Shadowing practice: The Treehouse Story | Easy English Listening Story (A2 Level)

This clip is a narrated story, not a lecture: a family named Peter, Anna, Emma and David decide to build a treehouse and then actually build it. It sits at A2 level, and the pace is 113 words per minute, which is slower than almost everything else in the catalogue, so it is a natural place to start english shadowing for beginners. The voice is american, which makes the clip useful for american accent training as well as story listening.

The 265 lines move in short exchanges rather than long speeches, most of them two or three words per turn: "Dad, Dad come here, look." and "What is it Peter?" That shape suits english speaking practice at this stage, because you reset your mouth and your breath every few seconds instead of chasing one long sentence to the end.

A handful of lines in this opening carry more than plot. They show how american speakers stress a single word to change what a sentence means, and how a full sentence sounds against the short exchanges around it.

• "Well, dreams are not cheap." The joke lives on one word: push extra weight onto "not" and the line lands as dry humor instead of a flat statement.
• "I may have said medium." The modal "may have" carries the whole confession before the sentence drops onto "medium": say the first part evenly, then let the last word fall.
• "The ladder helps us go up safely." This is one of the longer lines in the opening, and it is good for practicing english speaking practice for daily use because "helps us" needs to run together, not stop between the two words.

Work through the opening in this order rather than jumping straight to line one hundred. The family dialogue here is close to everyday english, so getting it smooth pays off beyond this one clip.

• Read line 1, "Build your dream treehouse.", once for meaning before you try to shadow it.
• Loop lines 3 to 6, the "Dad, Dad come here, look." exchange, until the excitement in the recorded voice starts to show up in yours.
• Slow down on line 20, "It's very expensive and it's not just a toy.", since it is the longest line in this stretch and the easiest one to rush.
• Practice line 42, "The ladder helps us go up safely.", on its own a few times to work on connecting the words.
• Once lines 1 to 45 feel steady, continue into lines 61 to 74, where the family actually builds the house, for more daily english conversation practice with the same characters.