Listening and Speaking: Self Study Tips

Hi, everybody.

Welcome to www.engvid.com.

I'm Adam.

In today's video, I want to give you some tips on how you can improve your listening

and speaking skills while alone.

For example, if you're doing self-studying or

if you live in a place that you don't really

have much access to a native English speaker,

you can study, you can still practice these

skills by yourself using some very accessible

internet tools, and I'm going to show you

how to do this.

So, we're going to start with the listening skills.

Now, I put here YouTube and TED.com.

Obviously, you know YouTube, you're watching us on YouTube, www.engvid.com.

TED.com is a site where people give speeches.

It's a very popular site and very interesting

speeches and lectures and all this stuff.

And the function I'm going to show you also applies to TED.com.

Now, okay, let me actually explain this first,

and then I'll get into the different places

you can find this.

So, in YouTube, now, keep in mind that this might be a little bit different depending

on the device you're using, but if you go to "Settings", usually it's in the bottom

right corner of the YouTube video screen, but not always.

You may have to look around a little bit.

Try to find this symbol.

This is the settings symbol.

This is actually a gear, that's what it's called.

Try to find this, and once you open this, you

should see an option for playback settings.

Playback means the speed that the video plays in, and the audio.

That's the key here.

Set the playback speed to .75.

This will slow down the speaking.

You could go to .5, but that's a little bit too slow, I think.

.75 is very good, and if you're listening to someone who's a very fast speaker, this

will slow them down to something that you can listen to.

If they're really, really fast speakers, then you can try .5.

Or, go to .5, it'll be very, very slow, and then go back to .75 and see if you can keep

up with the speed.

But anyways, the main thing is that it slows down

the speaker so you can actually pay attention

to all the words they're saying, right?

Another thing you can do, and again, on TED.com I know that they have transcripts.

On YouTube, some channels offer transcripts, some don't.

What you can do, if you can print out the transcript, this is even better.

Listen to the video, listen to the speech a little bit slower, at .75, and follow the

transcript.

So, you're listening and reading, and just making sure you understand what the person

is saying.

Then, listen again.

Put the playback setting back to normal speed,

and listen again, and again, follow the transcript

to make sure you understand what's being said,

and also pay attention to the enunciation

and the intonation, where the speaker goes up, where the speaker goes down, sometimes

how words might be blended together, right?

So, you get all these different aspects of the

listening while you're understanding what's

going on.

Then, listen again at normal speed without a transcript, and just pay attention to how

the speaker is speaking.

Now, a few other things you can do.

If you printed out the transcript, what you can do is get some whiteout.

Now, whiteout is this, like, white tape, or even sometimes it's a liquid.

For example, if you're writing something and

you need to... and you made a mistake, you

need to clear it and write on top of it, you put

that white stuff on, that is called whiteout.

So, take some whiteout, take the transcript,

and just randomly block out words all over

the transcript.

Then, listen again at normal speed, and follow

the transcript, and fill in the blanks that

you created for yourself.

This is just a good listening drill, right?

You're listening for the specific words.

Now, if you're going to be taking the IELTS,

especially the IELTS, the TOEFL not as much,

if you're taking the IELTS, this is excellent

practice for the listening section of the

IELTS, to follow along and fill in blanks.

Now, once you get comfortable with this, go to YouTube and start looking for all kinds

of different listening things, especially, like, sitcoms.

Look for, like, videos about friends, you know, the TV show "Friends".

You can find a lot of little videos that are,

like, two minutes, five minutes long, just

enough of a sample that you can practice, or Seinfeld.

Now, the reason I suggest these videos is because they're speaking in a normal speed,

right?

They're just saying...

They're speaking like they are to native speakers,

and you're going to get a lot of new vocab,

you're going to get a lot of, like, idioms, you're

going to get a lot of different expressions.

So, you're building your vocab, you're building

your idiom base, and you're improving your

listening skills.

Now, keep in mind that these are not the only places you can do this.

There are lots of video sites that will offer you the playback settings.

Some of them do not.

For example, CNN, if you go to CNN.com and click on their videos, they don't give you

this.

So, look around the internet, find things

that you're interested in, and just practice

your listening that way, okay?

So, that's for listening.

Another thing you can do, and this will be part of the speaking, after you've listened

to a lecture on TED, for example, or you watch

a show on YouTube, and you've gone through

the transcript and you're ready, then when you have your transcript, try reading the

transcript similar...

In a similar way to the way that was spoken by the original speaker.

So, if you're listening to a TED speaker, pay attention to how they're delivering it,

and then try to repeat and record yourself,

and then compare your recording to the original

lecture.

And this is good for listening and for speaking practice.

But I'm going to show you another tool that will help you with the speaking...

