Daily Dose of English 6
Audiobooks
Daily Dose of English 6
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 audiobooks. But first, how are you? Want to check in, see how you're doing? I'm doing quite well. It's a normal day for me. I just finished up work and I'm feeling excited to continue recording these episodes for you. And speaking of which, today we're talking about audiobooks. Audiobooks. Books that are audio. Because I'm a huge fan of audiobooks. I've been listening to audiobooks consistently and regularly for pretty much my entire life. I grew up listening to audiobooks on tape. And I'm not even that old, but there were still books on actual physical cassette tapes that I listened to growing up. I still remember, I think the only one I really remember listening to on tape were like the early Harry Potter books because I borrowed them from the library. I would go and I would get the huge booklet of all of the cassettes. It was like this plastic shell and you open it and you would see all of the tapes. The book wasn't that long. The first Harry Potter book is like eight hours of audio. But a tape can only hold upward like 50 minutes, 45 minutes. I forget exactly how much, but there was many tapes that I had to go through to listen and you'd have to take it out, rewind it, and you'd have to listen to the book like that. But I grew up with a time where cassette players still weren't that common, or weren't that common anymore, rather. I could only listen to them with a couple of specific things. And I remember one of them was at my grandparents' house. They still had a cassette player that I would use. But then a lot of the books I listened to on CD, books on CD, and actually that reminds me, audiobooks used to be called books on tape. That was like the name that we used all the time. And I remember my mother would almost be confused, be like, do I call them books on CD now or what do I call them? But yeah, I listened to a lot of the other Harry Potter books and a bunch of books growing up on CD. I had a CD player that was like a blue, it almost looked like a rice cooker, like a fancy rice cooker. It was basically a ball, but I would listen to that for hours and hours and hours, books on tape, books on CD, if you will. And then at a certain point, I got my dad's old iPod and that changed everything because I started to be able to listen to books on tape on my iPod. I was unstoppable. At that point, I listened to so many books. Even the same books, I did listen to the Harry Potter series again and again and again. And so that was definitely a, I could have been a little more adventurous and tried more things, but it was sort of hard to get books. That was one of the big things that was in my way because I'd have to see if the library had it. I would have to go there. And then if I wanted to have it on my iPod, I'd have to burn the entire book onto iTunes and then transfer it to my iPod. I still remember when they had the CD slot and I would put them in and I burned the entire CD down into iTunes. And if I remember correctly, that was allowed. That was like the thing that you could do, like it was a built-in feature to iTunes. I could be remembering wrong on that because there wasn't really another way to get your music that you own because it was very common to own your own music or books or whatever. I think technically you weren't supposed to do it with library stuff because you didn't own that, but I am not a lawyer. I don't know exactly what it was. I just wanted to listen to my books. And I'm sure those books are still on my parents' computer because they probably didn't get rid of it, which would be actually really funny to go back and see maybe how many times they were played, if that saved at all. But yeah, that was how I started with audiobooks for the first maybe decade of my life. I'm not exactly sure how long. But then at some point, Audible became a thing and my mom started buying me audiobooks if I wanted because that was when it was pretty early on and I think you could get credits for pretty cheap comparatively and a credit would be one book every month or so-ish. And obviously parents are going to want their kids to listen to more books rather than play video games or whatever, so they were more than happy to give me books. And so there's a ton of books that I listened to several times growing up on my mom's Audible account. I actually want to try to pull up that account right now on my phone because I have all those books now. At a certain point a couple of years ago, I made an account and transferred all those books to my account because she doesn't listen to audiobooks. And so I want to now go back and look and see what kind of books I have because oh yeah, there's 139 audiobooks that I own right there on Audible, so what's owning anymore? But oh yeah, I totally remember all of these. One of the series that I listened to several times was called The Brother Band Chronicles by John Flanagan and it was this cool sort of young adult coming of age story about a band of essentially misfit kids in sort of a medieval Viking society sort of thing. And I really enjoyed those books and they were – I don't actually know how hard they would be. They might be a good option for intermediate to lower advanced English learners. I'm sure there's a lot of specific vocabulary that was used because they're sort of that Viking sort of thing. And then another series that I listened to a lot that I think is just a good series in general even for adults – it is a kid's books for teens – The Mysterious Benedict Society. It's a trilogy of books and they're all pretty short-ish, like normal length books, but it's a fun sort of mystery series with a couple of kids that have different strengths and weaknesses and so that's just another fun series that I remember listening to several times. Well actually, wait, I think I read that series but I didn't – I probably listened to it a couple times honestly. I listened to everything several times. But yeah, and then now more recently I use audiobooks as a way for language learning because I do really like to listen to books still. Like it's that just process of putting in earbuds and listening to a story be told to me while I do other things, I still really enjoy. But I switched all my books to be books in Spanish, right? That was the language that I spent a lot of time with and so I've listened to a lot of books in Spanish at this point and that's been a really foundational, really helpful thing for my Spanish learning. And so if you are maybe a little bit worried about your listening to audiobooks for language learning maybe being too difficult, I would recommend that you try it and see what it's like because it is a skill. And that's something that I've noticed in the past few years is that not everybody has the same skill of listening to audiobooks while still doing other things. I did it so much when I was growing up that it became a normal thing for me to be able to listen to a story, listen to a book while doing other things, typically chores around the house or going somewhere, whatever it was. I was typically listening to a book instead of music or something like that. And so I have the skill, I guess, like I've developed a skill to be able to do something else like cook or clean while also focusing on an audiobook. And so if you don't have that skill, don't worry, you can develop it if you want because audiobooks can be very useful for your learning. If they're, however, too difficult and you just know you can't do it, try reading along with the book at the same time. That's what I do right now with Czech, the language that I've been learning for about a year. And it's amazing. I love to listen and read because that listening allows me to hear things and keep up with the story because I can't really slow down and read so, so slow that I don't make any progress. But I get to still see the text and look up words. So it's like the best of both worlds. I get to listen to the book and read the book at the same time, which is what I'm doing, obviously. And so if you're not doing any of those activities for your English learning, I definitely recommend you check it out. If you need some recommendations for young adult sort of books that are hard but more interesting and maybe a little bit easier than adult fiction, I definitely recommend those two series that I mentioned, The Brother Band Chronicles and The Mysterious Benedict Society. And if you're looking for something a little bit easier, then you should probably look into maybe some more kids books. I don't have anything off the top of my head right now that I can share except for one series. There's a very short series, but it's called Movies in My Mind. And I listened to that series when I was quite young. But I'm sure there's a lot of similar books out there. Or this podcast can maybe serve as a bit of an easier thing since I don't use such literary words and whatnot. But anyways, that is my little podcast on audiobooks. I hope that you enjoyed and you maybe learned a little bit of something or have an idea for going out and listening to some audiobooks. Maybe while going on a walk or something like that. But anyways, I'm going to say goodbye here. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. And I will see you again tomorrow. Take care. Bye bye.
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