This clip is from an episode of the Delicious podcast, which you will enjoy if you like listening to conversations about food! This clip is from an interview with chef Tom Kerridge, talking about his approach to writing his cookbooks.
This clip was selected to give you practice identifying redundancy in spoken English – all of those unnecessary extra words, phrases and mistakes that are a natural (but very confusing!) part of natural, spontaneous conversation.
…and be, you know, different dishes…
This is an example of redundancy. The speaker begins a new idea (…and be…) but then adds something to the previous idea (…try new dishes…).
Redundancy is basically anything that is unnecessary in a sentence. In spoken English, this can include repetition (e.g. and in this sentence is used twice), fillers (words or phrases that are used to fill silences, often to allow time for the speaker to think e.g. you know in this dictation) and false starts (where a sentence or idea is begun and then abandoned (e.g. in this dictation: …and be…).
Redundancy is a completely natural feature of spontaneous spoken English (and other languages). The best thing that you can do is learn to recognise redundancy and ‘edit it out’ or ignore it to prevent it causing confusion. One way of doing this is to begin noticing common examples of redundancy (e.g. you know, kind of, sort of ).
This is an area that having a better understanding of individual words and phrases can be very useful – this will make it easier for you to identify redundancy and choose to ignore it. Over time, this will happen naturally and automatically.
Photo by Eaters Collective on Unsplash.
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