Hello and welcome to bonus episode number 148 of the Q -Lips English podcast, the series where we big B, build our fluency, improve our cultural knowledge, grow our vocabulary and become better and clearer English communicators.
If you like those goals, then you're in the right place and I'm going to do my best to help you achieve them.
By the way, my name's Andrew.
I'm a Canadian English teacher, but I live abroad in Seoul, South Korea.
and here in our bonus episodes, I tell you a story each and every week from my everyday life.
And yeah, I'm telling you these stories so that you can improve your English with me.
We'll do it together.
To accompany each and every episode, there's a 100 % free transcript plus a vocabulary glossary.
And if you're a Q -Lips member, then we'll throw in a comprehension quiz as well so you can test and see how much you are able to understand from this episode after listening to it.
And if you'd like to sign up up and become a Q -Lips member, just visit our website, qlips .com, for all of the info about the benefits and bonuses you get as a member and, yeah, to sign up and become a part of our community.
Speaking of our awesome Q -Lips member community, in today's episode, I'm going to talk about something that was requested by one of our members in one of my weekly small group speaking classes.
For Q -Lips members, we have three weekly speaking classes that you can join one, two, or three of.
And we talk about our recent QLips episode.
And also at the end of each class, we have a kind of open session, a Q &A, if you will, where people can leave comments or ask questions, or we just chat and hang out.
And one of the members, and I really have to apologize because I can't remember exactly who requested this topic.
So please let me know if it was you, and I'll give you a shout out in the next episode because it's totally escaping my mind right now about who it was.
So I apologize for that.
But one of our members in a recent speaking class asked me if I could give a behind -the -scenes tour of how we produce our content and our lessons here at Q -Lips.
And I thought that was a really cool idea because actually there's a ton of work and a ton of effort that we put into creating each and every Q -Lips episode.
So I thought I would shed some some light on some of the tasks and things that we have to do behind the scenes that maybe you don't see as just a regular Q -Lips listener.
So that's what I'm going to do in this episode today, everyone, is walk you through steps A to Zed.
I have to say Zed as a good Canadian or American pronunciation A to Z, which I do have to admit rhymes and flows a little bit better than A to Zed.
But anyways, from start to finish of the Q -Lips episode production process.
And without any further ado, let's get right into this week's story.
So here we go. I hope you enjoy.
Let's do it. If you're a regular Q -Lips listener, then you'll know that each and every week we release two brand new episodes.
One episode is a bonus episode like this, which is just me talking with you and hanging out with you and telling you a story.
And then one of the other episodes we could call a regular episode is with me and one of my co -hosts.
And I have a whole bunch of great co -hosts here at Q -Lips that help me make awesome English lessons.
Cassie from the USA, Suzanne from the USA, Anna from England but lives in Spain, and Indiana from the USA, and also Alina who's originally from Russia but now lives in Ireland.
So I have just a whole host of amazing co -hosts.
And don't get confused about the word host there.
A whole host means many.
So I have many awesome co -hosts that help me here produce some of the regular Q -Lips episodes.
And as I mentioned, we release one of those each week.
And we have different series.
We have our simplified speech series, which is for intermediate level English learners ...where the content is a little bit easier, a little bit slower.
We have our Chatterbox series, which is for higher, intermediate to advanced English learners...
...where we talk about a more complicated topic.
But both Simplified Speech and Chatterbox are really just like free -flowing conversations.
It's almost like you get to listen in to a conversation between good friends.
We also have our Real Talk series, which teaches you the English that you need to know...
for real -world, everyday situations, and we have our Catchword series, which is our vocabulary series where we teach you some useful, helpful vocabulary, like idioms or phrasal verbs, that will improve your English listening and speaking.
And so for each of those different series, I have a co -host. Indiana and Cassie are helping me out with Simplified Speech, Real Talk, and Catchword. Anna's helping me out with ChatterBox, and Suzanne is kind of everywhere and she'll help me with anything.
And Alina helps me with our community side of things and our monthly updates and the monthly challenges.
So I got some awesome support here at Q -Lips to help me make really good English lessons.
And yeah, we couldn't do it without the team.
It really is a team effort.
So actually the life cycle of a Q -Lips episode begins as soon as we we finish recording one episode.
So as soon as an episode is finished recording before that recording session is finished and I say goodbye to one of my co -hosts, we always pick a recording date for the next episode.
So I guess that's really where things start is we need to pick a recording date.
And as I mentioned just a while ago, my co -hosts are spread throughout the world in different continents and different corners of the world, in different time zones even.
