Are you tired of your drab listening routine? Do you
wake up every day and listen to the same one podcast,
just wondering where you're going wrong?
Boy, do I have a solution for you! This year more than ever I really realized
that I am a listening- and speaking-based learner more than anything else, so
that means that I'm not the biggest bookworm, writing bores the crap out of me sometimes and that's OK.
Listening can be kind of daunting already if you feel like it's not your best skill
or if you're not doing it in the most efficient way, so today I thought I would talk about
the 4 FUNdamentals (plus 2 extras), of listening.
This is Listening 101, welcome, I'm Professor DaVega, and today we're gonna talk about how to use your ears.
So let's just get right into it. So the first two are so basic, I feel like I don't even have to talk your ear off
about it. The first one: you gotta listen every day. You gotta do it.
If we're talking about sharpening your listening skills, you have to commit to at least listening every single day
whether it's 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes. I feel like ideally thirty
minutes is a perfect amount of time. If you listen to a podcast, if you watch a video, maybe
part of a TV episode every single day for 30 minutes, that's 10,000 minutes by the end of the year. That's almost 200 hours.
Absorption is real. And this even counts for passive listening too,
If you're listening while you do chores, while you wash dishes, babysit your sister's kids, practice cartwheels, I don't care.
Listening is not just about meaning. Listening is not about capturing every single word.
And depending on the language, there's a lot of other things to be absorbed as well. So whether it be pitch accent,
or cadence, or filler words, like there are
a ton of other things to be absorbed besides meaning. You know, you don't have to capture every single word.
And I feel like that's where we go wrong with listening: thinking it just has to be for meaning.
And understanding every single thing. I feel like that's where a lot of anxiety comes from in language learning.
like, "I have to understand it." You don't have to understand every single thing.
Which brings me to my next very basic fundamental, I feel like this is the oldest one in the book, but I'm
gonna say it anyways: don't try to understand every single word, look for the big picture.
The amount of energy you spend panicking over not understanding every single word-- this is,
this is like a law of physics, ok? The amount of energy you spend panicking over obsessing over
every word is probably equal or even greater to the amount of energy that you could use just getting the big picture.
So relax, close your eyes, put on your headphones, and focus on what's happening here.
Even if you just understand the topic, that's an achievement. Even if you just understand the basic stance of what they're talking about,
whether they're for or against it, that's an achievement. So just be patient with yourself,
Allow yourself to come from top-down rather than bottom-up.
God, this sounds so sexual, I'm sorry.
And those are the basic two. I feel like we've heard them from so many other people before, but the next two ones
I'm really excited to talk about, because they're not just things that occurred to me and then I started
to enforce them; they were things that I was already naturally doing, and then I realized, "Hey,
that's a feature of my listening routine that's really important and really beneficial."
Balancing content: ok, what do I mean by this? I'm talking about choosing resources and choosing content that
allows you to have functional learning but also immersion. So, two different fields here.
Functional learning is content that is more appropriate to your level. So I'm talking about stuff that you basically
understand. Maybe it's because they're speaking slower, maybe they're speaking clearer, and it's really not how "natives" would speak.
So let's take my German learning for example, that would be Easy German.
Because I feel that they speak a lot clearer because it's a material that's specifically designed for learning.
But by immersion I just mean content that is basically designed for native speakers' consumption.
So I'm talking late-night shows, music, documentaries, TV,
you know, all that stuff where they're speaking completely normal and completely fast. "Completely fast" *scoffs* at a normal speed.
Because you want to have resources and you want to have content that is going to allow you to constantly
progress and learn new things, but you also do not want to forget the end goal, y'know? Because why are we here on this planet, learning languages in the first place?
*silence*
Human connection, thank you. And I understand that that can be a super source of anxiety because it
can be super discouraging to feel like "Great! I just learned this thing!" and then go back to
immersion and see like "Oh wait, that's what I have to live up to eventually?"
But you know, like I said, human connection-- you wanna be a part of the pop culture of the language, you wanna be up to date on current events
that are happening in the world of the language you're learning, so..
And the last fundamental I wanna talk about is accent work-- WAIT, please do not close this video, I know,... I know.
