۸ روش ساده برای بهبود قدرت شنیداری

(soft music)

• Hello everyone and welcome back to English With Lucy.

Today I’m going to teach you eight ways in which

you can improve your listening skills,

your English listening skills.

Now, number one is take advantage

of YouTube’s subtitles system

but make sure you understand and use it properly.

So in order to improve your daily English,

the English that you use every day,

I want you to find vloggers and kind of daily YouTubers

that document their everyday life,

who actually add their own subtitles.

Vloggers that don’t rely on the auto-generated subtitles.

Nowadays, YouTube has some very, very good subtitle software

but it’s never perfect (chuckles).

When I post a video, YouTube analyses what I say

and it posts what it thinks I’ve said

as auto-generated subtitles.

However, for every single video, I do pay for someone else

to actually write the subtitles

and there are a couple of reasons why I do this.

Number one, I want correct spelling and grammar.

YouTube software doesn’t add in the correct punctuation

and kind of commas and quotation marks and things like that

and that’s important for you to learn.

It’s important for you to see where a sentence starts

and ends and where there might be pauses.

Also, sometimes the software just

completely misses out words.

It misspells things, it misunderstands what I’ve said.

Sometimes it puts very rude things

in place of what I’ve actually said.

So I choose to buy my own subtitles

and a lot of creators do this

and a lot of vloggers do this and it’s very, very useful.

In fact, on my own vlogging channel

where I’ve been documenting my life, my personal life

on the farm in rural England,

I do write the subtitles for you.

So you know that what I’m saying on-screen

is what is also written on-screen.

How can you tell if the subtitles are trustworthy or not?

Well, one indicator is the term auto-generated

which will come up if YouTube’s AI system

has developed the software.

If you follow some vloggers

that speak a native level of English,

watch their videos with subtitles every week or every day.

You will pick up on so much vocabulary,

vocabulary that we use as natives in our daily lives.

Number two is listen to a variety of accents and dialects.

Now, I don’t just say accents I say dialects

because different parts of my country, England

have different dialects.

So Northern slang is very different to Southern slang.

In fact, British English is so unbelievably diverse.

So for example, something as simple for me as a can of Coke.

Well, up north, they might say, a tin of Coke

and that would sound ridiculous for me.

So to ensure that you understand

everything that you listen to,

or almost everything that you listen to,

because let’s face it,

everything would be quite the challenge

‘cause even I don’t understand everything that I hear.

You do need to listen to a variety of accents and dialects,

the different sounds that they produce,

the different common phrases that they use

and the different slang words as well are really,

really important and I have something in the pipeline

that will massively help you with this.

I’m going to talk about it more

towards the end of this video.

Number three is of course, speak with natives,

listen to natives and speak to them but more than that,

it’s ask for repetition and ask for explanation.

So you want to speak with natives,

ask them to repeat things and ask them to explain

and justify things.

A lot of students ask me how they can find

well-priced native teachers or native-level teachers.

Just because someone isn’t native doesn’t mean

that they’re not an excellent teacher

and start earning those prizes.

Right, let’s move on to way number four.

Now, this is a really simple way of making native speech

easier to understand.

It’s so simple, I can’t believe that people

still aren’t taking advantage of it.

Do you know about YouTube’s slow-down function?

Now, when I look at videos that are explaining

something technical like how to use my new washing machine

or why my hoover isn’t sucking.

Sometimes I find the person takes ages

to get to the point or to explain something,

so I speed them up, I click on the little cog

and then I click on playback speed

and I put them at 1.25 times speed or 1.5

if I’m really energetic.

However, the slow-down function would be really,

really useful for language learners.

You can slow down speech to three quarters

of the natural pace, 0.75 speed.

If you’re watching a video and you’re interested

in what that person is saying

but they are just speaking too quickly, try that 0.75 speed.

Now 0.5 tends to be too slow.

The person sounds drunk or deranged

but 0.75 for very fast talker

can actually be really, really helpful.

Even for me as a native speaker, there are some people

that just go and I find it hard to follow.

So if there’s a vlogger or narrator or a presenter

that you have shunned in the past

because they speak too quickly,

try watching them on YouTube, try slowing them down

and let me know what you think.

What would be even better

is if they had their subtitles added as well.

So you can watch them in slow speed without subtitles

and then watch them again with subtitles

but more about that later on.

Now number five, this is a really common listening tip

but I’m going to talk about it

because I’ve got something extra to add.

