Daily Dose of English 100
One Hundred Episodes
Daily Dose of English 100
Intermediate
Hey everyone, 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 this is a very special episode. In this episode, we're talking about 100 episodes. This is the 100th episode of this podcast that I've recorded, and I want to take a little bit of time to talk about it, what the experience has been like, what I've learned, and yeah, and then we'll go from there. So a couple of months ago I decided to set out and make a podcast for English learners and that's what you've been listening to for the past few days or months or however long you've been listening. And I wanted to make it as Really, it's a big part of this project that I'm doing of trying to make a bunch of comprehensible input for English learners without making it a huge part of my life that takes over all my free time. I spend well under an hour every single day working on my YouTube channel and that has been working really well for me. I started, let's see, so the first episode came out in, what month was that? Oop, that's number 70, that's not the first one. The first one was in, oh, because I made this smaller. Hang on, let me open my spreadsheet. Ah, the first day of April, January, February, March, April, yeah. So, episodes have been coming out for all of April, May, and June. June, and now we're into July. April, May, June. Yeah, so three and a bit months. Well, yeah, that's 100 days, duh. And I started recording things in the beginning of March. And so I've been doing this actually, okay, little secret, I'm recording this now in June. It's actually June 13th right now. I record episodes ahead of time because I like to make sure that they all come out every single day. And so I started in March and I recorded March, April, May, and now half of June. So three and a half months. And it's been really nice. I don't feel like it's really stressful. It's not taking over my life. Like I said, I do less than an hour per day. And with that, I'm able to produce seven podcast episodes per week plus two Tintin episodes and one image talk, which comes out to about two and some odd hours. So two and a half hours, let's say. And I'm putting in maybe 30 minutes per day, 30, 40 minutes, something like that. And so it ends up being about a two to one ratio, a little bit better. And so that means that for every minute of English that I put on my channel, I spend maybe two minutes or a little bit less of working on that. over the course of the week. And that's been really good because it allows me to also get ahead of things and I don't have to record every single day. There's many days that I don't record. In fact, during these months where I've been releasing things every single day, I went on vacation for a week or 10 days or something like that and I wasn't even here to record. But I had plenty of things to go out and I just let my process make sure that things would be published. And that's the main difference that I think I'm taking with my content versus basically every other independent comprehensible input creator on YouTube or on the internet. Because I plan for things to go out in advance and I've been working very, very hard on my processes. To put out a podcast episode, for example, I sit down and I record for about 10 minutes, let's say, and then I actually have a program that I made, which is really very simple. It just processes the audio a little bit and then does a couple other things, which takes me about a minute to run. And then I upload it to YouTube, upload it to my podcast, blog on benslanguagelab.com and that's it. I can do an entire podcast episode in less than 15 minutes from start to finish. I have everything ready in a spreadsheet which tells me what the episode number is, what the date it's going to be released on. Everything is done basically automatically. I just put in the things where they go. And that's been working really, really well for me. And so if you're thinking about trying to make input for your native language, I definitely recommend going with the, what I'd say, the process method. Really focus on getting your process down so that you can spend the least amount of time not speaking. That's how I think about it. And so that includes uploading, editing, sending reminders, anything like that, that involves a work that is not literally sitting down and recording something. When I started the Tintin episodes, I actually did a couple of test videos. I set up what it would look like, I made sure that I wouldn't need editing, I made a process, everything like that I set up in advance. Then I recorded a bunch of episodes and then it started to release. At this point in time, let's see, if I go to my Tintin episodes page, I recorded, right after this, I'm going to record episode 13 of The Secret of the Unicorn, which is going to come out in, oh, tomorrow, in your time. If you're listening to this as it goes live, this episode that I'm going to record of Tintin is going to release tomorrow, not today. But that means that I already have most of the Secret of the Unicorn episodes recorded. I'm already on, okay, now, yeah, most of them. I'm gonna record number 13 right now, and number five just released. So I'm very ahead on that as well, which allows me to take my time, to not feel like I'm rushed, and I never have to do something that is going to be released the very next day. And so that makes sure that I have my consistent schedule, I'm ahead on things, and you all, people that use my videos to learn, can count on videos being released. You know that every single Monday and Wednesday, you're going to see a new Tintin episode. Or, not Monday, Monday is ImageDoc, I think? Wednesday and Saturday? I don't remember exactly when my own videos come out, but you do, probably, if you use them. And that's something that I think works really, really well for this. Because the goal of comprehensible input is not to make a couple of videos. You can't just make 10 minutes of videos and then say that's gonna be useful for a learner. In order to learn a language, you need hundreds and hundreds of hours of content of the language. And with my process, I'm able to produce, let's see, if I open a calculator, if I do, let's just round out, I do two hours of content every month, every week, two times 52, oh, that's just 104. Duh. That means that at this current rate that I'm going, which is very doable for me, I alone, one single person, can produce 104 hours of content in one year. That's pretty good. I know of other channels that don't have that after three or four years. I actually wrote a program at some point which looked into how much time an entire channel's videos were. That doesn't make sense. It calculated how long all of the videos on a channel are in total. and I looked at a couple of big channels, and there's one that's actually a really good channel. It's by this guy named Lucas, and it's called French Comprehensible Input, and he makes comprehensible input for French. And he's been doing it for a couple of years. I think he's been doing it for like four years now, but he has only about 100 hours of content. And the content that he makes is very good, I will say that. However, I think that he's lacking a bit of process. I actually took some of his ideas on what I'm doing on this channel. For example, the Tintin stuff was right out of his videos. But my guess is that he has too much extra time in his process. He's maybe editing things or he's taking a lot of time to upload stuff and write descriptions or something like that, which is taking away from his ability to make more content. Which would be amazing because it's a fantastic resource for anybody looking to learn French. And so what I'm trying to do is make my processes repeatable so that other people in the future can use them to make their own comprehensible input. And so I'm gonna wrap up this episode now, because we're at the 10 minute mark, I can see, and I gotta get this uploaded. But I'm going to, in the future, try to turn all of my processes into, or processes, I think is actually the correct pronunciation, into something that anybody can replicate and do for their their native language and make something very useful for people for free because I think that's a really cool thing to do. Anyway, I hope that you've enjoyed this these first 100 episodes of this podcast I continue I will continue to make them as I've been really enjoying it And so I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode of a daily dose of English. I'll see you then. Bye
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