Listening. A key practice for improving your English.

Who’s this for?

English Learners, especially learners at a basic or immediate level.

Why?

Because this will make English easier to understand. You will get use to the sounds and the patterns of English and this will also help your speaking skills. You will find it easier to hold conversations in English.

Listening and English

Listen more. Listening is the forgot skill in language learning. It’s also easy to do these days. You can have English on your smart phone, your MP3 player, your computer and TV

Listen to Simple English

Listen to simple English because you will learn faster that way. Many people listen to CNN and BBC news when it’s far too difficult for them. They would learn faster by listening to simpler English.

Simple English Resources

Lingq - Listening and Reading materials

Lingq has lots of short stories and texts with audio. Most of the listening and reading material is free. They have a big library of listening material at all levels. Join them and you will be able to download a lot of useful listening material for English (and other languages).



This YouTube channel has lots of stories for children. They are simple to understand and you can read along as well.

British Council - Simple Short Stories

A collection of short stories in video. The stories are easy to understand and use basic language.

Be Your Language Learning Boss!

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The good old days

Once upon a time it was difficult to get language resources. We relied on language schools to get them and to show us how to learn. We used textbooks as an entrance to a new language. Reading and writing were important activities in learning a language.

You were a student. The teacher was your Boss. The teacher’s boss was the curriculum and the curriculum was usually decided by some nerd who liked to write textbooks.

Progress was measured by exams and the level of text book that you reached. It didn’t matter whether or not you could understand a native speaker of that language.

The much better new days

Language schools are still around and thriving. Some have moved away from textbooks and offer real choice for the students.

Whether or not you choose a language school, you have much more choice now than before to be the boss of your language learning.

What’s new!

The internet.

This has allowed several things to change with language learning.

• Learners can talk to each other.
• It’s much easier to get in contact with someone who speaks the language you’re learning.
• It’s much easier to get resources.
• Language learning communities have developed based on ‘sharing’.

Learners talk to each other

This is important. The old advice was work hard and get through the text book. This simply didn’t and doesn’t work for a lot of people.

The new advice from learners

• Listen more
• Get ‘real’ language materials. Youtube has tonnes of language material, though at the moment it’s a pain to find useful stuff.
• Focus on your language Environment.
• Get resources that you enjoy.
• Involve people
• Use space repetition to help remember
• Use Audio Books.
• You can find out which language schools have been recommended by other learners.

Get in contact

Facebook, Lingq, Skype, LiveMocha and Meetup are some of the ways you can use to meet native speakers.

New Resources

Free

• Examples of using Youtube - English Dutch
• Lingq (lots of free listening resources)
• Dutch Resources

Paying Resources
• Yabla TV - Yabla English TV
• Podcasts - Germanpod101

Community learning

Lingq has lots of listening and reading material avai
lable for downloading. The community created the content. I find this approach very interesting and a forebearer of things to come in the language learning world.

Livemocha and Buusu are other language learning communities. Though I’m not sure what exactly they offer.

English Resources - LingQ

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For English Learners (also Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Russian, Korean, Portuguese, Swedish and French)

There’s never been a better time to learn a language than now. We have access to more resources than ever before.

This video was a timely remember that LingQ has lots of listening and reading resources for English Learners.



Lucas Fischer Raymundo said that he didn’t know any English seven months ago but through listening, reading and reviewing he can now speak English comfortably.

To get access to LingQ resources you can join here

Join LingQ

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Welcome to LingQ

Your English gets better everyday

Chris