Welcome to the Listening Time Podcast.
Hey everybody, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 163 of the Listening Time Podcast.
You might be able to hear that I'm just a little bit sick today.
Nothing serious, but my whole family got sick.
So we're all dealing with that, but life needs to go on, and so Here I am today recording another episode, but I'm happy to talk today in this episode about my language learning plan for the rest of this year.
So at the time of recording this episode, it's still May.
So we're still not halfway through the year.
So I've still got a lot of months of language learning left this year.
And I mentioned a couple episodes ago that I want to focus on my French for the rest of this year.
And my goal is to reach a B2 level in French by the end of the year.
And someone a listening time VIP asked me this question about my advice for learning a language and what I did with Italian when I did that challenge, and it got me thinking about my plan for French and I talked a little bit about that during that QA and since then I've modified it a little bit and I think I have more or less my plan for French for the rest of this year.
So I plan on spending maybe two hours a day, if I can, actively learning And then hopefully doing a good amount of passive listening as well.
So I haven't started this really.
I'm going to start this next week.
But I think that even though I haven't proved that this plan will be really good...
I'm pretty sure that it will help me improve and reach a higher level in French, and maybe you'll want to follow this plan or not.
Do it exactly like me, but maybe do something similar for the rest of this year and then at the end of the year we'll see how much progress we made.
But before we start, remember that if you want my advanced podcast episodes in which I speak at normal speed, then make sure to sign up to become a Listening Time family member and you'll get two new advanced episodes every month.
The link is down below in the description.
And remember that you can sign up for my US Conversations podcast to help you reach the next level in your listening, because in that podcast there are two people talking and not just one.
So that's the next step to help you Understand well.
Understand when there are multiple people speaking.
That's an essential skill.
So if you're interested in that, the link is also down below.
And you have the transcript for this podcast episode down below as well.
All right, let's get started.
Are your ears ready?
You know what time it is.
It's listening time.
Alright, let's talk about my language learning plan for French for the rest of this year.
So I don't know what my current level is in French, because I don't do any speaking, and that's something that I'm gonna change this year.
I'm gonna start speaking every week, but I haven't done much speaking practice so I can't really say how well I can speak or know.
However, I have a pretty decent level of listening comprehension, so I can understand a lot.
I listen to French podcasts all the time, and I understand the majority of what's being said.
So I can't really say what level I have.
However, I know that at the end of this year, I want to reach a B2 level.
I want to have a pretty good level of French because Up until now I haven't been serious about my language learning for probably the last seven years or so and I've just kind of alternated between languages and been more casual and just did it lightly for fun.
I still want to do it for fun, of course, but I want to get more serious about it and actually reach a high level in some different languages.
So I really want to do that with French, and maybe next year I'll get to go to France and I'll be able to talk to people in French, so that would be nice.
So let me talk about my plan.
What I want to do with french for the rest of this year.
So i want to spend about an hour and 15 minutes, more or less, every day of pleasure listening, i'll call it.
What i mean by this is i want to listen for this amount of time to content that I really like and that's interesting for me, and that is maybe not the hardest content because it's in my field of interest or it's related to my work or my goals or whatever.
However, it's gonna be native content, so made for native speakers, And I'm gonna do this with and without subtitles.
I haven't really figured that out yet.
But with this portion, this part of my learning plan, I'll probably just keep the subtitles on most of the time and I might spend some of the time reading the subtitles while I'm listening and some of the time just listening, and then, if I need to, like I don't catch a certain word or something, I'll look down at the subtitles.
By the way, we can say that you catch something or you don't catch something, to mean that you didn't hear or understand something.
Right.
If you catch it, you heard it and understood it well.
And if you didn't catch it, then you didn't hear or understand it well.
So if I don't catch something, then I can easily look down at the subtitles.
So, what's the purpose of this part of my language learning plan?
Well, there are a lot of reasons why I want to spend a lot of time doing this.
Of course, this is going to help me practice my listening.
It's a lot of listening practice.
I'll also get to read the subtitles, so it's a little bit of reading too.
And I hope that I will acquire a lot of words, a lot of phrases, and a lot of sounds.
French is a language that is kind of similar to English, in the sense that you might understand a sentence when you read it.
But when someone says it and you can't see the subtitles or whatever, you might misunderstand it, because the sounds don't match up very well with the letters, and this isn't the case in spanish, for example, or italian.
With those languages, if i don't understand something, it's probably because i just don't understand the word.
It's not because i can't identify the correct sounds and associate them with the correct phrase or whatever, But with French this happens.
So through my listening practice, I'm going to be acquiring words, phrases, expressions, and sounds.
I'll get more accustomed to what different words and phrases sound like in real life when people say them, and not just what they look like when they're written down.
And really the biggest thing with this type of pleasure listening, as I call it is to keep me engaged, to keep me interested.
