Agricultural Labor Management

University of California APMP
San Joaquin, Stanislaus & Merced Counties

Learn English Audio

United   Canada


Learn Spanish Audio

United   Mexico
Free English language audio downloads. This introduction is written in English because few farm workers have access to computers where they can burn CDs. This page mirrors the Learning Spanish page where farm employers and supervisors can download Spanish lessons. Each word is introduced in Spanish and repeated twice in English. We have attempted to provide a neutral English that can be generally understood by all in the USA and Canada, but where vocabulary or accents differ, preference has been given to English from the USA, and Spanish from Mexico.

These MP3 files include general interest audio tracks as well as English vocabulary associated with agriculture. Vocabulary for this project was taken from the English-Spanish Language Dictionary developed by the Spanish Language Project Team. Once you have burnt a CD, feel free to make copies and distribute them to others as long as people are not charged for the materials. Your suggestions for new vocabulary will be appreciated. This is a public service of the University of California.

Mexico
NOTA: Todos los audios en esta página están disponibles en forma gratuita para el aprendezaje del inglés y si hay interés, con mucho gusto podemos traducir las descripciones de esta página al inglés. --Gregorio Billikopf


  Listening to Audio in your computer or vehicle
 

MP3 files may be played in your computer, or converted for listening in your CD player or vehicle. When burning a CD, your computer will ask if you want a data CD or a music CD. Make sure to choose a music CD format (it will provide a file with a CDA extension) or you will not be able to play it in a CD player. WARNING: Make sure to keep the files from the Spanish and English projects in different folders so you don't overwrite one or the other.


  Sounding Like a Native English Speaker

 


Brief Strategies for Learning Another Language
(Spanish narration, 7:58 minutes, 7.3 MB, Author: Gregorio Billikopf, Narration: by author, 31 May 06, zipped file)
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Vowels
(Narration, 1:48 minutes, 1.7 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Numbers
(Narration, 3:19 minutes, 3 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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  Greetings, Polite Expressions & Praise
 

Greetings
(Narration, 1:44 minutes, 1.6 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Polite Expressions
(Narration, 5:28 minutes, 5 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Praise
(Narration, 1:20 minutes, 1.2 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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  Climate, Time, Days, Numbers
 

Climate
(Narration, 2:49 minutes, 2.6 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Time
(Narration, 3:03 minutes, 2.8 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Holidays
(Narration, 1:13 minutes, 1.1 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Days, weeks, months
(Narration, 1:44 minutes, 1.6 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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  Farm Vocabulary
 

Common questions
(Narration, 3:31 minutes, 3.2 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Giving driving directions
(Narration, 1:45 minutes, 1.6 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Giving instructions
(Narration, 7:18 minutes, 6.7 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Irrigation
(Narration, 0:48 minutes, 0.8 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Health and Safety
(Narration, 5:32 minutes, 5.1 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Shifts and Pay
(Narration, 4:19 minutes, 4 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Around the office
(Narration, 2:01 minutes, 1.9 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Animals
(Narration, 1:47 minutes, 1.6 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Orchards, Crops and Plants
(Narration, 5:21 minutes, 4.9 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Tools and Equipment
(Narration, 2:38 minutes, 2.3 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Measuring tape, distances, weights +
(Narration, 1:39 minutes, 1.5 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Farm Jobs
(Narration, 1:41 minutes, 1.6 MB, Narration: Nathaniel Battig, Gregorio Billikopf, 25 May 06, zipped file)
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Materials will be added here. We are always interested in special requests.


  Non-Farm Conversations
 

Lesson 01
(Dialogue, 15:45 minutes, 15 MB, Practice translating from Spanish into English and then repeating the words and expressions in English to improve your accent, 25 September 2015, zipped). Apologies for whistle sound and poor quality audio. We will work to correct that in the next audio.
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  Project Philosophy
 

To help farm workers and others interested to learn English, based on the following principles:

    1. Provide tools that will help farm workers learn English naturally
    2. Focus on learning by first listening
    3. Focus on learning by repeating after native English-speakers
    4. Preserve the correct use of the English language
    5. Avoid the use of slang.
    6. Provide a neutral sounding (audio) English that avoids regional accents

This Website was built to support this Spanish language project. The ideal, at first, is not to have to read at all, but just listen and repeat. However, we realize that when learning another language one might have to look occasionally at a word here or there in order to make out the letters being used by the speaker. To the degree that you focus on listening and trying to pronounce the word as the native speaker, the better your accent will be. On the down side, people might think you know more than you do :-). While we hope that with advanced technology the time may come where this dictionary page might provide instantaneous audio of each word looked up, right now it may take quite a long time to download a single sound.

One of the principal products of this project will be to tape English words and expressions followed by their Spanish equivalent, repeated twice. Rather than providing a list of vocabulary along with the tapes, users will be directed to this Website where they can download the latest version of the written dictionary. It is simply impossible to include all of the vocabulary in recordings, and the written dictionary will contain many more words than the recordings.

Team members. The University of California project team for the general dictionary consists of Gregorio Billikopf, Lucia Varela, Jesus Valencia, Ramiro Lobo, Myriam Grajales-Hall and Richard Molinar. Alberto Hauffen and Myriam Grajales-Hall have already been of great help with the technical aspects of the project. David Underwood created the cold fusion program that makes the on-line dictionary program possible. Gregorio Billikopf is the Webmaster and project director. Commodity specific team members include Lucia Varela (viticulture), Arturo Scheidegger (Universidad de Chile) and Tom Shultz and Alejandro Castillo (dairy) and others. Special thanks go to numerous contributors including Roberta Lee Crill (Cornell): Hector Rene Diaz-Saenz (U. of Texas); Alejandro Fernandez del Castillo F (Consultora Logica Empresarial, S. C., Mexico) and numerous other contributors.

Other contributions. As we become aware of either contributions that are not copyrighted or those we obtain permission to include, we will do so, taking the liberty of making needed corrections or changes.

An English-Spanish Glossary of Terminology Used in Forestry, Range, Wildlife, Fishery, Soils, and Botany by Alvin Leroy Medina, Range Scientist, Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Stattion, USDA Forest Service, General Technical Report RM-152, Fort Collins, Colorado, January 1988, 54 pp. (Thanks to Lee Fitzhugh, Wildlife Specialist, Univesity of California, for making this publication available to us.)


While we are talking about gaining a better ear for language, I also want to invite you to read an article on listening skills, or how to listen to others who need to vent and be heard.


Agricultural Labor Management

E-mail: gebillikopf@ucdavis.edu

Gregorio Billikopf Encina
University of California
(209) 525-6800


(c) University of California, 2006. This page and audio clips may be freely shared and distributed as long as people are not charged beyond the basic costs of making or reproducing the CDs, no changes are made to the materials, and credit is given to the University of California and the authors.

25 September 2015