Daily Dose of English 116
The Blog
Daily Dose of English 116
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. In this episode, we're actually going to be talking about benslanguagelab.com or the blog, as I like to think about it. because I've been posting this podcast now every single day for 116 days and every single episode, every video has a accompanying blog post. There is a blog post that goes up at the same time, I think, with the transcript and a little bit more information like a link to the video and stuff like that. And I wanna talk a little bit about what I do, how I do that, why I do that, and how you can use that to your own benefit. So the first thing I think that's important is generally what is BensLanguageLab.com? It is essentially just these episodes in text form. They're written versions of every single episode. There's a couple of other pages on there where I have like some basic information, some links and things. But for the most part, it is just the text, right? That is 95 or 90% of the entire website, 95% of the website. And if you go to benslanguagelab.com and then you click on transcripts, you'll see an entire list of all of the things that I've ever published. And if you click into any of them, you get to see the actual information. You can see what I said. You can also get a link to the YouTube video, that sort of thing. And so it's a really easy way to find the text to go along with, or to copy, or to use for reading, or whatever you want to do, and also find the links. You can also scroll to the bottom of the page on the transcripts page. At the very bottom, there is a bunch of tags, because I also tag every episode with a level, more or less, that it's meant for, and the series now. That's actually a change that I made about a month ago. Now I make sure to tag every single episode with the series as well. So if you want to see all of the Daily Dose episodes, you can click on, at the very bottom, there's something called hashtag Daily Dose and it will just show you Daily Dose episodes. And that way, if you wanna find the things that you actually wanna watch or listen to more easily, you can. And I think that having transcripts available is very, very helpful for many different reasons. Number one, it's useful for subtitles, right? So if you're watching this on YouTube, you'll be able to watch what I'm saying along as I'm saying it. And that opens up a ton of possibilities for learning. Not only are the subtitles nice to have for following along with if you just wanna read, but also it's really nice if you wanna have some kind of tool to look words up with. If I say a word like academy and you don't know what that word is, how are you supposed to learn it unless it's in a context where you do understand it? You could figure it out through a context, but I didn't say it in context and it wasn't clear from my sentence what academy means. And so it's really nice to be able to look up certain words like that really quickly, because it means that you don't have to find another source to figure out what the word means, and you can just look it up. And you need subtitles to do that. If you don't have subtitles, then you have to listen to what it is, and it takes you like 20 seconds to write it out, but then you don't know how to spell it. Does Academy have an I in it, or an E, or an, how do you, I don't know, English is weird. And so, if you have the subtitles, you can just, even if you have them off, you can turn them on for a second, and then you can look up the Word Academy. If you wanna go even further, you can get a tool like Language Reactor, which will allow you to hover over the subtitles as I say them, and instantly look up words, which is really, really nice. I definitely recommend Language Reactor if you're a beginner, or even like lower intermediate, it can be really, really helpful. Another tool or another reason that subtitles are helpful and actually because another thing that Language Reactor does is it allows you to seek based on subtitles. So seeking is what we call in a video or a TV show or something is when you are going back and forth five seconds, 10 seconds, fast forwarding, rewinding, trying to find a specific moment. That's called seeking usually. And when you seek, typically, like you just press the back arrow on your keyboard, it'll go back five or 10 seconds. I think it's five seconds for the arrow keys and the J letter is 10 seconds, L is 10 seconds forward, and the right arrow key is five seconds forward, something like that. And that can be a little bit annoying if you're trying to listen to full sentences. But with subtitles, if you turn on something like Language Reactor or ASB Player or anything like that, It allows you to seek based on the subtitles, which are typically done with sentences. And so if you press the left arrow key, if you have ASB player or you have a language reactor, it'll go to the beginning of my sentence rather than going to just five seconds, which is really nice for re-listening to things. I do this all the time with TV shows, not with podcasts, but with TV shows because it's really nice to be able to re-listen to lines that you didn't hear or that you want to just make sure you understood or whatever. And you don't even have to have the subtitles on. And that's the really important thing. This is something that I think is very important for anybody making content, especially for people making content that are for language learners. Even if they're not going to use the subtitles, they are still valuable to have. Because you can also turn them on and off to check things. When I learn Czech, I actually have subtitles off, but I like to have them to check something, because it's nice to be able to verify that I did hear something, or if I just can't hear a line, but it's important to the show, I should be able to just see what it says, right? And so making sure that subtitles are available, even if they're not being used, there is still value to that. There's also value to being able to do word analysis, right? So if you want to look up what words are common in an episode, for example, like what you could do is pre-study an episode if you're a little bit more of a beginner, and what I'm saying is still pretty difficult. You can look at a transcript before you read, or before you listen to the episode, rather, and you can look up new words. You can use a tool like Link or Loot in order to do that, where you sort of save things. And that's what I do for my Czech podcast listening, is I actually, or now I read along with it in a tool like that. So Loot, you can listen to things with the text. But what I used to do is pre-read a little bit, look up new words, and then listen along with the text. Because I was still pretty much a beginner, but I wanted to be able to follow along. And so having the text there with instant definitions and being able to show me, these are the words that you don't know yet, is really, really helpful. And so if you're a beginner, that's what I would definitely recommend you do because it can be really hard to just listen to something for 10 minutes if you don't understand all the words or it's really fast for you or something like that. And that's where transcripts can come in handy. With the transcripts, you can just copy and paste them, right? I have to make my own for check, which is not that hard, it's pretty easy, but I would prefer not to have to. It's not, it would be easier if it was just done for me, right? And so that's what I try to do with my blog. The way that I do it though is I use Whisper, Whisper AI, which is an AI tool from OpenAI and it transcribes text or speech to text. It's a very sophisticated speech to text program. It's not the sort of kind of AI that you see that's like use our new AI product that actually just sucks or is just chat GPT or whatever. Whisper AI is actually really, really helpful at making transcripts. It's really quite accurate for a lot of languages. For English, it's like 98% accurate or something like that. So there are mistakes in my transcripts that I make, but it allows me to make them in a minute, or I don't even make them, they are done for me, because otherwise I couldn't provide them. But it's really, really good for my videos since I'm speaking quite clearly and I have a good microphone. The only issues that it has are with what I say. Or if there are character names. So proper nouns it can struggle with. But everything else is pretty much spot on and that's really, really nice for learning. For check, I do have to do spell checking and stuff because it just spells the words wrong for some reason, but it's really, really helpful. I really like it. And it's a very powerful tool that I think should be useful for, that will be more useful for people coming up, especially as it improves and just gets better and better. But, yeah. Anyway, that's all the time that I have for this episode of, um, A Daily Dose of English. I hope that you check out the blog post for this episode since there is one for every single video. And if not, just to go see, like, what does the blog look like if you've never checked it out before. But that's all that I have for today. Thank you so much for listening. I hope that you enjoyed and maybe learned a few things here and there. And I'll see you again tomorrow on the blog for another episode. Have a good one. Bye!
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