Listening Comprehension: predicting before you hear
What the tasks look like
Short recordings, each played twice: station and airport announcements, phone messages, dialogues in a shop, café or ticket office, short interviews, weather reports. Items are true/false, multiple choice, matching, or completing a small table with numbers, times and names.
Concepts you must control
Numbers and prices spoken with a comma (doze euros e cinquenta, 12,50 €), times (às nove e meia, um quarto para as dez, às catorze horas), dates and days, the spelling of names and addresses, and directions (sempre em frente, virar à direita, é ao lado de). You also need the sound system of European Portuguese: nasal vowels (pão, bem, um), final -s spoken as sh, open versus closed vowels, and contractions (do, da, no, na, ao, pelo, dum).
Traps
- Self-correction inside the audio: “São quinze… não, desculpe, cinquenta euros.” The last figure is the answer.
- Negation: não é preciso, já não há, deixou de passar.
- Two speakers, one fact: the item asks what Ana wants, but the distractor is what Rui wants.
- Vowel contrasts: avô/avó, pão/pau, só/sou; and number pairs such as sessenta/setenta, catorze/quarenta.
Worked example
Options: A) 15 € B) 50 € C) 5 €. The audio says “São quinze… desculpe, cinquenta euros.” The correct answer is B: the speaker corrects herself, and the corrected figure wins.
Rule of thumb
Before the audio starts, read the options and write beside each one what kind of information you need - a number, a place or a time. In the first listening, note only that word; use the second listening to confirm or change it.