Listening

Listening Recommendations

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If you have a question how to improve listening skills or you want to find some recommended sources, you are in the right place.

Sometimes even people with an advanced level can easily read newspapers and sophisticated literature but struggle with understanding movies, songs and YouTube videos. Have you ever have such an experience when you could not fully understand the film or song, so you decided to switch on captions or find lyrics, and when you did it, you realized that this text doesn't contain any unfamiliar words for you? This might happen for different reasons, but the general rule is your Reading Vocabulary surpass Listening Vocabulary. Mostly this happens because you read more than you listen, and when you read, you don't pronounce each word distinctly in your head.

There might be several recommendations to improve your listening. You will be surprised, but the first one is to read more conscientiously. Rather than quickly skimming one paragraph from another, you can slow down a little and try to pronounce each word in your head. Try to connect the written word with its sound.

But of course, this is not the only option. English has so many different accents, and some natives speak faster than we can understand. In that case, it would be useful to listen to some specially prepared podcasts and videos and elaborate your listening skils by small steps.

I can distinguish sources by four major categories:

  • Learning apps
  • Videos
  • Podcasts
  • Movies

Learning apps

There aren't many of them I want to mention. Mostly because I have never had time to use them, but if you are interested in them, I can recommend trying these:

  • Voscreen. App gives you a little piece of video, you should choose the best translation. This game is suitable then you have 5 minutes and want to spend them beneficially but don't have time to do something serious.
  • Learnathome. The whole service based on the idea of transcribing YouTube videos step by step in game mode. This service has not only good listening exercises but also very neat grammar tasks. But unfortunately, it relates to Russians, so only someone from the former Soviet Union countries can enjoy it.
  • SpeakyReads. The same idea as in Learnathome, but all content is in English, so everyone can use this site.

Videos

Let's continue with videos because sometimes video is easier to understand than podcasts. By seeing body language and illustrations, you can complete your understanding by not only that you hear but that you see too. Below you can find my list of the best YouTube channels for my humble opinion, which might help with language practice. Don't forget that these channels reflect my interests and might be boring for you, but in that case, you can find your best channels and share them in the comments. Try not to subscribe for many channels because the more subscriptions you have the more freedom YouTube AI has in choosing which new video show you in the Subscriptions tab, so you can miss very good staff outvoted by YouTube mechanism.

Podcasts

Podcasts have a considerable advantage over videos because you can listen to them anywhere (e.g. commuting, having sports activity, lying on the bed, taking a shower). There are my favourite English podcasts. Don't forget to write a comment if you know some excellent podcasts too.

Movies

I can't recommend something here because of national differences. I am using Puzzle-Movies service, which is an excellent source for watching movies in English. It has subtitles in English and Russian, speed adjustment and assembles many films and TV-shows. But I can't recommend it for everyone simply because for non-Russians, this service would be useless.

There was my list of YouTube channels and podcasts. I hope it would be helpful and you can find something you like.

This article would be ready after finishing podcast section...

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