Videos are great for English listening practice. They are fun and you can listen to people speaking in the way English is actually spoken.
Here at RealEnglish.Club, we carefully select videos from YouTube to meet students’ needs. These videos use natural English, are short, and are interesting.
By watching videos on our website and doing listening comprehension activities, you can overcome many of the challenges of listening to English.
There are a lot of things that you can do with videos that you can’t do when talking with people in real life. And these things can help you improve your listening skills and understand more!
Listening Challenges
It’s too fast
- Slow it down. The video speed can be adjusted to give you more time to think. Click on the “1X” in the bottom right corner of the video.
- Repeat. If you listen to something again, you may catch more than you did the first time. Click on the sentence in the interactive transcript to hear it again.
Catching words – You may know the word, but not hear it.
- Read subtitles or transcripts. This way you can see what words are in the sentence and see how they sound when spoken. (It’s often different what you read in pronunciation guides!)
Not familiar with words and phrases.
- Do activities to become more familiar.
- Repeat. Each time you see a word or phrase you become more familiar with it.
I don’t understand!
- General understanding: The videos have transcripts. Scroll down to “Read” Copy and paste this into Google translate. The translation may not be perfect, but it can give you an idea of what the people are talking about.
- Specific words and phrases: If there is a sentence you want to understand better, choose some words and phrases that you think are important. Find more about their meaning from Google Translate or an online dictionary. (Many words and phrases also have Japanese explanations in the “Useful Phrases” section)
Choose a video that you think is interesting. After you have watched the video, do practice activities and read the transcript. Become more comfortable with the language and understand more.
