English:How to Use Unlimited English Lessons

This is an introduction to our lessons on ESLPod.com. If you understand how these lessons are put together – how we make them and why we make them – you’ll be able to take full advantage of them, or to get the most out of them. The best way for me to help you improve your English faster is by explaining how and why you should use our Learning Guides. I want to tell you first some, what I’m going to call, “secrets” that may surprise you about learning languages, and then I’m going to explain how those secrets relate to using our guides.

To understand how to use ESLPod lessons the most effective way, you have to understand at least one big thing about language learning, and once you understand this big thing, you’ll understand the rest of what I’m going to tell you about our Learning Guides. Okay, so here’s the one big important idea. To pick up – or to, what we would say, “acquire” – a language, to really know a language, you have to understand the language.

To pick up a language, all you really need to do is understand the language you are listening to or reading. If you can’t understand it, you can’t learn it – or we would say, you can’t “acquire” it. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “Well, that’s obvious, Jeff. Of course, you can’t acquire a language unless you understand it.” But it isn’t really obvious at all. In fact, I think that for many people, they spend their whole lives not understanding this basic idea.

Many people spend years trying to improve their English, and they do all sorts of things. They study grammar, they memorize vocabulary, they make lists, they make flash cards – little pieces of paper to try to memorize a word – they try to repeat everything they hear or everything they read, they take tests, they give themselves quizzes, they take examinations – they do all of these things thinking that these things will help them improve their English.

What I’m telling you today is that none of these things are necessary. In fact, some of these things might actually make your English worse. I know. It sounds crazy, but it’s true. The only thing you have to do to improve your English is find things you can mostly understand in English and then read or listen to them. If you find things you can read and listen to, things you can mostly understand, your brain will take care of all you need in terms of improving your English. You don’t have to do anything else other than put yourself in a situation where you’re listening to or reading English you can mostly understand.

Now, there’s another way of saying this, which is if you spend your time listening to or reading things you can’t understand, you cannot understand, then you won’t improve your English. And this, in fact, is what many people do all the time. They try to read books that are too hard for them, so they spend all their time looking up every word in the dictionary, or they try to read things or listen to things that are too fast and they can’t understand them.

That is a waste of time. That is not going to help you improve your English very fast. Studying grammar rules or studying the words is not going to improve your English very efficiently. It’s much faster to spend that time listening to easier English or reading easier English that you can mostly understand. When you do that, your brain will take care of everything else. Your brain will acquire, or pick up, all of that English you don’t know, automatically.

How much do you need to understand? I would say, for most people, enough so that you feel comfortable listening to or reading it for a long time. That might be 90 percent. That might be 95 percent. For some people, when they read, it might be 98 percent. That depends on you and how interested you are in what you’re reading or listening to, how much you know already about what you are reading or listening to.

Did you ever notice that when you read a newspaper in English about something in your country or about something you know a lot about, it’s a lot easier? That’s because what you already know, what is already in your brain, helps you understand new information much more quickly. Listening to or reading English you mostly can understand will help you pick up the English you don’t understand much more efficiently, much more rapidly. You don’t have to believe me. Believe more than 40 years of scientific research that linguists such as I and Dr. Lucy Tse have been doing that shows that this is true.

Now, how does this relate to ESLPod.com and our Learning Guides? The purpose of our Learning Guides is very simple. There is really only one purpose. It’s to help you understand the audio file you’re listening to. Learning Guides are not for studying. They’re not for memorizing. They’re not for playing Sudoku. They’re not for taking and making into little balls and throwing them at your neighbor’s cat. That’s not the purpose of the Learning Guide, even if that might be fun.

The purpose of the learning guide is to help you, we would use the word “comprehend,” or understand, English. If you understand this point about improving your English, you’ll understand everything I’m going to tell you now about how to use the Learning Guides. Now before I explain more about the Learning Guides, let me talk about the two basic lessons we have – and if you’re new to ESLPod.com, this might be useful to you.

The first kind of lesson is what we are now calling our “Daily English” lessons. We used to call these “ESL Podcasts.” These are our dialogue or regular episodes. In these lessons, we read a dialogue or a story slowly. We read it slowly so you can understand it, because remember – if you can’t understand it, you can’t learn it, you can’t acquire it.