I mean, Thankfully, Cassie lives here in Korea, where I live, but she's in a different city.
Actually, right now, she's on vacation in the USA, so she's in a different time zone than me right now as well.
This can sometimes make scheduling a little bit difficult, but I think it's really important here at Q -Lips that we have a variety of different hosts.
I love that I have co -hosts that I can talk to that come from different places, have different accents, different life experiences, different cultural backgrounds.
And even in the case of Alina, she's an English learner, just like you as well.
I think that perspective is super, super important to have here at Qloops too, is that we have some staff members, some team members who have gone through the difficult process of learning English, just like you and can now use English, speak English and understand English at a super, super high level.
So yeah, I guess what what I'm trying to say here is that sometimes picking a recording date can be a little bit of a difficult process, but we get it done.
And once we have chosen our recording date and planned our recording session, then we can move on to step two.
So step two is planning the episode.
And guys, I've been doing QLips for a long time.
So I have just an app in my phone where I make notes.
Anytime a good episode idea comes into my head, I write it down and I've got this huge list of episode topics.
I'm always adding to it, always revising it.
And so honestly, the brainstorming aspect and the episode planning is pretty easy because I can just go to my list and I have so many ideas written down there.
Occasionally, members of our Q -Lips community will request a topic.
Just like this episode today was requested and often that makes for a really good episode and one that I love to do as well.
I love it when people request topics and yeah, I'm happy to do as many as I can that you guys request. So if you ever have an episode idea, just let me know, send me a DM through our discord and I'll be happy to try my best to make it become a reality.
and sometimes I also ask co -hosts and my co -hosts are always brainstorming as well and they'll say oh Andrew I had this idea how about we do this for an episode topic and that's really great as well so we're never short of ideas we always have lots of good ideas and I think you know some people have asked me have you ever worried about running out of ideas here at QLips And I counter with like, do you ever run out of things to talk about with your friends?
I mean, maybe some people do, but for me, whenever I see my friends, we're always just like chatting like crazy.
And I think here at Qlips as well, we'll always have things to talk about.
We're always going through the world and having new experiences, learning new things, seeing new things, new things are happening all around us all the time.
And so there's always, always plenty to talk about.
So I'm not really worried about ever running out of ideas.
But yeah, the next step anyways is choosing a topic.
And then depending on the series, there could be more planning that needs to go into an episode or less planning, depending on the series.
For topics like simplified speech, usually we're talking about a kind of daily, everyday topic.
And honestly, they don't need too much planning.
planning usually i can brainstorm maybe five or six rough discussion questions where i think oh it could be interesting if we explored the topic in this way or that way but it doesn't require too much planning some of the other series though require more research or more work for example catchword our vocabulary series we have to research the definitions of the words we need to make some examples for you.
And we could do that on the fly, I suppose, but I think a little bit of prep goes a long way.
So we like to research and make some good example sentences so that we can really explain and teach the vocabulary that's the topic of that lesson in a good way.
Real talk is similar.
It requires a lot of preparation, making good example conversations conversations and dialogues and coming up with appropriate expressions that you can use in a specific situation.
And Chatterbox is case by case, it really depends on the topic at hand.
Sometimes it requires quite a bit of research. And sometimes we can do it just freestyling, it really depends.
But anyways, the next step there is to prepare the episode, plan the episode, and make sure that everything is good and ready to go.
And when I say plan and prepare the episode, it's not like I'm making a script or anything like that.
It's just a rough idea about the direction we wanna take the lesson in so that it's well -structured and you can really learn something, take something away from it.
As much as possible, we try to have just natural speaking here on QLips.
We don't really script anything at all except for some of the dialogues that maybe you'll hear in real talk or catchword. Some of those dialogue examples, we do make a script and read the scripts for them.
But everything else is really just off the cuff.
We're thinking of it and making it on the spot and we don't really follow a script at all.
Just that rough outline, the plan that we create during the planning stage.
So we've got our recording date.
We've got our plan.
The next step is to actually record the episode.
And yeah, because all of my co -hosts are in different spots, we just do it over the internet.
Of course, I have my mic and my camera on my side and they have the same on their side.
Now, usually the co -hosts and I, we have a brief chat before we hit the record button just to go through the outline to talk about some of the stories that we're going to share.
And I always tell my co -hosts, don't tell me the story in advance.
You can say, for example, like you want to talk about this topic or I'm going to tell a story about this.
That's fine. But I like to be surprised and I want everything to be as natural as possible.
