I put the date?

Do I say, "Yours faithfully," or, "Yours sincerely," or, you know, things like this

that I, even as an English graduate, I don't know.

So I think practicing things like that, I guess, if you find yourself in situations

in real life where there's an opportunity to write a letter versus send an email, you

know, even just practice it, throw it in the trash, and then write an email is...

I mean, one of the problems about the computer is you can always rely on Google Translate

to sort you out, whereas if you're doing it kind of by hand, then you're hopefully using

a dictionary if you need one rather than a computer.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

You know, a handwritten letter is a beautiful thing, but it's not so much a common thing

anymore.

So, it sounds like this one job has, you know, kind of launched you, you've come out here,

you're having this exciting life out here in Canada, so I guess the lesson to learn

from that is, well, A, to stick with a good job when you have one, but also to make the

most of opportunities when they come your way.

Yeah, I think...

So for this position, when I was very young, I watched a lot of American movies and had

the American dream, so to speak.

Our company had been...

We've had a small number of US customers for quite a long time now, actually over a decade,

but there had long been a desire to really put roots in North America, put people here,

put sales people here, put marketing people here, put project management people here.

And I knew that I worked for a business that wanted to do that, and I knew that I loved

the America that I saw in the movies.

So there is a British culture, as you'll probably know, of going down the pub on a Friday after

work with all the staff and with your boss and sometimes even your boss's boss.

That's always a good opportunity, or certainly was in my eyes, to wait until someone's had

a couple of beers and then try and encourage them towards a certain decision.

So I worked under a guy who was a sales director for the business at the time, and I would

go down the pub every Friday and I would prod him and I would say, "Send me to America.

Send me to..." and he'd go, "No, can't wait."

But I did it again the next Friday, I'd be, "Hey, send me to America."

And I did this for six months.

And one day I got a phone call on a Saturday morning in my bedroom in Brighton, I got a

phone call from that guy and he said, "I can't get you to America, but I can get you pretty

close.

I can get you to Canada."

Amazing.

So I think it was, I mean, I guess the lesson I took from that that I've taken into later

life is, if there's something you want, you just got to keep running at it, almost to

the point where you were a pest, until you can really push that through.

This was a big dream for me, it's taught me a lot as a sales professional, as an individual

as well.

So, yeah, that's...

But I think you've done it in an intelligent way, like a lot of people sort of pack their

bags and run off to places without kind of good plans in place, like you kind of were

very persistent, you knew that you kind of had to have a support mechanism behind you

to make your American project a sustainable reality.

So it sounds like you've done really well.

It's been fun, it's been a good journey.

One last question, so you still go back to the UK and a place, well, a thing close to

your heart is your football team, which is the Hammers.

Yes, West Ham United, yeah.

I...

Well, my dad's side of my family are from East London, he's a big West Ham United fan,

so he used to take me to games when I was, you know, this big.

It's been a long and suffering journey as a West Ham fan.

They have a reputation as being sometimes a little aggressive.

They do.

That goes long back to the 1980s of, you know, some of the worst times in English football

for violence.

It's a much more mature club than that these days.

Unfortunately, the football hasn't got much better.

The violence has vastly improved and lessened, but the football hasn't improved at the same

time.

Prediction for the end of the season?

Mid-table.

Right.

Yeah.

I'd be fairly happy with anything between 7th and 10th, but to be honest, I'd just like

to watch a game on television without wanting to cry at the end of it right now.

That's all I ask for.

Well, I'm sure that's not the reaction our viewers are going to have at the end of this

video.

It's been absolutely fascinating to hear from you, Rich, and really, really generous of

you to come out and share all your experience and, you know, worldly wisdom with the guys

back home.

So, big thank you to Rich.

Yeah?

Cheers.

Thanks for having me.

I hope you enjoy the rest of your night.