Daily Dose of English 101
YouTube
Daily Dose of English 101
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 can make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about YouTube. because YouTube is a very interesting tool. It is simultaneously one of the most amazing tools that we, not even tools, it's really a platform, a company, one of the most amazing things that we have available in the modern day, but then also one of the potentially most problematic things for many people. And I'll talk a little bit about why I think that is. But first, let's start with some of the good things, right? The fact that you're able to make and upload stuff for people to hear and see all over the world is pretty incredible. I have uploaded dozens of hours of content for English learners over the past few months. for free and they host all of this stuff and they let it play back on your own devices pretty much wherever you are in the world and that's a pretty big thing. It is not easy to host a video and to distribute it all over the world. YouTube is doing something that's truly incredible and if you were to go back even 20, 30 years and tell somebody what YouTube does, they wouldn't believe you. That would be crazy. And the sheer number of videos and hours of content that get uploaded every day, every minute to YouTube is mind boggling. There is so much content on YouTube available that you couldn't even watch it if your entire life was only watching YouTube videos every single moment of every single day. You wouldn't even get close to watching a small percentage of that. It's just there's so much on there for anything. It's crazy. And not only in English, which is the language that it was started in, it was started in the US, but in languages from all over the world. There's content in hundreds of different languages, and there's massive sub-communities and niches in many of these different languages, which in a lot of ways makes YouTube one of the most powerful language learning tools that has ever existed. There is so much stuff for language learning that you are never going to be able to use it all, right? There's a limitless supply for individuals, which is wild. I've used YouTube to watch so many hours of Spanish and Czech content to improve those languages that it's... I don't even know how much it is. It's so much. And then there's tons and tons of people who have learned English accidentally by just getting into online culture and YouTube and that sort of thing even though they're from a completely different part of the world where English isn't spoken and they engaged with the internet and YouTube in the way that a native English speaker would and they ended up learning accidentally. Maybe you've even had similar things where there's not something available in your native language, but it is in English and so you watch it in English and you pick up words and you learn things that way. And in that way, it's truly impressive what YouTube is and does and has available. You can learn any skill pretty much. You can learn how to build things with wood. You can learn how to cook. You can learn how to fence, which is a sport. Fencing is the sport that you have like swords with and you try to hit each other. It's a little more delicate than that, but that's the general name of it. Yes, it sounds exactly like a fence that you have in your yard, but different words. There's so many things that you can learn on YouTube, and like I said, in a lot of different languages. But as an English learner, you're definitely lucky that there is so much good stuff in English going back many years. YouTube has been around, especially in English, for a lot of years. And so if you find something that you like, you can have hundreds and hundreds of hours of it in English. Some languages are a little bit newer and so they only have a couple of years worth of content or a couple of larger creators or something like that, but things are definitely just growing. It doesn't seem to show any signs of stopping. You may be listening to this podcast on a different platform, but I upload most of my things to YouTube. YouTube is where Ben's Language Lab lives because I primarily post videos. I do have transcripts and things on my blog, but all of that points to YouTube videos. So if you go click on this episode on my blog, so you go to the posts and you find episode number 101 and you click into it, the first thing you'll see is a link to this video on YouTube. And so, and that's also where the rest of my content is. And so, if you've never seen the other things that I do, I also make a couple of other things. Right now, I'm just doing what I call image talk, which is shorter, or they're actually longer, they're like 20 minutes long. Videos where I talk about images, they're made for more beginners. And then I also do some comics where I go through reading a Tintin comic in English, obviously. And that's for beginner, but a little bit more advanced since it's following a story and there's a bit more difficult vocabulary. And so if you haven't found those yet, I definitely recommend checking out my YouTube channel, because I'm also going to be posting more things in the future, different things, adding things for more advanced learners, other beginner materials, I want to do stuff with. going through movies, watching TV shows together, things like that. I'd love to do some books and read just books aloud and explain what's happening so that you can follow books like that. I think it'd be really fun. And yeah, I have a lot of things that I'd like to do in the future. But there's also kind of a dark side to YouTube, well not really kind of, there's a lot of dark sides and it's pretty, they're pretty clear if you've ever been on the platform. But something that I definitely struggle with sometimes is the fact that you can, it's really easy to get sucked in. to YouTube. And sucked in in this case is when something is really hard to stop doing. So if you start watching a video and you get sucked into it, it's really hard to stop watching that video and to do something else. Because a lot of things on the internet essentially take advantage of our brains in some way. They make us want to keep watching or want to keep going even if it's not the best thing for us. And so I find myself very often getting sucked into YouTube and watching something that I don't really want to watch. I don't really want to keep watching this. I'd much rather do something else, but my brain doesn't really want to stop. And that can happen for, in my case, it's not really that big of a problem. I'm able to pull away and do other things and focus on my life. However, many people really struggle with that. They don't have other things they want to do or they ended up just spending hours and hours and hours every single day on YouTube. Relatively recently, I found a video by somebody, and it was titled, I Wasted My 20s on YouTube, or something like that. And they basically talk about their past with YouTube, where they, for many of their 20s, which is when you're from the ages of 20 to 29, we call those your 20s and your 30s and 40s, 50s. And he said that for a lot of his 20s, instead of doing anything else, he would spend several hours per day on YouTube, which is not very healthy. And then leaving his 20s, he kind of realized that and regretted it. He felt like it was a bad choice, a bad thing that he did because he lost a lot of this other stuff that he could have been doing. He could have been doing projects, exploring, learning things in the real world, reading. There's so much more out there and it can be really hard to pull away from YouTube. Um, and so, yeah, I'm running out of time in this episode, but if you have a similar issue, I definitely recommend you try taking breaks from YouTube, like, like weeks or months at a time. Um, I also recommend that you give yourself maybe challenges of doing less than 30 minutes per day, or only watching YouTube in English, that can be a helpful way to reduce your intake because it adds this extra level of friction. Because maybe you don't always want to do English. And so you go, oh, I'm really tired right now. I want to just think in my native language. But I told myself I'm not going to be on YouTube. So instead, I'm going to read a book in my native language or I'm going to listen to a podcast or watch a movie or something. I don't know. Do whatever you want. But sometimes doing something that's not this endless cycle of staying on one website is a very good thing for you. But anyways, that's all that I have for this episode. That was a very fast episode. It feels like I just started talking, but I thank you very much for listening. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on YouTube. So definitely leave a comment below with what your opinion is, but I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.
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