How to Learn English on Youtube

Hi, Bob the Canadian here.

As you know, YouTube is an amazing tool

for learning a language like English.

There are, however, a few tips that I can give you

that might make that experience even better,

so in this video, I'm going to look at YouTube

as a language learning tool

and I'm gonna give you as many tips

and I'm gonna show you as many tricks as possible

so that you can make that experience even better.

(light music)

Well hey, welcome to this video on how to use YouTube

to improve your English.

Before we get started though, if you are new here,

don't forget to click that red subscribe button below

and give me a thumbs up if this video helps you learn

just a little bit more English.

The first thing that you can can do

when you are watching YouTube videos

to improve your English, is to adjust the speed.

If we look at a mobile device, if I do this on my phone,

the way I would do it is I would click the three dots

in the top right corner and after you click those three dots

you can choose playback speed.

From the playback speed menu, I would choose 0.75

to slow the video down, and then when I play the video,

hard working person,

you can hear that it's a little bit slower.

You can also press the three dots

and go to playback speed and set the playback speed higher

to 1.25 if you want to challenge yourself

and play the video a little faster.

As being the salt of the Earth.

They were people who worked hard.

I'll pause that.

Let's look at the same thing on the computer.

On the computer, if you want to change the speed,

you would click down here where you see the gear.

Once you click the gear, you would choose playback speed

and you can see, you have the same options

as what we did on the phone.

When I select 75% or 0.75,

you can use them if you want, but when you,

it is still very understandable

and it is just a good way to slow down an English speaker.

If I click on playback speed

and choose 1.25 it will be faster.

The cool thing about the computer though,

is you can choose custom as one of your speeds.

My favorite speed when listening to a video

that's in French that's too fast is 0.85.

We're at the store, everything.

Which slows the video down,

but still makes it very easy to understand.

So, the first thing that you can do to help you

when you are watching English videos on YouTube

is to either slow the video down,

so you can understand it better,

or speed it up to challenge the speed at which

you can listen to and understand English.

The second thing you can do

so that you can understand YouTube videos better,

is to turn on captions or subtitles.

Now some people think that you should not

turn on English subtitles when you are learning

the English language.

I, however, have this advice to give,

I think you should watch every video once

with the subtitles on and then you should watch it

a second time with the subtitles off.

So let's look at how to turn subtitles, or captions, on

using a mobile device.

Again, on the mobile device, you will click the three dots

in the top right corner, then you will look for

the word captions in the menu that pops up,

and when that opens, hopefully it says English.

It might say English auto-generated,

that means that the subtitles were made by YouTube

by a computer, but hopefully it says English.

That means that the person who made the video

created word for word English subtitles.

All of my Tuesday videos

have word for word English subtitles on them.

Once that's done and you hit play, you will see

that as the video plays it now has subtitles on it.

Let me pause this video for a sec.

Let's look at how to do that on the computer.

On the computer, you can just click the CC button,

which will turn on subtitles,

but you can also click the gear

and then you can go to subtitles

and you can choose the subtitle that you want.

You can see here now that English is on.

This is a very handy thing to be able to do.

The other thing you can do on a computer

is you can actually move the subtitles

and put them on a different part of the video.

This can be helpful if the subtitles are behind something.

So, the second thing that you can do

to increase the amount of English that you learn

with each video you watch is to turn on subtitles

or captions for the first time that you watch the video

and then watch the video again

with the subtitles or captions turned off.

The third thing I wanna talk about is how to fast-forward

or rewind a video quickly

when you are watching it on YouTube.

Sometimes when you are learning English

by watching a YouTube video,

you don't quite understand what the person said

and you want to quickly rewind.

The way you do that when you are using a mobile device

is to simply double tap on the left-hand side of the screen.

When you double tap, the video will go 10 seconds backwards.

When you tap on the right side of the screen,

when you double tap on the right side of the screen,

the video will go forward 10 seconds.

So if I'm watching a video and I don't quite understand

what the person just said,

I can quickly double tap and go back 10 seconds.

On the computer, the way you do this is even cooler I think

because you can hit play on the video

and if you don't understand what the person said,

you can just hit the left arrow on the keyboard.

When you hit the left arrow on the keyboard,

the video will go back five seconds.

