English Listening Practice #7: How I Met My Wife (with Subtitles) - Intermediate and Advanced

Hello. This is Jack from ToFluency.com. I help English learners reach a high level of

English and this video is going to give you some advanced listening practice. So, I’m

going to tell you the story of how I met my wife and you can download the free worksheet

that comes with this video. It gives you the transcript, analysis of the language I used,

further examples and also an exercise. So, here is the story.

As I have mentioned before, in 2007 I went traveling for 9 months. I went on my own,

started in the U.S. and basically had an amazing time. After 7 or 8 weeks in the U.S., I took

a flight to Ecuador, to Quito, and in Quito I decided to go to a language school because

I couldn’t speak any Spanish and I was going to spend a lot of time in South America. So,

I thought it’d be very beneficial if I went to a language school.

When I arrived in Ecuador, I found a hostel, stayed in there for a couple of days and then

decided to go and find a good language school. I had 2 options at this time. Let’s call

them Language School A and Language School B. Language School A was my first choice and

I wanted to go there. So, I found where this was on a map, exited the hostel and thought

“Okay, I need to turn right to go find this language school.” But, when I got out the

map when I was outside a guy came over to me and he asked me “Where are you going?

What are you trying to find?” And, I said, “I want to find this language school.”

And he said, “No. It’s not that way. It’s that way.” And, I thought he was wrong but

he was local, he was very confident and he said, “It’s definitely that way.” So,

I started to walk in the direction in which he told me to go and after 5 minutes of walking

I came to a junction and I saw the name of the street. So, I thought I’d look on my

map to see where I was and to get directions. And, I’d realized that he sent me the wrong

way. I was correct. He was wrong. He had sent me the wrong way. But, he had sent me towards

Language School B, my second choice and it was pretty close. I decided just to go there,

to go to that language school because it was really close to where I was.

So, I made my way there. When I got to the second choice, Language School B, there were

a couple of people in the office. There was a Canadian guy and a girl from Australia and

they both told me how good this language school was. They told me about the parties they had,

the teachers, the fact that you could stay in the language school. So, you can roll out

of bed in the morning, start your language lessons and then enjoy the rest of the day.

So, they convinced me to go to this language school so I just decided I was going to do

it. I decided just to go for that language school instead of going back to my first choice

and it was in this language school where I met my wife.

So, she was studying at the time at university but during the summer she went over to the

language school for a couple of weeks to improve her Spanish. We met. We connected. We got

on really well and we started our relationship. Now, what’s interesting about this story

is this. If that guy had given me the correct directions, then I wouldn’t have met my

wife and I wouldn’t be living in the U.S. right now. So, it’s funny how these small

things can make a big impact on your life and shape exactly what happens to you.

Now, just to give you the rest of the story, I continued traveling for a few months, went

back home and we continued our relationship before we moved to Spain. We spent a couple

of years in Spain together and then moved here to the U.S. and we’ve been here for

5 years now. So, like I said at the beginning of this video,

there is a free transcript, analysis, exercises and more examples that you can download. So,

just click the link now and you can download this for free. Thank you for watching this

video and I’ll see you next time.