Home - English With Michael



Please note that there are probably a few mistakes in the transcripts. There is a lot of text to look through and its very time consuming. You can use it as a guide to practice your English but not everything is necessarily perfect. If you have any questions you’re welcome to ask me.Michael:00:00I'm all ears. This is a very common English expression. I'm all ears. At the end of this podcast, I will let you know what it means. In the meantime, have a guess, see if you can work it out. Maybe you'll guess correctly.Michael:00:22Hello and welcome to the English with Michael Podcast, the best place to come to study English as a second language as well as to practice the British accent with me. Michael Lavers as your teacher.Michael:00:40Hello English learners. Welcome back to the English with Michael podcast. Thank you for being here as always. It's great to be with you. I also want to say a big thank you for people who watched last week's podcast, so that was the interview I did with Emma. It seems like a lot of you really enjoyed that podcast and I had a lot of fun doing it, so thank you for your support on last week's episode. Today I want to go back to another English learning tip, some of my advice from my own mistakes in the past and also from information I've heard from other English learners. So the topic today is improving your listening skills. How can you improve your listening skills? So today I'm going to get right into what I have to say. I'm going to start by telling you about three different ways that you can listen. So I've separated, you're listening into three categoriesMichael:01:46and each of them has its own benefits and drawback - advantage and disadvantage. The first way that you can practice your English listening skills is with passive listening, passive listening. So passive is the opposite to active. And it means you're listening, but your mind isn't really working. So you're not using your brain to interpret what you hear, but you're still getting some English input in one way or another. So an example of this could be listening to a podcast or a story, an audio book, but you're not really paying attention to the meaning. You're not focused on learning new words. You really just listening to the sound of English.Michael:02:44I've even heard of people doing this while they sleep, so people listen to English while they sleep. Now, I'm not sure that is actually beneficial, but I don't know, I have heard people do that anyway. So the advantages of passive listening is that it's very easy to do and it requires almost no effort. You just put the sound in your ears and listen. Another advantage is you can do it in any free time that you have during the day. Even just a few minutes here in there can add up to a lot of the end of the day. It may help you get used to the sound of English. So if you spend all of your time in your native language, adjusting to the sound of English can be a challenge. So this type of listening might be beneficial to you. However, there are some big disadvantages. So many studies suggest that passive listening doesn't really help with the acquisition of new words. So acquisition means like gaining input. So in other words, something that requires little effort, will probably have little results as well. So I can't imagine you would really learn anything new from passive listening. But I guess you could argue it's better than nothing.Michael:04:16The second way of listening is what I have called study listening study listening. I've tried this before and it worked really well for me. So this is where you listen to some audio or video like a TV show, and you also look at the transcript, in other words, the subtitles. So while you're watching, you're reading this transcript and you can study all of the new words that you don't know after a sentence is spoken on the audio, you can pause, repeat the sentence out loud and see if there's any grammar or vocabulary that you're not sure about. If you do come across any new words, you can then write them down, add them to your flashcards to study at a later date. The key here is repetition. So you listen again and again until eventually you will understand the entire or audio. Some people that do this method, maybe they will study for 20 minutes a day on some audio repeating and repeating it.Michael:05:28And every day they were doing never 20 minutes. And if you keep following that pattern, you will eventually have listened to and understood the entire episode or movie or whatever you're watching. So there are many advantages to this. I think it's an excellent way to get phrases and vocabulary stuck inside your head. So I still remember phrases that I learned by doing this method, uh, several years ago, even maybe five years ago, I still remember specific phrases and even the intonation with which they, uh, spoke. So that's another good point is because you're studying along with the intonation of their voice is this really helps cement it in your memory. So cement means it stays in your memory. And I think this is maybe to do with like music because if something is in a song, it's easier to remember. So if you can hear the kind of the musical sound of someone's voice is much easier to remember than just by seeing some writing, I would say.Michael:06:44So anyway, the disadvantage of the study method is that it's very time consuming. It takes a lot of time. So you might even be spending 20 minutes on just two or three minutes of audio. So it can be quite intense. It can also get boring to listen to the same audio again and again. Another thing that I found in the past that is if it's a TV show that you enjoy, of course that's a good thing, but if you listen to it again and again, it might ruin it for you because you can't really listen to it for fun in the future because you've heard it so many times, it's kind of like over listening to a song that you really like. Eventually you'll really hate it. So that