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Hi Guys, Dan the Grammar Man here
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...'