All of my reactions, all of the things that I'm saying here at Q -Lips.
I want, well, me to speak naturally and I want my co -hosts to speak naturally as well so you guys can learn from real English.
So yeah, most of what I hear during a Q -Lips episode I'm hearing for the first time or maybe I know my co -hosts will talk about it but I don't know the details at all.
So I'm hearing the details for the first time.
Usually when we record, my co -hosts and I, we record two episodes at a time.
And as much as possible, I try to bank many episodes.
So at any time, I have between 10 to 20 episodes recorded in advance, just sitting on my hard drive.
I think right now, as it stands, I have enough episodes to get us through all the way through the summer and probably into the fall.
And that's just because, well, I like to be organized and have lots of content lined up in advance.
And also you never know, like if you get sick or some recording can't happen one day, you never want to be down to the wire where you just really need to make content in the last moment or make lessons in the last moment.
So it's always good to have a cue and we always have an episode cue.
So I usually record once or twice a week with my my co -hosts.
And like I said, we record two episodes each time.
So that's between two to four episodes, regular episodes we make here each and every week.
Once the recording session is finished, well then it's time to go to the next stage, which is the editing stage.
And as you guys can probably understand from the way I've been talking about Q -Lips lessons so far, I try try to make sure as much as possible that everything is as natural as possible.
So when I say editing, it's not like I'm doing a lot of editing.
Most of it is really, really light.
We try to clean up the audio so that it sounds as good as possible.
And when I say we, we have an editor on our team as well, Marshall.
So the editing duties are divided between me and Marshall.
and yeah, we clean up the audio so that the quality is as good as possible.
Sometimes, you know, occasionally there's some background noise.
Like if a loud motorcycle drives by, we'll try to cut that loud motorcycle noise out of the background.
Occasionally there will be some weird mouth noises or breathing noises that personally just drive me crazy to listen to when when I hear other people include them in their podcast. So I cut those little weird mouth noises that sound disgusting out.
And occasionally my hosts and I will talk over each other.
Maybe we try to say something at the same time and it comes out really unclear and difficult to decipher and understand.
If that happens, then I'll try to clean that up so it's easier for you guys to understand.
Laughing, if somebody laughs really loud, which is usually me laughing too loud.
Sometimes I turn the volume down on the laughing so that you can still hear what the co -host is saying.
I don't want to overpower anybody with my laughing.
So just things like that.
Occasionally, as you guys probably know, I talk a lot and I can go on and on and on one of my bad habits that I have. So if the episode goes too long, then sometimes we cut some content out.
But yeah, that is what is involved at the editing stage.
And once the episode has been finished and the audio is good to go, well, then we need to make the study guide for the episode.
Each and every regular Q -Lips episode has a study guide that we give to our members.
It's a key part of our program here at Q -Lips.
And we really believe that following along with each study guide and spending time with it will help improve your English skills faster.
So we put a lot of effort into making high quality guides.
We really do want to do a good job with our study guides.
And so once the audio is edited, then we transcribe the audio.
And I know these days, if you look in your podcast app, like if you're listening right now on Spotify or on Apple podcasts and probably many other podcasts as well, you can see an AI computer generated transcript, but those are pretty good.
They're pretty good, but they're not a hundred percent accurate yet.
And of course, in our study guides for QLips members, we want to make sure that our transcripts are perfect and super, super accurate.
So we human transcribe each and every episode.
And I mean, these days, AI tools are getting very good at transcribing.
So what we do is we actually use an AI tool to generate the first draft of the transcript.
But as I said, they're like 80 % accurate.
So then me or one of our other team members will go back through the transcript that's AI generated and check and make sure everything is perfect, change the spelling of some words that are incorrect, make sure everything's good.
The punctuation is good.
The spacing and paragraphing is good and we clean it up so that it is a hundred percent natural.
So each transcript is actually human checked by two different people, by the transcriber and then later on by a proofreader.
So you can rest assured that what you see in the The transcript here at Q -Lips is totally, totally perfect through some of the other apps.
I can't guarantee that.
There are probably a lot of errors.
Whenever I look at it, I kind of go, oh, oh, please use the Q -Lips transcript, not the auto -generated one through some of the apps because it's not too good yet.
But anyways, okay, so we make the transcript.
And then next, after the transcript, we need to write the study guide.
And we have two study guide writers.
Those co -hosts that I mentioned earlier, Indiana and Alina, they are our study guide writers right now.
And they go back and forth.