When your brain is really interested and engaged, you actually acquire more of the foreign language.
If you're really interested and you're almost not even noticing something, that you're listening to something in a foreign language because you're just consumed, you're really engaged because of the content, that's an optimal state to be in for language acquisition.
So that's why I want to listen for a long time to content that's very interesting for me.
And while I listen, I'm going to pause and rewind sometimes if I can't understand something and I want to see what they actually said and look at the subtitles.
Or if I hear an interesting word or phrase, then I'll definitely pause or rewind, but For the most part I'm not doing too much repetition here.
I'm just listening to a lot of content that is interesting for me and that's the bulk of my listening practice.
When we say that something is the bulk of something else, we're saying that it is a big part or the majority of something else.
Okay.
So the bulk of my listening practice is this pleasure listening, listening to things that are really interesting for me.
OK, and I'm going to spend a lot of time listening to the same people.
So I listen to the same YouTuber or podcaster for multiple episodes, multiple videos, and I like to do that because it allows me to hear the same words and phrases used, because everyone has their own style of speaking.
And so if you listen to the same person talk in different contexts, you're going to hear them repeat a lot of their favorite words and expressions and phrases.
So this helps me get repetition of new words and phrases without needing to just listen to the same thing again and again, right?
So this is kind of what I would call indirect repetition.
So I'll listen to the same YouTuber or podcaster for a while, and then...
Maybe when I start to get a little bored, I'll switch to another one.
And I'm not only going to listen to one person at a time.
Maybe I'll have two podcasts that I listen to, and I listen to a lot of episodes every of those two podcasts, but I don't listen to 50 different podcasts, for example, so I stick to the same handful of content creators for my practice.
So That will be the bulk of my listening practice.
And it's fun, right?
It's not that hard to do that.
And then I'm going to do 15 minutes or so of harder listening practice.
So what I mean by that is I'm going to choose a topic that is a little bit outside my comfort zone and that will have a lot of new words and phrases and expressions.
So my idea is to watch videos about French history, for example.
So i'm interested in french history, i like history, but this content will be harder than just watching a youtube video about um, online business or whatever right this topic french history will have a lot of words that I'm unfamiliar with.
I'll have fun with it, but it won't be quite as relaxing as my pleasure listening.
And I'm going to have to pause and rewind a lot more.
So with those 15 minutes, I'll probably only get through a five to 10 minute part of a video maybe.
And what's the purpose of this?
Well, I want to challenge myself and listen to harder content, learn more new words and learn things, not just the language, but learn about French history, for example.
And one of the reasons why I'm doing this as well is because I'm going to use repetition with this part of my listening practice.
I'll talk about that in just a minute.
But just keep that in mind, that this hard listening part I'm going to do actual repetition with it.
So for you, for example, maybe your pleasure listening is is my podcast, the Listening Time podcast.
Maybe this is comfortable for you.
You have fun with it, I hope, and you can listen a lot without needing to pause and rewind too much.
And then maybe your hard listening might be my advanced episodes or my US Conversations podcast, or maybe just some random YouTuber or podcaster who's talking to English speakers.
This will depend on your level.
But that's something that you can incorporate into your language learning plan to make sure you're challenging yourself.
So if I only listen to the things that are a little more comfortable for me, I'm not really challenging myself.
So that's why I want to incorporate this small amount of time every day to doing this hard listening.
And then I'm also going to spend 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes, reading some interesting content as well.
I think it's great to include reading in your language learning and not just listening.
For me, I think that I'll always do more listening than reading.
Um, that's just, uh, easier to do and I can do it passively as well.
And it can be a little more engaging, because it might not be as hard as reading in a foreign language.
Uh, because reading can be hard.
Uh, There is a more formal style when someone writes than when they speak.
So that means it's more refined.
The vocabulary is a little bit different.
It can be less natural.
Whereas when you hear someone speaking, they repeat themselves a lot, use the same words, they use simple speech a lot.
So reading is a great challenge as well.
And what's the purpose of it?
Well, you're gonna get exposure to this more formal language, a more formal register, a more refined language.
Definitely a lot of new vocabulary.
And I think it also helps you to notice more details of the language.
So when you see it written down and you're reading it you're spending time doing that you might notice things like the spelling of words, and that's really important when it comes to english and when it comes to french, because these languages are hard to write because of the irregular spelling, whereas spanish is pretty easy to write because the spelling is very regular.
So for me, if I spend some time reading in French, it will help me notice the spelling of different words and it will help me notice other little details as well that I might not pick up on as easily if I'm just listening.
By the way, when you pick up on something, this means that you recognize it and understand it when you hear it right.
Or when you see it.
So this will help me pick up on certain details that I might miss when I'm listening.
And in general, I like reading.
So I want to incorporate some of this into my language learning.
However, I'm not going to spend a ton of time reading.
Just me personally, I want to spend more time listening.
