How can you improve your listening comprehension and understand real English audio without subtitles?
You want to understand Americans the way they really speak,
but they just talk so fast!
If you’ve ever felt this frustration, you’re going to love what I call
the Audio PowerBuild Technique.
I’m Christina Rebuffet and you’re watching Speak Better, Feel Great TV.
The place
to boost your English and boost your career.
In this video, I’m gonna show you a technique to improve your listening skills so that progressively,
you understand real spoken English better,
understand your American colleagues more
and never feel lost again.
Ya ready?
When you’re watching American movies or television series,
you probably use subtitles in English to help you understand.
That’s fine,
but in the real world, unfortunately, your American colleagues don’t come with subtitles.
I’m sure when you read those English subtitles, you understand enough of the words.
So, you know the vocabulary,
you just don’t recognize the words and expressions when they’re spoken at normal, natural speed.
The Audio PowerBuild technique is gonna help.
I call it “PowerBuild Technique” because it’s just like lifting weights.
Nobody starts lifting a hundred pounds. You start easy
easy
and work your way up
to progressively the next level
Then, over time, you’ll succeed in lifting a hundred pounds.
Or understanding Americans. Really.
So,
how does the Audio PowerBuild Technique work?
There are a few steps:
Number one
Search the internet for some audio or video you want to train with.
YouTube videos and podcasts are great sources.
Then
download the file—audio or video
onto your computer.
Number two
Open the file with VLC Media Player.
Number three
Then,
you can adjust the speed
and make it slower.
It’s
easier to understand at a slower speed
because you have more time to think
and try to understand.
but just like lifting weights
when it becomes easy, you have to push yourself further.
Gradually increase the difficulty
by increasing the speed.
When that level becomes comfortable,
increase the difficulty again.
You have to always go just beyond your comfort zone.
Listen to different videos,
listen to different speaking styles.
Expose yourself to the kind of real speech that your American colleagues use.
First,
you need to select a video that you want to watch.
Here,
I've selected one of my past videos, on SMART goals.
You'll also need to make sure that you have VLC Media Player,
which is a pretty standard player. It's free, and you can download it very easily.
Then,
go to your video,
right click,
open with,
VLC.
So that's at normal speed.
But maybe normal speed is a little too fast.
So, I'll go to Playback,
Playback Speed,
and you'll see this little bar.
And you can just slow the speed down.
Let's make it really slow,
like .61 times faster.
Then, when we listen,
it's slower, so there will be some distortion of the audio,
but that's ok because we're just working on listening at the moment. Don't worry about the distortion.
So that was quite slow.
Maybe it's too slow.
So, we just speed it up a little bit.
Maybe
.72.
And let's listen to this one.
OK, that's still kinda slow,
but if that's the level that you need to start understanding, keep it at that level.
If you think it's too slow for you,
move it up a little bit.
Let's try .85. That's almost normal speed,
and let's start back at the beginning of this video, just to make a comparison.
Now, let's see.
Of course, we have our normal speed
right there.
When you open the video with VLC, this is the speed that it's automatically at.
This is the speed at which I'm really talking on these videos.
But if you want to, just for fun,
we can boost the speed, and let's see what that looks like.
Maybe that sounds a lot like your American colleagues,
but maybe it's a little too fast also.
But you see how you can use this simple technique
to play with the speed of the video
to adapt the speed to your level
and then of course
progressively increase the speed
to help you get used to listening to speech at normal speed
and without subtitles.
But does this technique work?
Yes.
A study in the Journal of Comparative Psychology showed that people who used this technique
could spend less time working on their comprehension skills,
but would improve more than people who simply listened to audio that was at the same difficult level.
So,
maybe it’s different from what you normally do,
but it’ll save you time
and you get better results.
Here’s your Speak Better, Feel Great challenge for this week:
Use one of my past videos just to test this technique.
You’ll improve your listening comprehension more quickly
than just by watching movies with subtitles.
Then
come back and tell us about your experience in the comments below.
Or if you have questions about how to do this technique,
ask a question and I’ll help you out.
Did you learn something from this video?
Then subscribe to my YouTube channel right now.
Or better yet,
go to christinarebuffet.com and sign up for the newsletter,
where I share exclusive resources and tools
to help you improve your English.
I’m Christina, from Speak Better, Feel Great TV.
See ya next time!