I find this to be a lot handier.

So again, when you are watching a video,

sometimes you will not quite catch,

you will not quite understand what the person said,

and a very easy way to go back is to double tap

the left side of the screen on a phone

or to hit the left arrow key on a computer keyboard.

The fourth thing I want to show you how to do

is how to quickly pause the video

so that you can shadow the person

who is speaking in the video.

When you shadow someone, it means that you listen

to what they say and then you pause

and you say what they have just said.

So this is a great way to use a YouTube video,

not just for listening practice,

but also for speaking practice.

So, once again, if you are using a mobile device,

all you do is you simply tap the screen.

So if I tap the screen it will pause.

I had to double tap there

because the controls weren't there,

so if I was listening to this video,

I could hit play and then I could repeat,

that was not a very nice thing to do.

So this is a great way to shadow the speaker in the video.

On a computer, it's even easier, you just use the space bar.

So you can see the video is playing,

if I hit space the video is paused.

I can even hit the left arrow key to go back if I need to

like we just learned in the last part of this video,

and then I can hit the space bar again to start the video.

So it seems like a simple thing

but the ability to pause the video

and to rewind the video are very powerful tools

when you are trying to shadow or trying to repeat after

what the person in the video has said.

The fifth thing I wanna show you only works on a computer,

it doesn't work on a phone.

I know most of you watch videos on your phones

but this trick I'm going to show you

that you can do the computer is extremely powerful.

If you look down here below the video on the right-hand side

and if you click the three dots,

you can click open transcript

and on the right-hand side here

you will see the entire transcript for this video.

What you can then do is you can highlight

and copy parts of the transcript

and maybe you can put them into Google Translate

so that you can see what Google translates it to be

in your own language.

Or if you want, you can paste it into your own document,

one second here, I did kind of an odd paste there,

you can paste it into your own document

and then you can read the transcript

before you watch the video.

The next trick I'm going to show you

only works on the computer as well.

I'm sorry about that.

I hope they build more features into the phone app

at some point, but on the computer,

you can share the video and you can share it

with a link that goes straight to the part of the video

you are currently watching.

So let's say I'm watching a video

and at the four minute and 55 second mark I have a question,

I can click share and then I can copy,

sorry, I can click share and then I can click start at 4:55

and then I can copy that and I could then email

that link to someone and say, "Hey, I'm watching this video

"and I don't quite understand

"what the speaker is saying at this part."

The person who gets that email, when they click the link

to YouTube, will go straight to that part of the video.

Here are four more general tips

for how you can use YouTube to improve your English,

and I'm going to talk about reading,

writing, listening, and speaking.

You might think YouTube

is only for improving your listening skills,

but you can actually improve all four.

For reading, I highly recommend that you do this.

Read the description below the video

before you watch the video.

Oftentimes when someone makes a video,

they will kind of summarize,

or they'll give a little description

of the video below the video.

This can help your mind get ready to watch the video.

Also, for improving your reading,

don't forget to read some of the comments,

especially if the person who made the video

replies to the comments

and if they are a native English speaker.

In order to improve your writing,

why don't you take the time to leave a comment

once in awhile on a video?

Work hard at writing a three or four sentence comment

in English and leave that on the video.

That is just a great way to improve your writing.

How will you improve your speaking

when you're watching a video?

Well, we talked earlier about shadowing, or repeating,

what the speaker says, this is just a great idea.

So continue to do that.

Watch videos and aim to improve your speaking skills

by repeating what the speaker is saying.

And, of course, how do you improve your listening skills?

Well, you need to listen while you're watching the video.

Oh, and one more thing, if you have the opportunity,

you should join a live English lesson on YouTube.

Many English teachers on YouTube

teach English via live streams,

where you can interact with the teacher in the chat

while the live stream is happening.

So the teacher teaches a lesson

and the students, or the viewers, can chat with the teacher

and with other people while they are watching.

It's a great way to improve your English.

Well hey, thanks so much for watching this video

about how to use YouTube to improve your English.

I hope it was helpful.

If you are new here, don't forget to click

that red subscribe button below

and give me a thumbs up if this video

helped you learn just a little bit more English.

And, if you have a little bit of time,

why don't you stick around and watch another video?