Daily Dose of English 168
Chorusing
Daily Dose of English 168
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. Today we have another slightly rainy episode of A Daily Dose of English. I don't know if you can hear that in the background, but it's a rainy evening here. And today we're going to be talking about chorusing, which is a, I don't know how unique it is of a language learning technique, but I haven't seen it talked about in that many other places. It's a little bit niche, but I find it to be very, very useful. It's relatively simple to do and can be very, very beneficial for your learning. I actually have made an entire tutorial video over on the refold YouTube channel. So you can probably just Google Refold chorusing or it'll pop up. I mean, let's just double check Refold chorusing. How's our how's our search engine optimization right now? Oh My internet is slow. Okay. Yeah, there it is. It shows up right away it's the first video option and Yeah Cool, that's good to know. Anyways. Let's talk about chorusing, because it is not the most straightforward thing. First, why is it called chorusing? So there is this technique that's been around a little bit longer, I think, called shadowing. And shadowing is called that because you shadow some native speaker of the language. And that means that you're directly behind them, right? Your shadow is right against you. It directly follows you. Every single move you make, your shadow is following you. And so in English, you can say shadowing when somebody's following somebody very, very closely. In fact, I remember in high school, I think, no, no, no, it was in, yeah, because it's in middle school. When you're in eighth grade, your school might do some shadowing where you go take a day and you follow around a high schooler for the day. I did that a couple of times, I don't think I was the only shadow, I don't really remember, but shadowing is where you go to the high school for a day and you follow around an older student to sort of see what life is like in high school, get to know the surrounding, not the surrounding, like the vibe basically and see if you want to go to that high school. Um, if you want to sort of learn more about that, there's a movie called the eighth grade, which is a very good movie. Well, I really like it. It's not super duper popular, but I think it's really good movie. It's very, very good at. like making you feel the emotions of the characters, which I think is really cool. Like it's like, whenever they feel or have an emotion, you like, you're right there with them, right? If they're happy, you're happy. If they're sad, they're sad. If they're embarrassed, you're embarrassed, right? It's very, very good at that, that emotional connection. And there's, it sort of shows you what actually real US life is like in eighth grade. So it's actually, it's a good movie. But that is not what we're talking about. That is shadowing. And then the language learning technique is that you'd be speaking along with me at the same time, basically, trying to get my pronunciation, my rhythm, my flow. But the problem with shadowing is that it's really, really difficult if you haven't had a lot of practice, even in like your native language. So an English speaker trying to chorus me would probably still struggle unless they'd practiced for a while. I've done it before, and so it's easier for me, and I can do it, but it's still a lot of brain power. It's difficult. And so people have started turning to chorusing more because it's just as useful, pretty much. The only downside is that you maybe get less exposure to the language, but I think you're getting better exposure. So it's basically the same quality and it's way easier to do, a lot more approachable and understandable. And you can learn a lot more from it in the earlier stages. Because shadowing, you can basically only do if you're really advanced. And so the difference with chorusing is that you just take a clip of an audio, or really of anything, you take a clip and you replay that maybe one or two seconds many times and you get that one section down. So... maybe you took that section there, get that section down, get that section down, get that section down, get that section down, or whatever it might be, and you repeat it many times, you practice it, you listen to it, you practice it, you record yourself, and you go back many, many times in order to get it correct. So the name the name comes from a chorus which is like a singing group a bunch of people that are usually singing the same thing at once and Chorus is also typically repeat. So it's got this sort of it's not really a double meaning it That's sort of what chorus just means like there's this repetition to it That everybody knows and so that's why it ends up being called chorusing. I There are no good tools for coursing that really exist. The best thing for mobile is called Music Speed Changer. It's a little bit awkward. It's made for musicians, but it works. It functions. But my preferred tool is actually Audacity, which is a free audio editing tool on every computer. It's a little bit janky. Audacity is not the most user-friendly