The next thing we do is we talk about the words in the dialogue so you can understand everything that we said, and at the end of the lesson, we then give you the dialogue or story at a normal speed so you can hear what it sounds like in regular English, at least spoken by native speakers.

The other kind of lesson we have is our “Cultural English” lessons. We used to call these our “English Cafés.” This is where we take one or two interesting cultural topics related to the United States somehow and talk about what it is and what it means. This is our way of teaching new vocabulary as well as talking about American history and culture.

We also answer questions on our Cultural English, or what we used to call our “English Cafés.” We take questions from you, our listeners, and we answer them. It’s just like if you know someone who speaks English and you have a question about it, about some word, you will go to that person and ask the person to explain it to you. That’s what we do on our Cultural English lessons.

The Learning Guides for these two lessons are pretty similar. There are some small differences. Both of the Learning Guides have what we call our “Glossary” (glossary). The Learning Guides start with a list of definitions of the main words or main terms that we use in that lesson. These definitions are usually a little different from the ones I say on the audio, so if you listen to the audio and then read the Learning Guide, you may see a slightly different version of the definition, but it’s the same thing, the same idea.

I suggest that you look at these definitions quickly. Remember that you usually have to see a word more than once to really understand it, and if you listen to the audios and then read the Learning Guide, this gives you what we would call a “second pass” (pass), a second chance to see the word and the definition.

Now here’s something I do not recommend you do, I don’t suggest you do. Don’t go and create flash cards or write these words down on a piece of paper and then write the definition and then write a translation and then try to memorize these as though you were still back in school and the teacher was going to give you a test. Here’s some important news: I’m not going to give you a test. I’m not going to call you up and ask you to tell me the meanings of those words.

In fact, trying to memorize words one by one is one of the slowest ways to improve your English. If you want to take a long time to improve your English, then I recommend you try to memorize words one by one. There are more than 10,000 words that you need to acquire or pick up in order to read English fluently and listen to English fluently. And if you try to do that word by word, it’s going to take you a very long time.

There’s actually a much faster way, which is simply to read and listen to more English, because the more English you listen to and read, the more chances you are going to have to hear or to see that word in what we call “context” (context). You see it with all the other words – words that you understand that will help you understand the meaning of the words you don’t know, and that will put it into your brain in a much more permanent way. So, reading and listening are much faster than trying to memorize words one by one.

The Glossary is for a quick review so you can see the words and definitions again, but not for you to try to memorize it and make sure that you never forget it. You’re going to forget it. It’s okay. Everybody does. You’re not going to memorize the word the first time you hear it or see it. The important thing is to give it another chance to get into your brain and then to move on and go to the next thing. What’s the next thing?

It’s the sample sentences. All of our words that are defined and are given in our glossary have sample sentences. These are new sentences that you haven’t seen or heard before that use the words in context with other words you probably already know, and that helps you get a better understanding of the word – that gives you another pass, another chance to see the words and to understand what they mean.

Some people ask me if you should look at the words before you listen to the episode or the lesson or before you read the lesson for the first time. I usually tell people no. We know from the research, from scientific studies, that trying to learn definitions and then listen to something or read it isn’t a very efficient use of time. It’s much better to read and listen, and then use the glossary as a review than it is to try to learn the word first and then go and listen.

Another part of the Learning Guide – at least our Daily English lesson guides – is Comprehension Questions. Now personally, I don’t think you have to even look at the Comprehension Questions. The reason we put them in there is some people like them. Some people think it’s kind of fun to see if you understood what you heard or listened to.

If you think it helps, then of course go ahead and look at them. If you don’t, or you don’t really feel like answering questions, then I think it’s okay to “skip” (skip) the questions. “To skip” means not to do something. So only do those if they help you.

Whether you answer them or not, the next thing you will find, in our Daily English Learning Guides, is a section, at least in some of our more recent episodes, called “What Else Does It Mean?” Not all of our episodes have this, but many of our Daily English episodes do.