But I think that if a language learner wants to spend a lot of time reading and a little less time listening, that's okay as well.
I think there are benefits to both, but for right now I want to focus a little more on listening than on reading, but I want to do both, okay.
And with what I listen to during the hard listening session and what I read during this reading session.
I'm going to do repetition with this.
So if I start today and I read something and I listen to some hard content, tomorrow I want to repeat those things.
I want to read the same thing and then listen to that hard content again, so that I can add a little bit of direct repetition to my language learning.
I think it's great to repeat things and listen and read things more than once.
And so by doing this, I'll see those new words that I saw yesterday again, and they'll be reinforced in my mind.
When something is reinforced, that means that it is strengthened.
So some of these new words and phrases will be reinforced when I see them the next day.
And if I don't do that repetition, I'll probably forget almost all of the new words that I saw.
So this is one of the reasons why I always talk about using repetition, even with this podcast that you're listening to.
There are surely some words that I use that you don't use, or maybe you don't even know.
And It's great to listen to the episode more than once so that you can hear those new words again and have them reinforced in your mind.
So I think repetition is great.
But of course we don't want to spend all of our time with repetition, because it can get a little bit boring if you spend too much time with repetition.
So that's why it'll probably be 15 to 20 minutes a day for me, just repeating what I listened to during my hard listening session and reading what I read the day before.
So it'll be faster the second day because I won't need to look up as many words.
Hopefully, I hope that I'll remember them or remember a lot of them the next day.
And then I can just spend maybe 15 or 20 minutes repeating what I read and listened to the day before.
So that's, I'm probably not going to do this with the pleasure listening content, just the hard listening and the reading content, because those are the two parts of this that are going to have a lot of new words that I'm not comfortable with.
So I think it's good to do repetition with that content.
So I'll do that and I want to also speak twice a week.
So my goal is to have two conversation classes every week in which I speak only French and just have conversations about different topics.
I don't want to discuss grammar.
I don't want a lesson.
I just want to have a conversation with a native speaker who can help me when I don't know a word or when I'm making a big mistake, and can offer me some feedback and just someone who's a nice person and is interesting to talk to.
So I think that's what you should also look for when you schedule classes with teachers.
Really focus on conversation.
I mean, you're spending money and you don't want to spend money on something that you can just do on your own.
You can learn grammar on your own.
You can learn grammar with great online YouTube teachers.
And yes, you can also do some grammar classes with your teacher.
I'm not saying to never do them, but just know that you can also do those things in other contexts.
However, one thing that you can't do alone is have a conversation with a real person who's a native speaker, right.
You either have to find someone who wants to talk to you or pay someone to do that.
So for me, I want to do the things on my own that are easy to do on my own, like listening and reading, and even grammar, if I want to.
And then I want to use a teacher to do what I can't do by myself, which is my speaking practice.
So I plan on doing that twice a week and just talking about different topics each time.
And on the days when I have a conversation class.
I'll do less listening on those days so that I can use that extra time to do some speaking.
And that speaking practice gives me confidence, listening practice as well, because the teacher will be talking to me.
So speaking is really, really important.
I know that I always talk about listening.
I'm the listening guy, of course.
My podcast is called Listening Time, and that should be the base of your learning.
However, speaking is essential at a certain point, and that point is different for different people, but i feel like i'm ready to start speaking regularly.
I think i probably should have started months ago, but now i'm ready and so I want to do it, and I want to do it consistently.
It's important to speak consistently, not twice a month.
It's better to do it at least once a week.
And in my opinion, twice a week is even better.
And so I want to try that.
So that's pretty much my plan.
And I'll do passive listening when I can.
I'll put my headphone in with a podcast when I'm walking or doing some household chore or whatever.
And so everything I mentioned so far is just there. my active two hours a day that I want to spend.
But if I can, I'll also do passive listening.
And this is the time when I never use subtitles.
So whenever I'm listening passively, I'm only listening.
I'm not reading any subtitles.
So I hope to be able to do 30 minutes at least of passive listening.
If I can find time to do that while I'm running or exercising or something I can do even more than 30 minutes on some days maybe an hour or whatever.
And that's a lot of listening practice without subtitles.
So it's also important to listen without using subtitles or a transcript, to just practice listening without the aid of anything else.
And aid just means some type of help.
So that's my plan.
And maybe you want to follow it.
You don't have to.
Obviously, I haven't even tried it out yet.
This is new, but I think I'll see good results from this.
And maybe it will give you some good ideas about what you want to do with your language learning for the rest of this year.
And remember that you can use my advanced podcast episodes and and my US Conversations podcast to give you some challenging content that will help you listen better and hear new words and phrases and learn a lot.
So the links to both of those are down below in the description.
So click on those if you're interested.
And remember that you have the transcript for this episode down below as well.
All right.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode.
And I'll talk to you on the next episode of listening time.