is one thing to keep in mind as well.Michael:07:42The final method is my personal favourite method and this is focused listening. So this is quite simple. It's where you listen to audio or it could be a podcast and you carefully try to understand everything that's being said. When you hear words that you don't know, you can look them up in a dictionary. Maybe you have a dictionary app on your phone. That's what I like to do. Although this is not necessary. You don't have to research the words if you don't have the time. So the pros, the advantages to this is that it's a really good middle ground. It's not very time consuming, but you also actively using your mind to interpret the audio. So it's a really good way to learn some new words if you have the time to use a dictionary too, I would say that aren't many disadvantages to this method, but I think it can sometimes be frustrating because in the passive way, if you don't understand something, it doesn't matter because you're not focused on understanding. In the indepth study, you have time to understand, you can research everything, but in the focus listening way, it can be frustrating because you might be listening very hard, very carefully, but you might not understand anything. Sometimes this happens to me, say my Chinese learning, I'm listening and I have no idea what was being said and it's quite disheartening. It makes me feel quite sad. So that's important to kind of get over that hurdle. A roadblock.Michael:09:36The other disadvantage is that a lot of repetition, you know, unlike the focused, no, this is focused on like the um, study learning, study learning. I forgot my own names. Unlike the study learning, there is no repetition. So you might only hear phrases once or twice and that makes it a bit harder to learn, but it's not a big disadvantage. So there are my three study methods to go fro, to go for, as I said, I prefer the focused listening. The last one I mentioned because it's a really nice in-between where it doesn't take too much time, but you're still learning a bit as well. I think it has a lot of benefits.Michael:10:21So find the method that works best for you, works best for your schedule. Let me know. Let me know which one you think you would like to try and which one you have maybe benefited from in the past.Michael:10:36In addition to those tips. I've got a couple more before we finish up on this. In terms of your the speed of the audio, you know, people often ask, should I be listening to slow English or English or natural speed? Generally I would recommend trying to listen at a natural speed. Perhaps there is some uh, audio and some podcasts out there. Maybe like mine, I don't know. So it's made for English learners. So in my podcast I try to find that middle ground. So I'm talking at my kind of native speed. I'm not a super fast talker anyway, but also I am trying to speak clearly, make it easy to understand. So maybe something like that is a good middle ground, again, where it's not really slow and unnatural, but it's not really fast and using lots of slang and advanced words, but don't feel too bad if you're a beginner, feel free to listen to slow English.Michael:11:47Slow English is really useful for helping you understand the vocabulary and maybe seeing the grammar and the structure of sentences. But if you stick with this for too long, I think it could harm your pronunciation and it will make the transition, the change to natural speeds difficult in the end. So as soon as you feel comfortable, I would suggest finding a more native or more natural speed, uh, materials because it's important to learn with materials that sound natural. That is one of the main parts of English you want to master isn't it? In terms of listening materials, of course I'm going to recommend podcasts. There are so many podcasts that could be an English learning one like mine or it could be any podcast that is in English. So I would recommend searching for something you enjoy. If you like yoga type in Yoga podcast and you can listen to that in English.Michael:12:59And that way you're kind of having fun while you learn as well. If you would rather maybe try the more study-based method or you want to just sit in bed and watch something, you could find a TV show that you enjoy, of course in English and also find some subtitles. So a really good resource for this is so on this website you can find subtitles in many different languages and you can download them and add them to your video player on your computer and you can read the subtitles, why you lesson and if you miss something you can go back and listen again or read again. Highly recommend doing that. If you want to be a little bit more focused on your, on your listening, in terms of making a goal to listen, I think that's a good idea. You can make a goal to listen every day.Michael:14:02I would say for five minutes minimum. The reason I say five minutes is because when you're planning your goal, I think it's very easy to say one hour, two hours of listening. Maybe you have that much time, but it's a long time and you will not be able to complete that every day. So start with five minutes. And even if you're busy and you could only do five minutes, it's still an accomplishment. You've still succeeded and you will not feel bad. So to summarise, it should be fun and it should not be a chore. Okay, there we go. There is my advice for English listening skills and hopefully listening to me talk about that. It was also good practice for your listening too, if you have listened to this podcast before, maybe you will know that now is the English in the media section. This is where we look at a phrase or a dialogue from something in the media.Michael:15:09It could be a TV show or a youtube video and we analyse some of the vocabulary. So it is often expressions or phrasal verbs or advanced vocabulary. And I've got a funny one today. Recently I have become addicted again, re addicted maybe to watching the office. This