Ear Training
A track of P44 · Listening & Ear Training.
Hear what you don't yet produce: minimal-pair discrimination on the vowels and nasals that separate almost-native from foreign, and the liaisons, élisions and enchaînements that decide where French words glue together.
Play dessus and dessous one after the other, without looking. Then tu and tout. If you are honest about the result, you will find at least one pair where you are not deciding — you are guessing, and then checking the guess against what the sentence must have meant. In conversation that works, because context nearly always disambiguates. At radio speed there is no spare half-second to spend on it, and the guess costs you the clause that followed.
This track trains the decision itself. Minimal pairs isolate one contrast at a time — the front-rounded vowels Russian does not have, the four nasals that collapse into one or two for most learners, the closed and open e — and you answer which word you heard, repeatedly, until the choice stops being an inference and becomes a perception. This is deliberately not vocabulary work. The words are ordinary; the only thing being trained is the ear's ability to separate two sounds it currently treats as one.
The second half is where the words go. French does not leave gaps between words,
and the joins are systematic rather than random: liaison attaches a normally
silent consonant to the next vowel, élision drops one, enchaînement carries a
pronounced consonant across the boundary. A learner who cannot hear those joins
does not hear les amis as two words with a z between them — they hear one
unfamiliar word and stall. Recovering the boundaries is what turns fast speech
back into the sentence it always was, and it is the direct prerequisite for
producing those joins yourself in P45.