It is watch English movies and TV shows.

Now we all know this, this is one of the first tips

that teachers will give you but it can be really,

really hard and really daunting to try and work out

which TV show and which film is going to be at your level.

It’s so annoying to finally find something

that you want to watch after reading loads of reviews

and then you just can’t understand it.

It’s also really annoying when your computer

or your network won’t allow you to access certain films

and TV shows because of where you live

because your country is not allowed

to view that specific website.

I have got a video coming next week

on my recommendations for British TV shows

and I start with beginner level.

I move to pre-intermediate, intermediate and advanced.

I cover all the bases and they’re all shows

that will help you develop a British English accent

and help you understand it as well.

I’ll also talk about the variety

of British English accents as well.

Now when this video is live,

I will link it in the description box.

So check that out because I want to help you find something

that you can actually watch and understand

and then you can move up through the levels.

Number six is learn responses that will buy you more time

because when we are listening to what someone is saying,

in a language that is not our first language,

we do need that little bit of extra time to process

what they’re trying to say.

I have a couple of tricks and phrases

that will buy you more time, things that you can say,

without seeming like a strange person going

because that is what a lot of English learners do.

It’s a natural thing to want to fill the gap

by just making one noise like

and you also don’t want to just fill it with silence

‘cause that can be awkward, that person might think

that you’ve not heard them.

When really you’ve just not understood them.

What you want to do is fill the conversation

with fillers or interjections

and I’ve made various videos on this topic.

I did a great one with Harry

from Real English with Real Teachers

on interjections things like ooh or (imitates hiss sound).

I will link that down below.

And also last week, I did post a video on different ways

to say I know and I understand

because those are very commonly used in conversation

whilst you’re processing what someone has said

or you’re just showing that you’ve understood

and acknowledged what they’ve said.

Again, I will link that, I think both of those videos

would be really, really useful.

They will give you phrases that you can use to buy more time

whilst you’re processing speech.

Number seven is listen whilst you read.

Listen whilst you read.

Now, I talk about this a lot in my videos

because it really, really works.

I’m always talking about listening to audiobooks

as you read the actual book

and I’m not just saying this for fun,

this is genuinely such a good method.

It trains your brain to connect

written words with spoken words.

It helps improve your pronunciation,

it helps improve your listening,

it helps improve your spelling as well.

The way a word is spelt in English

doesn’t necessarily give you any indication

as to how it’s pronounced in English

and the way a word is pronounced in English

doesn’t really help you work out how that word is spelt.

This is why English seems like such a hard language

to understand when you’re listening to it

and such a hard language to pronounce

because you look at word and you just have no idea

how it should be pronounced.

If you take a book that you have already read in English

or a book that you would like to read in English

and read that book as you are listening to

that same audiobook version, your problems will be solved.

Now, the last tip, number eight is

to create your own transcription exercises.

You know those annoying, horrible listening tests

where you have to fill in a gap or right what you hear?

Unfortunately, they work, however, we want to do something

that’s relevant for us, don’t we?

So if you find something that is particularly interesting

to you, maybe you’re interested in photography

and it’s about cameras, maybe you’re interested in wildlife

or skateboarding, I have no idea but everybody

has their thing, don’t they?

I personally love cooking and gardening.

Well, if you find something that’s very,

very interesting to you, create your own listening exercise

because it won’t be so boring and painful.

This exercise is all about listening blindly.

Meaning that you are not looking at any visuals,

so you don’t see their mouth moving,

you don’t see their emotion, nothing.

And you definitely, definitely don’t look at any subtitles.

Take one sentence or if you’re feeling more advanced,

you can take a couple of sentences and listen to it once.

Then you can listen to it for a second time

and then you have to write down exactly what you’ve heard

or what you think you’ve heard.

After that you can listen to it one more time

and you can look at the transcription or the subtitles.

Make sure they are accurate and there you have it,

you’ve created your own transcription exercise

using something that is relevant and interesting to you.

The reason why these sorts of exercises are included

in so many different examinations by so many

different prestigious examination boards across the globe,

is because they really, really work.

So if you can get into the habit

of every time you’re listening to something interesting

and you know there are reliable transcriptions

or subtitles available to you, if you do this

and make it a habit, you really, really will learn so much

and you’ll get so used to analysing things

from a listening perspective.

Right, that’s it for today’s lesson.

I hope you enjoyed it

and I definitely hope you take some of my advice.

Please feel free to add any more advice,