“What Else Does It Mean?” personally is my favorite section. In each episode we take two terms, or two words, from our dialogue and we explain other meanings that these words or terms have, either combined with additional words or by themselves, that are different from the meanings that we talk about in the dialogue or the story. English, like most languages, has many words that have more than one meaning. This is the place where you can learn some of those additional meanings that we don’t talk about in the lesson.

Another part of our Daily English Learning Guide is what we call our “Cultural Note.” We don’t always have time to talk about every topic that is related to the main topics in our Daily English lessons, our ESL Podcast lessons – what we used to call “ESL Podcast” lessons. So, the Learning Guide includes some additional cultural topic that is related to our dialogue or story for that day.

For example, the dialogue might be about taking a trip to Hawaii. The cultural note would be some additional information about the history of the state of Hawaii, or perhaps a famous person who is from Hawaii. For our Cultural English lessons, we have a similar kind of cultural note, but we call it “What insiders know.” An “insider” (insider) is a person who knows about information because he has a lot of experience or he has lived in a certain place for a long time.

Our “What Insiders Know” section is information that someone growing up in the United States would know, but someone from another country might not. We try to talk about a movie, a song, a book, or some other aspect or part of popular culture that most Americans would know who grew up here, but might not be something that other people would know.

There’s just one more part of our Learning Guides that I want to talk about before we end here, and it’s the largest section of every Learning Guide for our lessons, the “Transcript.” A “transcript” (transcript) is when someone writes down everything you say. All of our lessons have a complete transcript. Everything I or Lucy says is written down so you can read it and see it.

Now, the biggest question I get about the transcript is when to use it. Well, here are your three obvious choices. You can read the transcript first and then listen to the audio. You can listen to the audio first and then read the transcript, or of course you can read and listen at the same time. Which should you do? Well, I’d be lying to you – I would not be telling the truth – if I said there’s only one way that we know will work.

To decide what’s right for you, we need to talk a little bit more about that one big thing that I mentioned at the beginning of this episode – the importance of understanding the message. Here’s how you should look at it. To really acquire or pick up a language, you need to get lost in the language, so much so that you even forget you are reading or listening.

Have you ever watched a movie or read a book, and you look at your watch, you look at the clock, and you go, “Oh, my goodness, I can’t believe I’ve been watching this for an hour” or “I’ve been reading this book for two hours.” You don’t even notice how long it’s taking because you’re so interested. You’re so “absorbed,” we would say. You actually forget that you’re reading. You are in this experience. You are lost in the book or lost in the movie.

The best way to improve your English is to get lost in English. To be in a situation where you’re listening to or reading something and you forget that it’s English. You don’t even realize that what you are reading or listening to is English. That’s why you have to look for English that is mostly things you can understand. It has to be easy enough for you to understand. You’re so focused, you’re so interested in the lesson, in the book, in whatever you are reading or listening to, that you forget it’s English. When that happens, your English is getting better.

Now, my own experience with students, and as a student of language myself, is that for most things, you need to be at least above 85 or 90 percent. Sometimes it can be less than that, but usually you need to have a lot of the language that you already understand. So, I would suggest experimenting – test different ways of doing this. Maybe you find that you can listen to the audio and get most of it, but still a lot you don’t understand, but then when you read the Learning Guide, you get up to that 95 percent, or you get a lot more by reading after you listen.

If you are in a situation, however, where you understand only maybe 60 percent of the audio – you’re missing a lot when you listen – then it might be better to read the Learning Guide first. Why? Because when you read the transcript and the Learning Guide, you can take your time. You can go slowly. You can go back and read things again. Then when you listen to it, the percent that you will understand will be much higher.

If you are already at 85 or 90 percent, then for most people I say listen and then read the transcript. If you’re below 80 percent or 60 percent, then it might be better to read the transcript first and then do the audio. Can you do both at the same time? Of course! Sometimes that isn’t possible. Many people listen to the lessons when they’re on the subway or they’re driving. (Please don’t drive and read the Learning Guide at the same time, okay?) So, whatever is best for you. There is no one right answer to that question.

If you have additional questions about how to improve your English or how to use the Learning Guide, email us. Our email address is eslpod@eslpod.com.

From Los Angeles, California, I’m Jeff McQuillan. Thanks for listening. Come back and listen to us again right here on ESLPod.com.