Daily Dose of English 36
Podcasts
Daily Dose of English 36
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 going to be talking about podcasts. Interestingly, podcasts, what a funny word, right? Like, where did that even come from? Pod cast? Like, I get the cast part, where you're casting it sort of out into the world, but why pod? I have no idea. Like, I genuinely don't know. I'm not gonna explain where the word comes from. I don't know where the word comes from. So I would be interested to know. I'm probably not going to look it up. Honestly, I'll probably forget to do that, but maybe you will, and let me know in the comments. Anyways, podcasts. They've been around now for quite a while. They were created, I think, somewhere in the early 2000s, and they've grown in popularity a lot, right? Nowadays, everybody has a podcast, including me right now. I'm talking on a podcast. um they're sort of the new version of a blog in a way because in the 90s and early 2000s that was the popular thing was to have a blog right everybody had a blog where they wrote about things um and had their own design and stuff but now it's a podcast right anybody can start a podcast it's really pretty easy you just need a microphone and a way to record pretty much And then you can upload to a YouTube or anchor FM or Spotify or kind of whatever. Um, and so there's a lot of different podcasts out there that have no viewers, a million viewers, or I guess listeners rather one, one listeners, zero listeners, 500,000 listeners. There's so many different, um, podcasts in terms of popularity and topic. which is pretty cool. There's also podcasts in like every language, not literally every language, but there's a lot of different podcasts out there in different languages. Especially any language with more than a couple million people, somebody's gonna have started the podcast because why not, right? And that variety is really useful for language learning, right? I know that you're listening to this because you're learning English, but There's a lot of stuff out there for other learners as well, and that's the popular thing to do if you want to help learners learn your native language. You make a podcast because that's pretty easy to do, and it just means that there's more content out there for you to listen to. There's even some really good ones out there, right? A lot of podcasters for various big languages are really good at what they do. They're very talented, they're very helpful. And I think that that's really cool, right? It wasn't possible 30 years ago, 40 years ago. And so it's really nice that that's happening. I also wanna talk a bit about my relationship to podcasts and how I use them. because I have different times in my life when I listen to more or less podcasts, right? Right now, I'm pretty much not listening to any podcasts. I just don't really want to, I'm not really interested in them, and they haven't really called my attention. Currently, I'd rather listen to audiobooks, which I talked about in a previous episode. However, a couple months ago, like five or six at this point, I was listening to a lot more podcasts because I like, there's a couple of podcasts that I was following and I would listen to them every single week. And I would catch up with their new episode and I would sometimes even take notes, right? Because I listened to some podcasts for learning purposes and I would do that every week. And I did that for a while. I was following primarily podcasts that have to do with one of my interests, which is a game that I play. However, I'm not currently playing that game, and so I just stopped listening to those podcasts almost entirely, and I haven't really missed them. which maybe is mean to say, but like, I don't know, they're fine. They're podcasters, they don't care. But not listening to podcasts has been interesting because now I do different things. I either listen to audiobooks or when not, I just don't really listen to anything. And it's kind of nice. I think I've also talked about this on a past episode where sometimes not having something to listen to is a good thing. And so, yeah, I know it's ironic to say that if I'm currently talking on a podcast, but you know, this is a short one. Those are hour long episodes or sometimes two hour long episodes. And that's another thing. One of the podcasts I was following that was more general. It was, they were just talking about kind of stuff, right? Every week they would just talk about random topics, but they would do it for like two hours, two and a half hours, which is just a really long time. What I would often listen to it when I was doing my weekly shopping, so I would go to the store, I would shop and I would have my podcast playing. However, like, I don't know, that just sort of got old. It got a little boring because I had listened to them essentially talk about the same thing for months in a row and I was going to the store and I wasn't really listening and I was like, you know what? I don't really need to listen to this. Sure, they're fun sometimes and they're funny, but I also just don't really need to. And so I stopped, right? I just stopped listening to the podcast and I don't really miss it, right? It wasn't adding anything to my life. It also wasn't necessarily taking anything away, but I just found that to be a nice change, honestly, in a way. No, excuse me. And over the years, I've gone through, like I said, different periods of my life where I listened to more podcasts or fewer podcasts, and they often sort of depend on my interests or what I'm currently doing. Right now, I do actually listen to one podcast I just realized. However, I listen to it in a very different way. The podcast is a Czech learning podcast, much like this podcast that I'm doing right now. It's an almost daily podcast. I don't know if he actually releases every single day. However, I've been going through his backlog, right? He has over 400 episodes or 600 episodes or something crazy. And so I just listen to the old episodes one at a time every single day to work on my check. And I'm actually doing it in a very similar way to my podcast. And that's actually where I got the idea. It was because he records about a 10 minute episode of him talking about a random topic. And then what I do is I use the transcripts that I actually have to make myself, but I use a transcript and a reading platform that I could use called Lute, L-U-T-E. which is very similar to LingQ, L-I-N-G-Q, if you've heard of that. Yeah, L-I-N-G-Q, yeah, okay. It's very similar to LingQ, and I read through the episode, and I listen to it at the same time, and I mark new words, and I highlight things, and I look up definitions, so that I can understand a lot more of the podcast. I'm at the point with my Czech learning where I can understand most of it without necessarily looking anything up. When I import a new episode, I already know about 80% of the words, maybe a little bit more, maybe 83, 84%. And so it's actually fairly easy to understand. I typically just need to look up a couple of new words that are related to that topic, and then I'm good to go. And I've been doing that every single day for a couple months now, I think maybe three or four months. And it's been really great, honestly. It's been super helpful. I've learned lots of words. It's pretty quick, right? I only spend, now, I only spend like 10 to 15 minutes on it, maybe. Before I, when I first started with it, I was spending probably 30 minutes per episode because I had to look up a lot more words since I was not as good at Czech yet. And, but then I slowly got, I'm slowly getting better and better and better. And I hope that in a couple of months, I'll be able to just listen to a new episode completely without transcript, without looking anything up and understand everything he says. However, that's a few months down the line and we'll get there when we get there. And so I want to end this episode here talking about a way that you can use my podcast in a very similar way. Because I have the transcripts available on my website that you can go download and then you can read through them and you can look up words and you can mark things that you might not know while you're listening or before you're listening or even after you're listening. Anything works. You can also use episodes several times if you want and listen that way to get more out of each episode. If you are a lower level, so if this podcast is still a little bit difficult for you because I speak too quickly or I use a lot of random words or something like that, then reading through can really, really help you understand more. Or if you just want this, if you want things to be a little bit easier, you can also just listen on YouTube and turn on subtitles because I also put subtitles on these podcasts and you can read along. And that just helps a little bit with processing the words and making things a little bit more approachable for slightly lower levels. However, as you get better and you get more used to hearing my voice, definitely try to turn off subtitles and just listen and see what you hear. because with more exposure, with more practice, you will hear more things and you'll understand more of what I say. However, I'm going to leave it there today. I think I've talked enough about podcasts. We've touched a couple of interesting topics and I hope that you enjoyed this episode and learned a couple of words or maybe a new topic or something or topic, no, tactic. There we go. Anyways, I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.
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