"Ils lisent la lettre."
Translation:They are reading the letter.
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I got that it was supposed to be "Ils lisent" based on her emphasis of the conjugation of the verb "lire", which sounded like "leeze." That emphasized "S" indicated the tense of the verb, which was to be the hint for the pronoun.
What I DIDN'T get, however, was the article in front of "lettre," which sounded and continues to sound like "les" not "la". It totally sounds like she's saying "lay", which would indicate the plural "les" to me. Le sigh (or should I say les sighs?)
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I could not discern whether the audio was "la" lettre or "les" lettres. I listened a few times, and it was challenging for me to hear the article before the noun.
There's actually no difference between the pronunciation of "mange" and "mangent". In a conversation, you can only tell from the context of the rest of the sentence.
Google Translate is a pretty good place to listen to pronunciations: http://translate.google.com/#en/fr/He%20eats.%0AThey%20are%20eating.
You learn that as part of learning each noun, le for male, la for female. For example: La voiture is car, le arbre is tree. Also, some nouns can be masculine or feminine: le chat is a male cat, la chatte is a female cat. The male/female choice is not always intuitive, not always based on the nature of the noun. Hope this helps.