tool, but the nice thing about chorusing is that you only need a few simple functions from it. The first thing you need to do is to bring in audio, and then you can just select what you want. And what I do is I copy it and I put it on a new track. So you hit tracks and then add new, and you put it there. And I do that a bunch of times. And then what I do is I remove that original track. I just delete it so that I can focus on the clips that I pulled out. Then I'll do Control A, which selects everything. Then you can do Control X to copy everything. Then I go to the very beginning and I paste it there. Then you select everything again, and in the effects tab, you can hit repeat, and you repeat like, whatever, 20 times. That'll just duplicate the audio a bunch of times. And then you just hit truncate silence, and you set that, there's a couple of settings, but it's pretty simple, and then you truncate the silence, and that deletes the silence in between the clips. That way, so then after doing that, I have five different tracks all at the same time. So if you hit play normally, you'll hear like the same person speaking five times at once. It's impossible to listen to. But then over on the left-hand side, you can individually mute or solo individual tracks. And that way you just listen to the track with one track. on solo, and you do that track 20 times, you go back and forth, you repeat, and then that's your entire practice. I also have what's called a direct monitor on my microphone. So actually right now I have it turned on, which means I can hear my own voice coming through my headphones in real time. So when I, this is a common thing for recording studios, for singers and that sort of thing, because it's very useful to be able to hear how you sound to the audience, right? So I can tell if my microphone's too loud or if there's something going on or if it's, like if I make a weird sound, I can hear that and it's very useful. Not most people this is weird for because you're not used to hearing your own voice in your ears, especially live. And so it can be a little bit strange in the beginning, but it is very helpful for hearing your sound like your mistakes and what sounds weird. And so I definitely recommend getting used to it. But the problem is that if you don't have a microphone with that function, the options for doing it in software are not great. Because they usually have a slight delay where they'll put it into your ear just a fraction of a second later. But that sounds really strange. It's hard to listen to. or sorry, it's hard to talk rather, because your brain is like getting these weird mixed signals that you're like not actually talking until like a little bit later. If you want to learn more about that effect, you can call it, it's called speech jamming. Speech jamming, I think. Speech jamming is, yeah, there's actually a, If you search for it, you can find click to release slash code slash speech jammer on the top of the searches, and you can test what it's like when you hear yourself talking at the end. It's very, very weird. and you don't want to do that when you're coursing because it's super duper weird and you can't focus on what you're trying to do. And so instead, just recording your voice and then listening to it back is very useful. Because when you listen to your recording, you can hear the differences between your voice and the native speaker. And you go, oh, of course I'm doing that wrong. They say it like this, not like dis or whatever. Oh, and you can hear the differences in tone and that sort of thing. When I was giving English classes, I used to do this with my students. I would make them listen to a chunk of audio and record it, and then we'd listen to the recording together. I would point out things, they would point out things, they'd do it again. But you can also do it on your own. You can usually hear many things that you have to improve on your own. I do chorusing with check relatively often because it's a fairly easy listening, speaking exercise. And it doesn't take a ton of brain energy, so if I don't wanna speak, I can just repeat after somebody. And it's also very useful for getting simple phrases down. Let's see, I've done, if I go to reports, last, I don't know, 90 days. Only, how do I, oh. Chorus, chorusing, I've done 12 hours of, 13 hours of chorusing almost. So quite a bit actually, that's more than I thought, but yeah, it's a very useful technique that I like to do. The only issue is that it is a little bit difficult to do. So if you have trouble, try that, what I laid out for you, or I'm hopeful that in the next, I don't know, soon-ish. At some point, somebody will make a nice chorusing tool that'll be easy to use, but currently there is not a great all-in-one, super simple option. But it is a useful technique, so maybe try it out. But that is everything for today. I thank you very much for taking the time out of your day to come here and listen to this podcast with me. And if you try out chorusing, let me know how it goes down in the comments. Have a great rest of your day. I'll see you again. Bye!
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