USA Learns is an excellent and popular website to learn English…
These rhyme: CAKE – SNAKE – RAKE – SNOWFLAKE
These rhyme: SLED – BED – RED
One of these words does NOT rhyme with the others. Which one:
BLUE – TWO – DO – FLEW – NO – TRUE – ZOO
SayLish is a quite-new website to help you listen to English words and phrases – as part of presentations and conversations posted on YouTube. PLUS – you can record your own voice, to compare your pronunciation with the video.
Voice recording support has been added just recently on iPhone/iPad with Safari, and we’ll give an example with that. It also works with Android phones/tablets, and desktop computers.
For example, if you search for videos with the word “infrequently“, you will see part of a YouTube video that contains your chosen word. After you listen to this, you can pause and …
Repeat this to hear it again 
Go to the next video that contains this word
After you listen, press the microphone to record, and try to pronounce the words you hear. Then press Stop (
) when you finishThen you can …
Compare your pronunciation with the speaker in the video
Go to the next part of the SAME video Go to the next video that contains your search wordSaylish has additional features which we will cover in another posting.
Listen a Minute is a free website with hundreds of short listening lessons. Each recording is less than one minute.
Here’s an example about Eggs:
Eggs are great. Where would we be without them? They are so useful. I can’t imagine life or cooking without them. There are many ways of cooking eggs for breakfast – fried eggs, scrambled eggs, boiled eggs, etc. There are even many ways of “cooking” these. You can have a runny or hard fried egg or even have it sunny side up. You can have soft or hard-boiled eggs and fluffy scrambled eggs. There are also many things to put on top of eggs – mayonnaise, ketchup, salt, soy sauce. Each country has something different. I like cooking with eggs. I particularly like breaking them. I can now do it with one hand, without breaking the yolk. Sometimes it gets messy and the egg white starts dripping down your arm.
Seminole State College in Florida has a web page with many helpful listening exercises. There are three levels of difficulty.
Each activity has 10 questions. For questions 1-5, listen to the audio and choose the sentence you hear.
Here’s an example:
For questions 6-10, listen to the audio and choose the best answer that you see.
Here’s an example:
To begin, try this exercise. If you like it, here are many more.
Playaway is a device that is pre-loaded with one audiobook. Listen to the Playaway book while you read the printed book to improve your comprehension, vocabulary and fluency. You can borrow Playaway for free at most public libraries.
— Thanks to Pat for this article —
Listen to 6 people say what they think about rainy days.
If you listen on the website – ELLLO.ORG – you can read the words (the “script”) while you listen, and take a quiz to see how much you understand.
They call this exercise “Mixers”, where 6 people – with different English accents – give their opinion about something. You can see many more of them on the website.
There are also many other listening and video lessons on this website.
StoryCorps is an organization that records short stories (~3 minutes) that people tell about their lives. They post them on their website. For each, you can listen to the story, and you can also read the words (transcript) while you listen.
Here’s one story called “Tell Me About Your Childhood in Mexico“.
StoryCorps also makes podcasts (like a recorded radio show) that are 10 to 20 minutes long. You can download these to your phone/tablet, and then play it using a podcast app on your device.
Some of the stories are animated, where you can watch and listen to the story while you read the English subtitles. Many of these are posted on YouTube. Here’s one called Facundo the Great…