The Senses: See, Watch, Stare and Glance in English

Katie says she hates "the sound of fingers scratching down a blackboard", and Tom answers with a heartfelt "Oh God yeah." A few clips later he's explaining the expression "silent but violent or silent but deadly", and Katie's verdict is immediate: "That's disgusting!" That's roughly where a unit about the five senses ends up when nobody is reading from a script. Along the way you'll sort out hear and listen, watch and look at, and why staring at strangers in restaurants is a bad idea.

What you'll hear in this episode

The unit is built from short unscripted clips of Katie and Tom talking, with the target words replaced by a beep. Your job is to guess the missing word before the answer comes. So one clip has someone admitting they don't watch much TV any more and used to listen to the radio a lot; another has one of the speakers saying he absolutely hates it when people stare at him in a restaurant, while it's "kind of acceptable" to glance at people in public, "but staring, is very rude".

After each set of clips comes a scripted teaching section where the meanings are checked and you repeat after the beeps. This is where the classic errors get corrected: I can't listen you becomes I can't hear you, I looked at the movie becomes watch, because "we usually use watch, when something's moving".

The second half moves to smell, taste and touch. There's jasmine and lavender, crisps versus cakes as savoury and sweet, the bitter salt-and-lemon of a margarita, the aromatic smell of curry cooking, and the therapeutic business of stroking a dog. Then the farts arrive, Katie declares that Thomas is going to "drag the tone of our conversations right down", and Tom cheerfully agrees: "I certainly will."

Quick facts

Episode	3.12 – The Senses
Pack	Vocabulary and Pronunciation 3
Level	3
Duration	15 minutes 13 seconds
Words and phrases taught	15
Audio	Free to download
Workbook	Included in the €39 all-in-one pack

What you'll learn

The useful thing about the sense verbs is that the mistakes are so predictable. Hear is what your body does whether you want it to or not; listen takes effort. See is noticing with your eyes; look is deliberate; watch usually involves something that moves. The unit walks you through each contrast with a right-or-wrong question rather than a rule to memorise.

The pronunciation work is specific. You'll hear that at is weak in look at that, that the past form looked at ends in a /t/ sound, and that rough "sounds completely different to the spelling" because the gh is pronounced /f/. It sounds finishes with a /z/. Savoury looks as though it should be /seɪvɔːri/ but the middle is /və/. Aromatic gets its own drill, with the stress on the third syllable and a weak /rə/ in the second, and bitter shows the two-syllable pattern with stress on the first and a weak /ə/ on the second.

You also get practice with it looks like and it sounds like for guessing and predicting — exactly what Katie does when she says it "really looks like Thomas is going to drag the tone of our conversations right down".

Vocabulary from this unit

to stare /steə/ – to look at something for a long time without moving our eyes away, it is often thought to be rude. Tom's restaurant complaint.
to glance /ɡlɑːns/ – to look quickly at something and then look away. The acceptable alternative.
rough /rʌf/ – feels hard or bumpy; smooth /smuːð/ – feels nice with no bumps. Both appear in the clip about skin.
bitter /bɪtə/ – with a strong taste that is not sweet. The margarita.
savoury /seɪvəri/ – not sweet, sometimes salty. The crisps.
aromatic /ærəmætɪk/ – smells nice, like spices or flowers. The curry kitchen.
silent /saɪlənt/ – without any sound. You know which clip.
to stroke /strəʊk/ – to touch something with your hand and move it up and down along the surface, like stroke a dog.

What's in the workbook

The workbook for this unit is part of the paid all-in-one pack. It opens with the introduction and then gives you the full transcript of every clip — first with the beeps marked, then with the missing words filled in, so you can check your guesses word by word.

The Extra Materials at the back contain a 22-entry glossary with phonemic transcriptions and plain-English definitions, covering everything from hear and listen to stroke, plus notes such as the example "He sounds nice" for the guessing use of sound.

Then three practice exercises: Practice 1 asks you to underline the correct word in six sentences (Can you hear / listen to that?), Practice 2 is five short reasoning questions — would a rubbish bin be aromatic, can something feel savoury — and Practice 3 is a pronunciation task where you decide whether the underlined sounds in pairs like rough / stroke and sounds / smooth are the same or different. Full answers are included, with the phonemes written out.

Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39

Questions

Is the audio really unscripted?

The conversations between Katie and Tom are unscripted, which is why they wander into farts. The teaching sections that set up the tasks and give the answers are scripted, so the instructions stay clear.

What level is this episode?

Level 3, from the Vocabulary and Pronunciation 3 pack. It assumes you already know see, hear and smell and want the finer distinctions.

What's the difference between hear and listen?

As the unit puts it: anytime you're awake, you're hearing things. To listen, you must actually try. So you turn on the radio to listen to music, not to hear it.

Do I need the workbook to follow along?

No — the audio works on its own. The workbook gives you the transcripts, the glossary and the three written exercises with answers.

How long is it?

15 minutes 13 seconds, teaching 15 words and phrases.

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