I know that this is such, such such such such such a big source of anxiety for a lot of people because
who wants to have an accent? I sure don't. Some people don't care, but for other people it can be a big source of insecurity,
so I understand if this is not a priority for you, but let me reason with you.
With every language that I've started, I always made it a really big point at the beginning to do a lot of accent training
and a lot of dictation and stuff like that, because it always came from a source of like, "Ohh, I don't wanna,
I don't wanna be that person from the U.S. who has a really detectable U.S. accent,
but after a while I realized it was really easy for me to speak and really easy for me to listen because of that.
Essentially, if you have a trained ear, you're just listening to yourself talk after a while.
If you do a lot of accent work and accent training, it's really reassuring because you don't have to work so hard
to understand other people, because you've already heard these sounds come out of your mouth if that makes sense.
There are a couple of significant things that I do to constantly train my accent. Of course the #1 would be
talking to myself, I am such a self-talker thanks to my mom.
My mom used to talk to herself a lot, and then I would always be like, "Mom, who are you talking to?" and then she'd say,
"Ahh, nothing, I'm talking to myself," so now that's who I am in my language learning, I guess.
So much, dude. In the shower, when I'm putting on makeup, when I'm cooking, I will have full-blown conversations with myself and I'm not ashamed.
Umm, also, just talking about reading articles out loud for dictation purposes,
Ooh, something that I love doing is taking a podcast and pausing it after every sentence and just repeating what the person or the people say.
Mimicry. Proven science. Parrots? You just gonna ignore that evidence? Everybody loves parrots.
But forreal, you don't even have to understand what they're saying in the podcast to be able to repeat it,
and just get used to speaking a certain way. So those were the 4 fundamentals by Professor DaVega's definition, but
I also have two kind-of extra tips that I wanted to mention.
Because I don't think they warrant their own video, but they're very important if we're talking about listening.
Listen with a transcript or listen with lyrics. This kind of counts as like training wheels of listening,
but it can be so beneficial to see the words first and then be able to recognize them afterwards.
I'll do this all the time, where I'll listen to a podcast and then just read the transcript as I go down,
and then at the end of the day I'll probably listen to the podcast again without the transcript
because I already know what it's about. Having a transcript gives you all of the control because
you can already see when people are going to talk over each other,
you can see the filler words, it kind of just gives you the jump on listening. If you need training wheels, that's okay.
And the second little tip I wanted to talk about is maybe transcribing the podcast yourself!
Now I would say it's most recommended if you have the official transcript,
so let's say, if you subscribe to a podcast and they send you the transcript every week, you can
compare them after you've transcribed it yourself. This is something I do with Easy German,
so I'll maybe do 2 pages at a time. Because, like, for some reason I thought transcribing was gonna be
like, such a light task, but it turns out people talk a lot in podcasts, so.
Maybe 3 minutes' worth is literally 2 pages, and it's just like "Oh my god, people talk so much," BUT
and you know, you don't have to get every single word. Sometimes I will just leave like an underscore or a blank if I don't get it, or
I'll write something that I obviously know is not the right answer and just come back to it later, so..
It can just be a really good way to correct what you think you hear, and then be like "Oh, no, it was this."
Oh my god, what are those people called that type in court rooms for the record?
STENOGRAPHERS! I have such a bigger respect for stenographers
after transcribing podcasts for language learning because I realized, that, like,
natural forms of communication are so chaotic. People use so many filler words, they say "Uhhh.." and they..
I don't know, sometimes people'll just say half a sentence and then start saying something completely different, it's..
such a chaotic process, but it's so fun and it can be so good for your listening.
Why is there no national holiday for stenographers? Jesus. Stenographers, I salute you.
Anyways, thank you for coming to my Ted Talk about listening, that was my two cents.. or I guess you could say, my.. six.. oh god..
Six cents? THE SIXTH SENSE.. "I see dead people." Such a good movie.
Thank you so much for watching this video, please comment down below any other listening tips you have because we are all here to mingle,
help each other listen better, help each other succeed.
You can follow me on my social media if you want to, nobody's pressuring you but I'll leave them right here.
That's e-l-y-s-s-e-s-p-e-a-k-s!
See you soon and happy listening, bye :)