and today, I'm going to be talking to you about

a technique that you can use to improve your listening skills

Now, I've been a student of languages

and a teacher of languages for....

....

...too many years now

and I can tell you

it's a very common problem that people ask me about all the time

it's, "Teacher, how do I improve my listening skills?"

I study a lot

I know what to say to people

but as soon as I start talking all this English

comes rushing right back at me and

I get overwhelmed, so...

what we're going to do today is look at

how to get you up to speed

so you can understand what you hear out there in the real world

Now, the main problem is that

up to now,

most of your exposure to English

has probably been either through the written word

written word, or through tapes made

especially for students.

the problem is that the written word

and the spoken word, especially in English

can be quite far apart

For example,

watchagonnadooduhnite

Watchya gonna, Watchagonnadoodanite

No, it's "what are you going to do tonight?"

What we love to do in English is take ahhh...take

is stress our nouns and our verbs

and all the little words, all the prepostions, all the articles

all those little, but very important words get pthppthpthpthp

squished together and not fully pronounced

so, as a learner, what you need to do

is get used to how people actually speak

Now, I'm going to show you a great technique for doing that

Right now

The first thing we are going to do

is turn to my best friend, and yours

when it comes to learning a language....youtube

Youtube is great because it has a wide range of material

You can get everything from very formal language

to very informal language

Also, you'll get a lot of media that's made for native speakers, right.

It's not specially made to be easier for students to understand

So, you know if you can start to understand native speaker media

you're doing really good

So, first we get youtube

Second, we're going to use a program

to pull those videos off of youtube

Then, we're going to convert the mp4s

that you'll get from youtube into audio files

Finally, we're going to use an annotation program

to take that spoken word, to take those audio files

and start to write out what you hear

and the uhhh....

the best part about all of this is that it is absolutely, 100% free

Let's get down to business

open your web browser and go to youtube

Select a video

Here's a video from a Canadian talk show segment called "Best Story Ever!"

Once you've chosen the video

you need to copy the URL for the downloader

I'm using the MacX youtube downloader

It's free and simple to use

Now, at the end of the video

I'll talk about where to find downloading programs for both mac and pc

Click on this icon here to add the URL

and then paste it

on the right hand side

you have a preview window in case you want to check the video before you actually download it

and a place to choose your target folder

I'm going to put this on my desktop

just because it's easy to find but you can put it anywhere

aahhh uuumm....

After choosing your target folder click down here

on the 'Download Now' button

it might take a few minutes to download

The program we'll be using, Praat, only works with .wav files

So before we can annotate this, we'll need to convert the file

I'm using a paid program called switch

But there are many services online that will do this for free

Again, at the end of the video I'll show you where to find some

Open your file convertor, click open file

Choose a destination folder down here

and tell it to output a .wav file

When you've finished that click 'go'

Now that we have our .wav file, we are ready to annotate

Open Praat

Choose 'open', 'read from file'

Then, over here on the left

Click 'Annotate'

Select, 'To TextGrid'

If you like, you can rename the tiers

Here we have Mary, John and Bell

Those are the default names of the tiers

If you are making custom tiers

Remember that to ahhhh create a second tier, you must include a space between the names

When I'm using this I usually just use the defualt names

ahhhh....now click 'OK'

Now you'll see if you look on the left-hand side

There's a new object in the window here

You'll need to select both objects

To do that, hold down the shift key and click on the audio file

They should both be highlighted in blue

Come over to the right and choose view and edit

Here we have the waveform. There are two because we have chosen a stereo file

If you have a mono recording, there will be only one waveform

In the middle section here it shows an analysis of the speech

Now, this is used for technical phonetic analysis by linguists

We don't need to concern ourselves with this

The only interesting part, really, is this blue line

It is...It shows the intonation contour of the person's speech

At the bottom, you'll find the three tiers

This is where we'll be doing our annotations

To isolate a section of the recording

you need to click either on the waveform or on the analysis

You'll see it makes this red-dash line here

Then, go down to the tiers

and click in the circle on the tier in which you want to do your annotations

Then select another and add another boundary either before of after the first one

If you want to change the area that you've selected

simply click on the boundary, and drag it to where you want it to be

To ahhhh.... to remove a boundary ummm

All you need to do is come up to the boundary option here

then go down and click 'remove' boundary

You'll see here it also has a shortcut to do it. It's good to learn these shortcuts, they can save you a lot of time

To play the selction, click inside the two boundaries on the tier level

and use the 'tab' button to start and stop the recording

Now, once you've selected the are which you want to annotate

All you have to do is start typing

Also, if you want to make changes

You can either delete up to the point where you want to write

Or, if you have a lot and you don't want to be deleting it all

everytime you need to make a change in the annotation

go up to the text windo at the top of the viewer

and click at any click at anypoint along the annotation to begin making changes

It's as simple as that

Now, I'd like to bring your attention down to the bottom left-hand corner of the window

Here, you'll find five buttons which can be used to toggle the view

First, if you click on the all button

It expands to show you the entire clip

The 'in' button zooms in

'out' zooms out

'sel' zooms into the selected area

For this button to work, you will have to choose an area between two boundaries

I think this button and the 'all' button are the two most useful

and here we have 'bak'

and this undoes the last change to view that you have made

Now let's watch the program in action

I'll make a few annotations here

One last thing, when you want to save your work

you can either

hit 'function + s'

or come up here to the file option

and select 'save textgrid as textfile'

THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT

If you choose any other option, you WILL loose you work

So remember, 'save textgrid to text file...'