So Alina will write one guide, and then Indiana will check that guide after Alina is finished writing it, and then they switch. So then the next episode, Indiana will write the guide, and Alina will check it.
So they're our study guide, dynamic duo tag team and they're going back and forth writing guides and checking guides and making sure that the information in the study guide is super helpful and designed to help you improve your English with that episode explaining the key vocabulary making the quiz the discussion questions all of these things and then checking the transcript like I mentioned earlier before before.
So as you can imagine, this takes a lot of time.
Editing the episode, transcribing the episode, writing the study guide, proofreading and checking the study guide.
This process can take between one to two weeks usually.
I mean, if we really, really put the pedal to the floor, put the pedal to the metal, then we could probably do it in a few days, but we don't like to rush things, we like to take our time and make sure everything has been carefully checked and carefully written and is just as good as possible.
So essentially, after Indiana or Alina has done the final human check of the study guide, and the audio has been checked again, then it's ready for upload.
So when everything's ready, we send it over to Yoshi, who is our behind the scenes guy here at Q -Lips.
And he's another English learner that we have on our team.
He's originally from Japan, but he lives in the USA now.
And he's learned English to a really, really high level as well.
And so he's another important part of our team.
And he's the dude that does the posting.
So he'll post the episode.
And then we let everybody know on our Discord server that the the episode is ready.
And yeah, then it's your turn.
You go and listen to the episode and study with it.
And of course, on our Discord community, we often have some nice discussions about the episode as well.
And then I guess I should say that the final step in an episode's life cycle is actually our small group speaking classes.
So at the start of this episode, I mentioned that that this topic today was actually requested by one of our Q -Lips members in one of our small group speaking classes.
And after an episode is released, usually we give it about a month.
So you'll have a month to listen to the episode.
Then after a month, we have three small group speaking classes about that episode.
So the idea here, guys, is that you'll listen to the the Q -Lips episode.
You'll spend some time with it.
Hopefully listen to it several times, go through the study guide and think about the questions, do the quiz, read the helpful study guide content and examples, all of these things.
And then the final step is we should speak about it because why are you learning English?
Well, most people learn English so that they can communicate with others and we want to give you an opportunity to do that.
So many of our Q -Lips members will gather, we'll hang out, we'll spend some time together, and we'll talk about each and every Q -Lips episode.
So that is the final step really is having our small group speaking classes about that episode.
So there's a lot of time, effort and thought and planning that goes into releasing each and every Q -Lips episode that we make here.
But yeah, that is the system to answer the question.
That is how a Q -Loops episode is made.
Of course, the bonus episodes are a little bit different because that's just me.
And they're a little more casual.
And I don't really do as much planning.
I just make a brief outline about what I'm going to talk about.
And then I press record on the audio and the camera and I just go, go, go.
And that's the bonus episode.
So for the bonus episodes, we also don't have the study guides.
So there's not as much creation in that regard. Of course, we still do have the transcript, and I make the transcript and check the transcript, so it's still human checked.
But otherwise, the production process for a bonus episode is a lot quicker.
Anyways, I hope that answered the question.
And I hope now you have a little little more understanding of the behind the scenes process of how an episode is produced and created here at Q -Lips.
Now before I let you go, I do need to share this week's completion code with you.
Each and every week, I give you a completion code and you can leave an example sentence with this completion code on our YouTube page, our Instagram page, or on our Discord community that signals to to me and all of the community members out there that you finished this episode and that you completed an English study session with me today.
So for this week, we are going to go with the expression behind the scenes, behind the scenes.
And behind the scenes just means a look at what you don't usually see in a production process.
Originally, I think we use this expression to to talk about a play or a drama production, maybe like Broadway musical, something like that, where behind the scenes, you know, you're seeing like what's behind the curtain, all the actors hanging out behind the stage.
And, you know, things are a lot different behind the curtain during a stage production than they are in front.
There's a lot of planning and organizing that goes on that you can't really see in a situation.
And anytime we're talking about that kind of context, text, we can say this expression, behind the scenes.
So I'm looking forward to reading your example sentences.
Go, go, go. And yeah, let's see what you come up with for behind the scenes.
If you have a topic you'd like me to talk about in a future Q -Lips episode, please let me know on our Discord community.
The link to join is in the episode description and it's free for everyone to join.
You can just post a message in the topic request channel that we have or you can send me a DM.
And yeah, I'm always open to your suggestions.
So have a great week of English studying up ahead.
Please take care as always, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
Until then, bye -bye.
