Learn English – What’s the difference between /ɒ/ and /ɑ/

A date written as "July 31" can be equally correctly pronounced "July thirty-one" and "July thirty-first". It stands to reason that a date written as "31 July" can also be pronounced a number of ways, including the bare "thirty-one July".

Note that to American ears, writing a date as "31 July" is unnatural to begin with, so how you pronounce it makes very little difference. Jim Dale has lived in the USA since 1980, so perhaps that had an influence on how he chose to read a date format that he rarely encounters anymore. More likely, though, this was a stylistic choice to reflect that he was reading a newspaper article, where conciseness —even terseness— is the order of the day.

Before being able to respond, I would need to know whether or not you are a native English speaker and which region or country you come from. There are several regional variants in English which can to some extent be mutually unintelligible; for example, I am Scottish, from Glasgow, and once knew a man from the Newcastle area whose Geordie accent I found very difficult to understand.