What is "Daily Dose of English?"
This Podcast!
Daily Dose of English X
Intermediate
Hello, everybody. My name is Ben and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today because in this episode, we're going to be talking about this podcast. This is the first episode of A Daily Dose of English here on Ben's Language Lab. And I want to talk to you about what this podcast is, how you can use it, and everything about that, how it came to be, why I decided to create it. So let's get into it. First, what is it? Basically, it's an English podcast, which you're listening to, obviously, and I'm going to release an episode every single day, until I don't, and each episode is going to be about 10 minutes long. And I'm going to speak using relatively slow but still natural English and trying to explain my ideas in a way that is comfortable and easy for somebody to understand who has a maybe intermediate or upper beginner level, more or less. However, anybody can use this. Part of the way that I'm making this is by including subtitles and transcripts so that if you're a lower level, maybe you're still just a regular beginner, you can use the transcript, you can look up words, and you can go slower to understand more than you otherwise could. If you're a lower level or it still ends up being a little bit difficult for you, you can listen several times, you can slow my voice down a little bit more, or you can use those transcripts to look ahead. You can read before what I'm talking about, what words I'm going to use, and then go and listen to the episode. In order to make these episodes daily, I need to reduce the amount of time that it takes me to make them. I do use AI, artificial intelligence, to make the subtitles, and the transcripts rather. I cannot guarantee that they're perfect, however, at time of recording, whisper, which is what I'm using to make the subtitles, is very good, especially with English. Since I'm talking about relatively common and simple topics, I expect the subtitles to be almost perfect, if not fully perfect. Probably with proper nouns, with names and places, or if I say a foreign word every so often, that's where it's more likely to make a mistake. If you do see something that sounds a little bit off in the subtitles, you might be correct. Don't necessarily assume that the subtitles are perfect. That's what this podcast is. Like I said in the introduction, if you want any of the transcripts, they're all available for free on benslanguagelab.com. I will also be posting other things there that go onto this channel, and so if you want to see all of it, you can just go there and always have that available to you. Now, why did I decide to start doing this? Well, I'm a language learner, and I've been learning languages for quite a long time. Right now, I've been learning Czech at time of recording. I've been learning Czech for almost exactly one year, and it's been amazing. I've been learning Spanish for even longer, three something years, I'm not even sure. I've learned German. I've learned other languages before. I'm a lifelong language learner, and I work for a language learning company, Refold. Languages are all around me, and I specifically have an interest in comprehensible input, capital C, capital I, so the proper noun in this case, because that's a genre of content made for people like you, people that are learning a language, in this case, English. I have a huge interest in how comprehensible input is made by people like me, regular people, because I think that there is a lot of improvement to be done in this field. In general, there is not that much comprehensible input in the world. For some languages, there's a good amount. For some languages, there's some, but I think there is so much room to grow and expand, and I have a lot of ideas on how to make comprehensible input easier to make for the regular people and more useful for you, the learners. And so I'm putting my ideas and thoughts to the test. I'm actually doing all of what I come up with and what I think to test it, essentially. And so on any episode of Ben's Language Lab here on this channel or on my blog, feel free to make comments or send me emails. I want to hear your thoughts and understand what you as a learner would like to hear and to see. I plan to do other types of videos, not just podcasts, not the sort of intermediate-ish podcasts. I want to do things that are easier, so things for beginners and even for super-beginners, people that understand nothing of English, to test those ideas because I think they're interesting. I specifically am a big fan of English. I've been an English teacher in the past. I have a CELTA, which is a certificate for CELT. Let me see if I can remember this acronym, C-E-L-T-A, Certificate of the English Language Teaching to Adults is what it stands for. It's not a great acronym, but I have a CELTA. And so I've taught students, I've worked on accent and accent reduction, which I can go into that into a future episode, but how to actually do that. And so I think there's a lot I also have to bring to the English learning space because I am a fan of English. I think it's a really interesting language and it's my native one, obviously. And so I hope to bring some interesting facts and tidbits and approaches for you, for English learners. Now let's talk a little bit about how to use this podcast to the best of your ability. No, that doesn't make sense. How to use this podcast and get the most out of this podcast. That's what I wanted to say. As you can see, it is natural English. I'm not cutting anything. I'm not making any edits. This is me speaking into the microphone. And so you're getting real natural English. It's just a little bit slower and I'm thinking about English learners when I'm speaking, but it's still natural. Anyways, how do you use this podcast? Well, first you should be listening to it regularly. Consistency and being regular with your learning is one of the most important parts. And that's why I want to release this every single day so that even if you discover me on day one, you have something to do every single day and you don't run out of a short, it's just 10 minutes if you listen without stopping with anything to do every single day. It's a bare minimum. And I think it's important for every single language learner to do at least something like this every single day. And so that's step one. Do this every day and find a routine that works for you. Now depending on your level, you might have to do something different. If you're a total beginner and you know hardly anything about English, this might not be the podcast for you, but if you still want to use it, you can. What you can do is you can look at the subtitles, you can look at the transcript, you can look up words, you can write words down, and then you can listen line by line. There are some tools on the internet like language reactor or ASB player, which you can use to automatically pause after each sentence and work through the podcast. You can download the audio and you can read it in something like link or loot, which are other programs to study with. So there's a lot of different ways you can use this podcast. If you're intermediate, you can just listen to the podcast on your phone, on your way to work, whatever you do. You can just listen to it once and that's it. If you'd like, you can listen to it, read it, and then listen to it again. There's like 30 minutes of practice in one day. Or if you're more advanced, it's probably something you should just listen to to connect with every day with English. So there's a bunch of different ways to use the podcast depending on what suits you. But the main thing is that you are consistent and you use the podcast in a way that you like to. I don't really have anything else to add about how you should study it. I think that you should try things and see what works for you, because you're likely to maybe come up with an idea and say, okay, I want to do this with the podcast, but maybe it's too hard or it's too easy. But you still want to figure out how to use it, and so you tweak, you change, you try something new with your approach, and over the next couple days or weeks, you'll find something that works for you and in a way that you can pick up new words and vocabulary and that sort of thing. Each episode is going to be about a different topic, and so I'll hopefully use a lot of varied vocabulary and words, but still have it based in regular, normal, everyday American English. But yeah, that's everything that I have for this first episode. Make sure that you are subscribed and if you want, you can join the mailing list in order to get an email update when I post new things, or you can just come back and check in every single day. But that's everything for today. Thank you so much for listening, and I will catch you in the next episode tomorrow. See you then. Bye-bye. Thank you.
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