Phone Number Listening Practice

The shape of an Australian number

Every Australian number you will practise here has ten digits when it is dialled inside the country, and it is spoken in fixed groups with a small pause between them. A mobile starts with 04 and is read as four digits, three digits, three digits: 0491 570 123. A landline starts with an area code, 02 for New South Wales and the ACT, 03 for Victoria and Tasmania, 07 for Queensland and 08 for South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, followed by eight digits in two groups of four: 02 5550 1234. National 1300 and freephone 1800 numbers are read as “one three hundred” or “one eight hundred” and then two groups of three. Short 13 numbers (13 XX XX) exist too, but they are not part of these exercises yet.

Those pauses are your best friend. When the speaker breathes after the fourth digit of a mobile, you know exactly three more digits are coming, then three more. If you decide the format from the first two digits, you can count the rest instead of chasing them.

Oh, zero and nought

In a phone number, most Australians say “oh” for 0, not “zero”. “Oh four nine one” is 0491. “Zero” is heard too, especially from people who work with numbers or want to be very clear, and “nought” turns up occasionally in older speech. All three mean the same digit. What matters is that a short “oh” is easy to miss when it comes first, and losing it shifts every other digit one place to the left.

Double and triple

When the same digit appears twice in a row inside a group, Australians usually say “double”: “double four” is 44, “double oh” is 00. Three in a row becomes “triple”: “triple five” is 555. This is a habit rather than a rule; some speakers read every digit separately, and the doubling never crosses the pause between groups. In these exercises the doubling stays inside a group, so “five double seven” in a group of three is 577, never 5577.

The numbers you hear are fictional

Landline numbers use the (0X) 5550 xxxx blocks that ACMA reserves for fiction. Mobile, 1300 and 1800 numbers are generated inside the 0491 57x, 1300 975 and 1800 160 prefixes that contain ACMA’s fictitious numbers, but not every number in those prefixes is reserved, so treat every number here as unknown and never dial it. Never type your own number or anyone else’s into the practice tool either; it does not need one.

In real conversations

People rarely read a number in isolation. It arrives inside a sentence: “You can reach me on …”, “My mobile is …”, “Call us on … between nine and five.” The digits are the same, but the sentence gives you less time to get ready. Level 3 practises exactly this. A useful habit from real life: repeat the number back in the same groups the speaker used. Native speakers do it too, and it catches a reversed pair or a missing “oh” before it costs you a call.

From outside Australia the same number is dialled as +61 followed by the number without its leading 0, so 0491 570 123 becomes +61 491 570 123. The exercises use the domestic form, which is what you hear inside the country.