Hi. James from engVid.

This lesson, what I want to do is help you...

Well, I want to help you improve two things at once, your pronunciation and your listening.

Really, I will be focusing on the listening part, but if you do this right, your pronunciation

will also get better.

You ready?

Let's go to the board.

As you can see, Mr. E has a big ear.

Listening is one of those things when people are learning a language they don't really

pay attention to.

It's quite funny because I hear many people say right away: "I listen to English all the time.

I listen to videos at home.

Why?

I don't need anyone to tell me about...

Help me with listening."

And usually the same people will say something like: "My pronunciation's not very good.

I really don't understand when people speak to me", and so on and so forth.

And you're trying to explain: Listening is a skill that is natural.

Actually, there's a difference between hearing and listening, and we're going to go to the

board right now and talk about that so that we can get to what I call "active listening".

You ready? Let's go.

So, E, as you can see, has a big ear because he is now listening because he wants to improve

on his listening skills and his pronunciation, and he's come to the right place.

All right, so the first thing I want to look at here is "hear".

When we use the word "hear" in English it's for sound, it really is.

It's just for sound. Like...

[Drops marker] Did you hear that?

Right?

You don't say: "Did you listen to that?"

You can't listen to that.

You can hear that. All right?

So that would be music, when people are speaking, because if you can't hear...

And here I wrote this: "If you don't hear it, it doesn't exist", and that's true.

Listening...

Or hearing is physical. Okay?

The ear actually has to work, or you have to make it work.

There are two things you have to be careful on, that your ear is good, so get a hearing

test if necessary, if you need one; but also we can make it better, if physically everything

works, sometimes people don't pay attention so they miss the sounds.

And when you miss a sound, it changes the word and sometimes the meaning.

And that's when we look over here, to "listen".

"Listening" makes us focus and gives us meaning.

So, when you're listening to someone, you will look at them and you will pay attention,

and that's how you get the meaning.

You need to be able to physically hear the sound, which is true, but if you don't listen,

you won't get the meaning of what they say. Okay?

So we need a combination.

And luckily for us, when the ear works, we can use our listening or our focus skills

to improve how this works so we can get better at learning language and learn faster.

If you remember what I said here: If you don't hear, it doesn't exist.

That's the physical part.

If you cannot hear it, it doesn't exist.

Right?

Which will lead to bad pronunciation, because if you cannot hear a T, you won't say the

T. "Huh? Hmm?" Yeah.

For many Spanish people, the "d" sound is a "th".

They cannot actually hear us when we say "duh", so they say: "the", right?

So they go: "I stanthe", "I stanthe" instead of: "I stand".

When they can hear it, because when I make them say the sound "d", they can do it, and

"duh", they can say it, then all of a sudden they're like: "I can stand.

He wanted".

Not: "I wantith".

-"I wanted".

-"Oh, it's a different sound."

By focusing and listening we're able to make them realize there are different sounds being

said and improve on their pronunciation. Okay?

Now, if we use active listening, which is what I will teach you now, it will help us

retrain the ear.

"Retrain" means make the ear go back to the beginning and then start again, and retrain

to make it better.

Now, I have a little game we're going to play, which is a fun game because you can do it

by yourself, -- I will give you an example in a second -- but you can also do it with

a friend.

"Huh?"

So you can both help each other improve.

So, I'm going to read something to you. Okay?

And I want you to close your eyes and I want you to listen. Okay?

Now, I want you to look for the words with the letter C. All right?

So you're going to close your eyes, like I'm closing my eyes now.

And I'm going to read this to you, and I want you to count how many C words are in this

sentence.

Are you ready?

Are your eyes closed?

Okay, do it now.

"The cat quickly came to the couch and caught sight of the kite in the tree and kept quiet."

Okay?

How many letter Cs?

I'll read it one more time for you, so focus on the words.

How many words with C in them?

"The cat quickly came to the couch and caught sight of the kite in the tree and kept quiet."

Count them up.

All right.

Now, probably the first time you did it, you were like: "What?" and it just went by very

quickly.

But the second time you probably noticed you were catching, grabbing.

This will help with pronunciation, but it also does another little thing I didn't explain

to you but you would find: You started to make breaks in the words so you can understand

much more clearly what I was saying.

Cool, huh?

When you're actively focused on catching one sound, your brain has to separate things to

make it clearer for you.

Continually practicing this, you're going to start noticing when English speakers put

breaks in the word, so your speech will flow much more naturally, and you'll catch the

actual pronunciation that we say.

Cool?

Yeah, I thought so.

Let's try another one for you.

Are you ready?

Now I want you to count the number of words with S this time, the number of words with

S. Listen carefully.

"She shopped at many sites in the city that seemed strange.

