Recursio
Calm English Listening
Slow, gentle English (B1) for the evening, a quiet walk, or before you sleep. Every episode comes with a full transcript and a list of useful phrases you can practice in Recursio.
Slow English for the end of the day
Calm English Listening is the slow half of the section: a quiet evening at home, a walk by the river, a long train journey. One voice, long pauses, no plot and nothing to solve. The English is ordinary, descriptive and gentle — the vocabulary of weather, light, rooms and small unhurried actions.
These episodes are for listening when you are tired and would otherwise not practise at all. They are not a way to learn while you sleep — that does not work, and we will not claim it does. What they do is keep your daily contact with English going on the days when a B1 conversation is too much work, and they teach the everyday descriptive vocabulary that situation-based episodes rarely cover.
As with everything here, the phrase list and the full transcript are on the page. Listening once, half-attentively, is a perfectly good use of them.
Where to start
- A Quiet Evening at Home — Calm English Listening — rain on the window, a cup of tea, and the vocabulary of winding down.
- A Calm Night Before Sleep — Calm English Listening — the slowest episode we make — for the last twenty minutes of the day.
- A Long Train Journey — Calm English Listening — fields going past a window, and the language of doing nothing in particular.