Welcome to our Real English Conversations audio MP3 lessons.
These podcast conversations were recorded over several years in the United Kingdom, Thailand and Spain.
All the Intermediate and Advanced audio downloads below include real conversations between native English speakers from England, Australia, United States, Canada and Scotland.
This is what our “Whole System” conversations pack includes:
That’s 180 audio conversation classes (55-60 hours of audio!) with 180 accompanying eBooks packed with the real conversational English we love to teach you at Zapp! English!
Everyone has a supermarket grievance. In this episode one of the speakers admits to always ending up with the trolley “with the dodgy wheel”, so that pushing it up and down the aisles means “nearly run people over” or knocking things off the shelves. Someone else keeps their receipts so …
Listen nowZapp! English Vocabulary & Pronunciation MP3 3.30 – Shopping
Halfway through the first conversation, Tom starts describing an infected toe and Katie stops him with “I hope nobody’s eating, right now!” That is roughly the tone of this episode: fifteen new words for parts of the body, learned through two unscripted conversations about things that hurt, things people paint …
Listen nowZapp! English Vocabulary & Pronunciation 2.19 – Body Parts
Tom opens this one with a hint rather than a greeting: “It’s time for lunch.” Katie’s answer is “Not yet.” Lunch has to be earned — no food until he has guessed every colloquial expression she describes, and they are all about time. He gets as far as “Please!” before …
A gorilla playing the drums to a Phil Collins song, the McDonald’s M standing in the middle of a desert, and a mermaid on a coffee cup. That’s where this episode starts: real people trying to remember which adverts actually stuck. Then it moves on to flyers, jingles, Marlboro sponsorship …
Listen nowZapp! English Vocabulary & Pronunciation 3.29 – Advertising
Katie opens by telling Clare this is probably bad timing: Clare has just said she’s hungry. “Yes, I’m always hungry,” she replies, and then spends the next few minutes guessing food idioms anyway. She gets the breadwinner almost instantly, works out the bacon one by asking “Ah! Is this about …
Listen nowZapp! English Colloquial 2.16 – Food (& Ingredients)
One of the speakers in this episode spent a whole holiday trying to think of a souvenir for his family, ran out of ideas, and bought fridge magnets for everybody. “True story,” he adds, through the laughter. Another admits that toiletries are “a nightmare to pack” — toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, …
Listen nowZapp! English Vocabulary & Pronunciation 3.28 – Holidays / Vacations
Katie asks Tom how much cash he has in his pocket. “Absolutely nothing,” he says. That’s the honest starting point for this episode: two people sitting outside, agreeing that money “becomes very important if you don’t have any”, and working through the informal English we use to say we have …
Nobody likes telling the boss there is a problem. So, as Annie points out, “Well people often use issues as a synonym for problems, don’t they?” — and suddenly the project has issues, and you will get it to them tomorrow. That small piece of office diplomacy is exactly why …
Katie describes a place that’s old, dirty and thoroughly unpleasant, and asks Tom for the word. His first guess is far too rude to print, so Katie steers him: “slightly more polite. Begins with d.” Out comes a dump — and Tom immediately explains why the image works, since a …
Katie opens this one with a small lie. She tells Clare they’re going to talk about her favourite topic, and Clare’s reaction is instant: “Oh no it’s not computers!” The topic is computers and technology, and there are four expressions to guess. Clare gets the first two straight away, has …
Listen nowZapp! English Colloquial 2.12 – Computers & Technology