How to improve Business English Skills?

How to improve English listening skills (through the phone)?

• I live in Honduras, and currently I am hired by a call center company. My group and I've been in training session for almost two weeks now, and some of us who have "best english" had chance to do live calls. It felt horrible. It's not that I made a huge mistake or messed up, but I just found out that I wasn't understanding what the customers were saying through the phone quite well. I've in english speaking school more than six years here in Honduras, I was translator for many American missionary groups who came down here to Honduras, I have American friends that I have no problem communicating either by phone or not, and also I had interviews via phone in English many times. So I was pretty confident up until now. However, I was struggling today with just 5 calls I took today. American women of maybe 25 yrs to 45 were pretty easy to understand. Their voice isn't thick, and they normally try to speak clearly. However, starting with men of any ages, old ladies, and black people were really hard to listen to what they were saying. But still, regardless whether who is easier to understand and who is not, I really have urgent feeling that I must improve English listening skills, especially when I'm having conversation with some native English speaker on the phone. Of course, the others including those who are working in the call center for months are telling me that I'll get used to and eventually get better with more experience and time. Nonetheless, that doesn't really comfort me at all, and I feel like at this rate I'll be as good as fired. I'd like to hear from you especially those who are not native English speakers that had similar experience as I do now. Of course, answers from any people are welcome, and I will really appreciate. Help and Advices please! Thank you!

• Answer:

  The TTSUU software can help you, TTSUU (Text to Speech Universal Utility) is a Text to Speech software that converts any text into natural-sounding speech. It reads any text for you. You can also convert the text material into WAV or MP3 audio files with this tool, so that the resulting MP3 can be played on many other devices such as iPods, PocketPCs and CD players etc. And TTSUU can even generate lyrics for you when converting text material into audios. When playing the audio, those devices with the lyrics capability, will display the original text, and therefore it will be possible for you to not only hear the text material but also get a look at the content through the display. The interface of TTSUU is very simple and intuitive, the two pillars in the interface serve as the area where you can add sticky notes that highlight points in the text content. You can pick off any interesting and salient parts of the text from any electronic documents such as MS Word Documents, Emails, Web Pages, PDF Files, etc and copy into these notes, and these can be colored to draw your attention easily. TTSUU allows you to slow down reading speed to learn the pronunciation. We provide multiple language voices: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Finish, Japanese, Chinese(Mandarin, HongKong, Taiwan), Korean, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, etc.