is the American version. It's a, it's a comedy TV series and it's probably the funniest thing that I have ever seen. I've really loved the office and I have been binge watching it recently. So binge watching means you're watching many, maybe five episodes in a row without a break. So yeah, it is a bit of an addiction. So we're going to listen to an extract from the office now and afterwards we will analyse free parts of the vocabulary and of course I recommend you go back and listen again or if you prefer, I will put the link to the full video in the show notes of this episode, which you can find on listeningMichael Scott:16:25Everyone Now, would be a good time to freshen up because I'd like everyone to meet in the conference room in five minutes and I suggest that you bring a snack because we may be in there for a while.Jim:16:34Michael.Michael Scott:16:34Yes.Jim:16:34Can I talk to my office for a second?Michael Scott:16:37Sure. But could I first talk to you in my office?Oscar:16:41Look, it doesn't take a genius to know that any organisation thrives when it has two leaders. Go ahead and name a country that doesn't have two presidents.Jim:16:50I've noticed we've been having a lot of conference room meetings and I'm wondering if perhaps those are a bit, um,Michael Scott:16:56disruptive.Jim:16:57Yes,Michael Scott:16:57no,Jim:16:58I just think that maybe they're eating large amounts of the day,Michael Scott:17:01you know what eats large amounts of the day are naps. You go to sleep it's light out, you wake up, it's dark. That's the whole day. Where did that day go? I have no idea.Jim:17:11You mean on the weekend?Michael Scott:17:14Yes.New Speaker:17:15So how did you find it this week? The main character Michael in this uh, series tends to talk quite quickly. It's maybe it's a bit hard to understand him, but again, I will put the full transcript of what they're saying in the show notes as well. So the first expression I want to look at is freshen up right at the beginning. So the full sentence was everyone now would be a good time to freshen up because I'd like to meet everyone. The conference room to freshen up is a very useful phrasal verb. You may know when we add e n to some adjectives, it kind of gives the feeling, it kind of gives the meaning to make it that way. So fresh means clean or new freshen it means to make clean just like hard or harden. Harden is to make hard or to become hard. If you freshen up, this just means you are making something look new or attractive or maybe you're getting ready for some kind of event. So this might involve putting on makeup, it might involve dressing up smartly, wearing nice clothes, basically being presentable. So if you are about to go on TV for example, you will have to freshen up and look nice.Michael:18:53The next word I want to look at is a comment from Oscar in the show and he said it doesn't take a genius to know that any organisation thrives when it has two leaders. So the word here is Thrive to Thrive. So this is a verb and it's very useful verb, I think to thrive is when you grow really well. Maybe you, flourish would be a similar word. For example, plants that are grown in the desert thrive, but if you try to grow them in the UK, they will not thrive they will die because it's too cold. Or maybe on your first day of school, maybe you thrive, which means you, you did well and you succeeded and you made a lot of friends. So just like a plant, thrive in water and a nice environment, maybe you will thrive in a good environment and you will succeed to see if you can use that in an example sentence. It's a very useful one to use and I'd be interested to hear what you come up with. The last part of the audio was the funniest in my opinion. There's a conversation between Michael and Jim or "Jimothy" in this case.Michael:20:19So Jim said, I just think that maybe that eating large amounts of the day, so this, there are probably no new words here for you, but it's an interesting expression when we say something eats into the day or it eats large amounts of the day.Michael:20:42Of course we usually think of eating is eating food, but in this case we're talking about something eating time. So if something eats a lot of time that means it takes lots of time. It's very time consuming so that we've got that consume as well. Which is to eat. So Michael gave the example of naps. When you have a nap, he eats a large amount of the day. Making this podcast eats a large amount of my day. I've been doing this for a few hours already with the editing and everything, but of course I enjoy it so I'm happy that is eats my day. So can you think of an example of something that eats a large amount of your day? Let me know in the comments something that wastes a lot of your time,Michael:21:33but that is it for today. We've been going long enough I think so thank you very much. As always for listening to the English with Michael Podcast, really enjoying doing this, a podcast series or these episodes. It's very, very fun and you'll support. I only motivates me more so thank you so much. If you want to leave a review for the podcast, I will be so happy. It will make my day promise. You can do that wherever you're listening. You can do it on apple podcasts or my finger just clicked. Ouch. You can do on apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you are, and I will read it in an episode if I like it. Thank you very much and see you next week. Bye Bye.Michael:22:28You have been listening to the English with Michael Podcast to view the podcast notes for this episode and to listen to previous episodes. Head over to podcastMichael:22:52At the beginning of the show, I asked if you knew the meaning of the expression. I'm all ears when we say I'm all ears, that means I'm ready to listen. I'm prepared to listen to you next week. When you listen to the podcast, maybe I will ask you, are you ready to listen? And you can say, yes, I'm all ears. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download