About the Author

Hilary P. is a professional psychotherapist and has practised in the United

Kingdom for over 15 years. Hilary has a keen interest in language learning, with
a classical language educational background. Hilary's particular interests &
experience is in psychology, education & learning, especially online learning
and language acquisition.

Transcript
So How Do You Use The Free Learn English Pod Casts?

Hi I’m Hilary and this is Adept English. And this is a short podcast to explain
how to use our podcasts, so that you get the most out of them. There are
now over a 100 podcasts available from Adept English and you can listen to
them on various different platforms. You can also find them on our Adept
English website – just click on Podcasts and they’re all there, with beautiful
photographs, to help remember which your favourites are. So today I’m
explaining how to use the podcasts, so that you get the most out of them.

If you listen to a podcast just once, it will help your language learning. You
might learn some new words and it may just refresh your memory on certain
words, certain vocabulary. And that’s that – a small benefit. However, unless
your English is very good - and by that, I mean that you understand every word
in every podcast first time through – then that’s not the best way to use them.

What is more likely if you’re learning English and you listen to one of our
podcasts, is that you understand most of the words and most of the meaning
first time. But you won’t understand all of it. If you understand less than half
the words and half the meaning, you may not quite be ready for Adept English

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just yet. You may be better going back to more traditional ways of learning the
language for a bit first. We always say that our courses and our podcasts are
not for beginners. You need to know a reasonable number of English words to
start off with. If you’re understanding less than half the words in our podcasts,
then our course ‘The Most Common 500 Words in English’ may be a good place
to start.

So, you listen to the podcast and you understand most, but not all of it, first
time through. If you then repeat your listening, you‘ll probably find that you
understand a little more of it the second time through. And if you listen a third
time, a little more again. And so it goes on. So repeating the listening to the
same material, the same podcast, is really important. Several things are going
on here. Firstly, you get used to not understanding everything first time
through. It teaches you not to worry about that. Often in real-life conversation,
language learners get anxious, they worry if they don’t understand something.
And then they stop listening altogether. But because it’s a podcast, there’s no
worry – you can play it again, as many times as you like. But you get used to
the idea that it’s OK not to understand everything. Don’t panic, don’t worry,
just be calm – and often you’ll work it out! If you’re patient, the meaning will
become clear. That’s really important – don’t underestimate that! You can learn
to say to yourself ‘I don’t understand it yet – but I will!’

The first time you listen to a podcast, your brain, the machine inside your head,
is having to work quite hard, using its English area for the whole podcast. But
then, once you’ve understood some parts of it, your understanding becomes
automatic next time you listen on these bits. Your brain will be saying ‘Oh yes,
I’ve heard that before – no need to work hard on that bit!’. So when you listen
again, your brain will focus on those parts of the podcast that you didn’t
understand. And different things start to happen. Your ears start to pick up
words that you didn’t manage to hear properly the first time through. And you
might think ‘Ah – that’s what she’s saying’. And sometimes when you listen
again, you work out meanings from the context. The context means ‘what’s
around the word’. So if you didn’t know the word ‘umbrella’ - but I said to you

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that an umbrella is an object, a thing, which you use when it’s raining and it
keeps you dry. It’s round and you can carry it folded up in your bag – then you
might work out the meaning, even if you don’t know the word ‘umbrella’.
Because you’re learning by hearing, your brain remembers the sound of the
word, rather than the written letters that make it up in the dictionary. So if your
main purpose is to speak English, this is much more useful way of learning new
words.

So each time you listen to a podcast, you understand a bit more. If you listen
four or five times, you may find that there are just a few words and sentences
that you still don’t understand. And here’s where the transcript is useful.
Everything we ever release, whether it’s a podcast, a video, a free course or a
paid for course – there is always a transcript. Always a written version. So
every word I say – or anyone else says – is written down, so that you can read
it. And if you still can’t understand a word, have a look at the transcript and
you might find you recognise it when you see it written. It’s just that I’m
pronouncing it, I’m saying it slightly differently from what you expect. And if
even then, you don’t understand, you can always use a dictionary.

There’s nothing wrong with looking up in the dictionary, but what’s really
important is that when you’ve done that, you then listen again to the podcast
which contains that word a few more times. What we’re trying to do here, is not
have you writing and spelling English perfectly – that would be good – but the
real aim of Adept English is to get you to understand words when you hear
them and speak English fluently. So if there’s a new word, that you had to look
up in the dictionary, it’s important that you hear it used, you hear it spoken
several times afterwards. This means that when you hear it next, your
understanding is much more likely to be automatic. And the more automatic
your English understanding, the closer you are to being able to speak those
words automatically, speak English, without thinking about it – just like your
own language. This is what you’re moving towards, this is your goal.

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And that brings me onto another part of this which is really, really important to
understand. When you’re learning a new language – whether this is as a baby
learning your own language, or like us, me and you, learning a foreign
language – understanding always always happens first. It always happens
before speaking. No one ever speaks a language fluently, before they can
understand it fluently. And understanding happens months, sometimes years
ahead of being able to speak. So every time you listen to a podcast and you
repeat the listening, a bit more of your English understanding becomes
automatic. And a funny thing happens. You’ll notice it. Your mouth starts to
want to repeat some of the words and phrases. Especially the ones that you’ve
heard a lot. So with each listen you are strengthening your brain’s association
with 100s of English words. So as well as the learning that you’re more aware
of – all the new words that you learn – you’re strengthening your understanding
of words you’ve met before. And you are recognising words through sound, not
through seeing them written down. That’s really important.
So how many times should you listen to a podcast? Well, that’s probably
different for each person. It depends partly on your level of English. If you
understand all of the podcast first time through, then maybe a couple more
times, just to keep it fresh – and you’ll be ready to move on. If on the other
hand, you find the podcast really difficult, but you’re very determined, you
want to work hard – you might listen to it a lot of times. I think what’s
important is that you listen enough times to understand more than you did first
time through – and if there are words which you didn’t know – once you’ve
understood them, important to go back and listen again to anchor them, to
give your brain the best chance of remembering them next time. But if you find
that you’re getting bored with a podcast and your mind is wandering off and
you’re not really listening, then it’s perhaps a good idea to move on to new
one. That’s why we produce lots of podcasts – so that there’s a lot of choice. I
try to vary the subject to try to help you stay interested while you repeat your
listening. I also try to relate it to things that you know already or make it topical
or current. Also, don’t try to listen to podcasts for five hours all at one time. It’s
much better to do 30 minutes to an hour every day – of listening – every day of
the week.

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Learning a language, so that you can understand it and speak it fluently is a
very gradual process. No one learns to speak a language in 3 weeks – not
properly. But much of the process is automatic, if you have the right conditions.
Automatic means it happens outside of your awareness, without you knowing.
Learning through listening in the focused way that Adept English promotes, is a
way of speeding up the usual mechanisms for language learning. It focuses
your attention, it means that you get used to hearing the language being
spoken and you don’t need to see the words written down. And the focus isn’t
on the written language. This is the mistake made by many traditional courses.
So learning through listening is a really good use of your time, if you want to
speak English. You can do it while you do other things and completely
independently. What could be a better use of your time than that?

Enough for now – all the best with your English language learning.

Copyright © 2018 Adept English

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First published: January 2018

Adept English Ltd.

https://adeptenglish.com/

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