What you hear while you speak reaches your ears two ways at once: through the air, like everyone else hears you, and through the bones of your own skull, which nobody else has access to. The second route emphasises lower frequencies, which is the entire reason a recording of your own voice always sounds strange the first time. It isn’t wrong. It’s just the first time you’ve heard the version everyone else already knows.
This matters for elocution specifically because the habits this course targets — blurred consonants, dropped word endings, a flattened vowel — are far easier to hear in a recording than to feel while speaking. You cannot fix by feel what you cannot hear.
Do this now. Record ninety seconds of yourself reading a paragraph from anything — a book, an email, a news article. Play it back once, all the way through. Then play it again and this time listen only for word endings: did any final consonants disappear, particularly at the end of a sentence?
Keep the recording. Lesson eleven asks you to make a second one and compare.