The cellphone that she used and took pictures of the sites was not hers."

Ready?

I'll do it again, so pay attention.

"She shopped at many sites in the city that seemed strange.

The cellphone that she used and took pictures of the sites was not hers."

This time you probably noticed you got the letter S or the words with S a little faster

because you were able to go: "S, s, s, s".

If you missed out, there's a second thing.

Remember I told you about the speed of English and the breaks, and proper pronunciation?

You're also probably going: "What is a site?"

Good.

We work on vocabulary.

In listening, when you're able to catch the words, because you probably caught the word

"site" from me, you learned a new vocabulary word.

English people cannot explain these words to you when you say: "I heard the word 'sia',

'siaseealja'."

It's nothing.

But when you say: "I heard this word 'site', what is it?"

I go: -"Oh, that's one of two things.

'Sight', the ability to see, and 'site' is an area that we look at things, like a city

can be a site, a place, an area."

-"Oh, nobody told me that."

-"And they're spelt two different ways."

-"Cool."

So, in learning to listen you can pick up new vocabulary that you've probably missed

because you weren't able to hear it.

Remember?

What you don't hear, it doesn't exist.

But by focusing on one sound or one letter-we talked about one letter-you're able to pick it up.

All right?

Take it out, and then it makes the other things clearer that you were probably missing.

Pretty cool, huh?

Now I'm going to teach you something else in a second, I'm going to teach you a little

bit more advanced because right now I'm asking you to look for the words, or sorry, the letters

that you know: A, B, C, D, or E, what have you.

Right?

We haven't worked on sounds, just the letter name.

So, C, the letter C you're looking for, but now we're going to work on sounds to improve

your listening ability.

Are you ready?

It gets to be fun now.

Okay, so I gave you a little exercise to try and we practiced it.

I'm going to make that exercise a little bit more difficult now because we worked on the

name, I call it the...

You could say the capital letter, and I say it's the name of the letter.

So, an example would be: This is a capital letter, the big...

The big size.

But this is the sound.

I would say this is the name of the letter and this is the sound.

So, the sound might be here.

Name is B, the letter B, but the sound-right?-would be "b", "b".

Now, we worked on letter name, right?

Like, how many words have the letter in it.

We didn't care about the sound that it makes, we just cared that the letter exists in the word.

That's the first step.

Then I'm going to have to work on sounds because you need to be able to tell the difference

between sounds.

But before we do that, let me give you a little bit of help with working with consonants.

Now, I'm just assuming everybody knows a consonant, but in case you don't: A, E, I, O, U, U are

sometimes strong...

Oops, sorry.

That's an old song.

Those are vowels.

Okay, so I'm not talking about vowels, to be honest with you.

Vowels are really hard to do because we mix vowels, we put E and I together to make an

"a" sound or an "e" sound, so I don't want to start with that, and nor should you.

Best to start with the consonants because they're hard sounds.

Also, many Latin languages, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish don't end in hard sounds, the

hard consonants, so it's a good idea to bring your mind to it so you can practice.

Also, Japanese people have a little difficulty with this.

So, working with the consonants will almost instantly improve your pronunciation by 5

to 10% just by listening and knowing how to listen.

Cool?

So, for a bonus little lesson: Do only the consonants first, I just explained why. Okay?

And I'm going to give you a specific consonant to work on because it will help you improve

faster and immediately.

The most used consonant in the English language is the letter T. Kind of strange, huh?

Some people would say the...

When I used to teach it I would say it's "s", "d", "t", and "th", not that these are...

TH is a consonant, but most people would have difficulty saying these sounds, especially

at the end of words, so I would make students use this exercise and practice with this again

and again while watching movies, so they got really good at hearing and they also found

they could understand more of what the people were saying.

Okay?

So it's best to know that T is the most used consonant in English, so it's best to start

with that.

Now, practice first before you even do the listening exercise of putting on...

I wouldn't start with music.

Go for a movie or TV program to start with first.

Okay?

First practicing saying T, and you could do it like this: "t, t, t, t", it's to get the

brain to become aware of it.

If you have difficulty with T, T is done by this: Your throat back here, you kind of close

it a little bit, like swallow, swallow, and then at the tip of your tongue... See?

Tip tongue, two Ts.

Your tongue...

Tip of the tongue goes to the front of the teeth, so: "t, t, t, t, t, t, t, t".

That's how you make the T. All right?

So T: "t". Got it? Cool.

Now we're ready to start.

I'm going to give you, by the way, the same two sentences I gave you before.

"Huh, so what's the challenge, man? I just did it.

You told me, right?"

Now, remember I told you how many...

Oh, did I tell you how many words or did I leave you hanging?

So, before I do it again: How many words did you find with the letter C?

Remember the first sentence with the cat?