Lesson 2:

Why You Must Listen to English Conversations Regularly

This is lesson 2 the free English mini-course. Lesson 1 is here.


In the first lesson, you learned that there are two ways to learn to speak English.

Implicit learning and explicit learning.

You learned that you must learn English implicitly to speak English well.

In this lesson, we’ll talk about one of the best methods for learning English implicitly…listening.

Let’s Start With Some Bad News for Those Who Hate Listening

Here’s the bottom line: if you want to speak English well, you have to listen to English on a regular basis.

It’s impossible to become an advanced English speaker without a lot of listening.

Why?

To speak English well, you need to build implicit knowledge of English. The greater your implicit knowledge, the better. (If you don’t understand this, go back to the first lesson.)

And guess what…listening is the easiest way to build your implicit knowledge of English.

Let’s say we take two groups of English students. We tell the first group to study grammar every day, while telling the second group to listen to English every day.

After six months, the second group will speak English better than the first group — They’ll be better at finding appropriate words to use, and their sentences will be more grammatically correct.

Why is that?

The reason is that the second group has greater implicit knowledge of English than the first group. Greater implicit knowledge = better speaking.

This is why you must listen to English regularly. If you’re not willing to do that, the best you can accomplish is being able to speak basic or intermediate English but not advanced English.

But It’s Not Easy Because…

Because there are two problems that you might have when it comes to listening:

  1. You have trouble understanding what you hear
  2. You don’t have time to do it. You do it for a while and then you stop because you’re too busy.

Let’s tackle each problem one by one.

For problem #1, watch this video to find out how to understand better:

Summary

  1. Find a media player that can change playback speed so that you can slow down the audio when you don’t understand.
  2. Listen to easy-to-understand materials like podcasts and audiobooks as opposed to movies. (Just forget about movies.)

For problem #2, watch this video to find out how to listen to English regularly if you don’t have time:

Summary

  1. Don’t allocate your free time to listen to English. (Your free time should be dedicated to speaking practice.)
  2. Listen to English during “downtime.” These are times when your mind is not focusing on anything in particular. For example, while riding a bus, walking, exercising, etc.

Here’s What You Need to Do:

Knowledge is useless without action. So let’s use what you’ve learned today to create concrete results:

  1. Install a media player that lets you change playback speed on your smartphone. If you use Android, you can use Rocket Player (Premium version). It’s not free but it’s super cheap.
  2. Find English listening podcasts on subjects that you find interesting (You can start here.), download them to your smartphone.
  3. Start listening to English during downtime.
  4. Wait for the next lesson.

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