With your speaking skills.

Okay, so now we're going to work on our speaking skills.

So, here's where you begin.

You must have Google Chrome to do this.

It doesn't work on Edge or Mozilla Firefox, etc.

It only works if you have...

If you open this page in Chrome, and you must

sign in, so you must have a Google account.

If you don't, just make one, it's free, it's easy, it's good to have anyway.

Once you're in Chrome, go to Google Docs.

You can just put it in the search engine and

it'll show you the link for it, or you just

put Google Docs in the address box.

Once you have Google Docs opened, open a blank page.

So now you're set up.

So, it's going to look like basically a file

to type on and do, like a Word file, a little

bit similar.

If you go to the top, you'll see a bunch of

different tabs that you can choose, like "File",

"Edit", all these things.

Look for one called "Tools".

Click on that, and then you will see something called "Voice Typing".

Click on that.

When you do that, you will see a little icon of a microphone, a mic.

Click the mic, start talking, start speaking.

Now, the whole point of this tool is it's a voice-to-text tool, so you speak and Google

types what you said.

Now, what the point here is to try to speak clearly enough that Google types the words

correctly.

Now, they do take into account accents.

If you have an accent, that's no problem.

If you mispronounce a word completely, Google will not type it correctly.

Either it will type some gibberish, some nonsense

word, or it will type some other words that

are close enough to it.

So, for example, one time I said "retreat", and I said this word, "retreat", and what

did Google type?

It typed "red meat".

So, it's not perfect, but again, if you're

by yourself and this is the only way you have

to practice, then this is a very good tool.

Now, a couple of things to keep in mind.

Google...

Google's AI, artificial intelligence, is actually

pretty smart, and it will help you a little

bit.

It will put some words incorrectly just because of the context.

So, basically, Google knows which word should go

next, even if you didn't necessarily pronounce

it correctly.

If you pronounce it close enough and it fits

the context, it will fill it in for you.

But overall, the key here is to try to get as many words correct as you can.

So, what you can do is just take a small... just take a paragraph from an essay or from

a magazine or a newspaper, and just read it out loud, and see how many words Google

types correctly.

Okay?

Another thing you can do is you can combine

the listening skills we talked about and the

speaking.

So, watch a little piece of a TV show or a lecture or just come to www.engvid.com and

just take one of our lessons and try to... take this lesson, even.

Just try to take the transcript, and all engVid videos have transcripts.

You can get all of the transcripts for the videos.

Just take a piece of that and then speak it

into the voice typing application, the tool,

and see if you can repeat saying what we said,

or what Ted.com lecturer said, or what some

other channel said.

And that way, you're getting your listening and your speaking practice in one.

Now, a couple of other notes.

All of this can change at any time.

These are all free tools.

Google can change their systems at any time, Ted can change, YouTube can change.

Keep in mind, all of this applies today.

But once the tools are available, they generally

don't disappear, they just change how you

access them.

Just look for the playback, look for the voice to text.

So, this is called voice typing, but the actual

tool is this, and you can find... you can

find it on Google Docs.

There are actually a lot of applications on your phone that will do the same thing.

Just look for them, and you can do this on your phone at any time, and record yourself

on your phone, type what you have to say.

The more you do it, the better you get.

And also, keep in mind, the more people go on to these applications or Google Docs to

do this, the better Google Docs becomes.

The better the applications become, because they're learning from you, and you're also

practicing yourself.

So, over time, these tools will get better,

you will get better, and everybody benefits.

Now, and this is, again, if you have access

to native speakers, that's your best option.

If you don't, this at least will give you

some sort of useful practice in your listening

and speaking skills.

Now, the main thing is, the key here is to find good sources.

TV shows and all this stuff, TED.com lectures,

but again, www.engvid.com is a great place,

the transcripts are there, a lot of channels

have captions, so if you go to YouTube, also

look for this, CC means "closed captions", so it's basically like subtitles, so if a

channel doesn't have transcripts, at least

it will have closed captions, you can follow

those as well for your listening practice, and you can use them, write them down and

then use them for speaking as well.

If you want a little bit more advanced English

lessons, a little bit faster, I have another

channel, if you go to YouTube.com/writetotop,

I'll write it down somewhere else, I give

more advanced lessons and I speak a little bit faster, so you can also practice with

that as well.

So, if you have any questions about any of this, please go to www.engvid.com and ask

me in the comments section.

I did make a quiz, just for comprehension, just to see if you followed the lesson, got

the main ideas, got some good information, and that's it.

I hope this is helpful for you, and if you

like the video, give me a like, don't forget

to subscribe to my channel and ring the bell

for notifications of future videos, and come

back next time, I'll have some more useful tools to tell you about.

See you then.

Bye bye.