Name: Listening and Speaking: Self Study Tips
Uploaded: 2025-06-18T11:11:42.000Z
Duration: 13 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hi everybody, welcome to www.engvid.com, I'm Adam.

Modal verbs - A2

In today's video, I want to give you some tips on how you can improve your listening and speaking skills while alone.

Basic quantifiers

For example, if you're doing self-studying or if you live in a place that you don't really have much access to a native English speaker, you can study, you can still practice these skills by yourself using some very accessible internet tools, and I'm going to show you how to do this.

So, we're going to start with the listening skills.

Obviously, you know YouTube, you're watching us on YouTube, www.engvid.com.

TED.com is a site where people give speeches.

It's a very popular site and very interesting speeches and lectures and all this stuff, and the function I'm going to show you also applies to TED.com.

Now, okay, let me actually explain this first, and then I'll get into the different places you can find this.

So, in YouTube, now, keep in mind that this might be a little bit different depending on the device you're using, but if you go to settings, usually it's in the bottom right corner of the YouTube video screen, but not always.

You may have to look around a little bit.

This is actually a gear, that's what it's called.

Try to find this, and once you open this, you should see an option for playback settings.

Playback means the speed that the video plays in and the audio.

You could go to .5, but that's a little bit too slow, I think. .75 is very good, and if you're listening to someone who's a very fast speaker, this will slow them down to something that you can listen to.

If they're really, really fast speakers, then you can try .5.

Or, go to .5, it'll be very, very slow, and then go back to .75 and see if you can keep up with the speed.

But anyways, the main thing is that it slows down the speaker so you can actually pay attention to all the words they're saying, right?

Another thing you can do, and again, on TED.com, I know that they have transcripts.

On YouTube, some channels offer transcripts, some don't.

What you can do, if you can print out the transcript, this is even better.

Listen to the video, listen to the speech a little bit slower, at .75, and follow the  So, you're listening and reading, and just making sure you understand what the person is saying.

Put the playback setting back to normal speed, and listen again, and again, follow the transcript so you can... to make sure you understand what's being said, and also pay attention to the enunciation and the intonation, where the speaker goes up, where the speaker goes down, sometimes how words might be blended together, right?

So, you get all these different aspects of the listening while you're understanding what's going on.

Then, listen again at normal speed without a transcript, and just pay attention to how the speaker is speaking.

If you printed out the transcript, what you can do is get some white-out.

Now, white-out is this, like, white tape, or even sometimes it's a liquid.

For example, if you're writing something and you need to... and you made a mistake, you need to clear it and write on top of it, you put that white stuff on, that is called white-out.

So, take some white-out, take the transcript, and just randomly block out words all over the transcript.

Then, listen again at normal speed, and follow the transcript, and fill in the blanks that you created for yourself.

This is just a good listening drill, right?

Now, if you're going to be taking the IELTS, especially the IELTS, the TOEFL not as much, if you're taking the IELTS, this is excellent practice for the listening section of the IELTS, to follow along and fill in blanks.

Now, once you get comfortable with this, go to YouTube and start looking for all kinds of different listening things, especially, like, sitcoms.

Look for, like, videos about friends, you know, the TV show Friends.

You can find a lot of little videos that are, like, two minutes, five minutes long, just enough of a sample that you can practice, or Seinfeld.

Now, the reason I suggest these videos is because they're speaking in a normal speed, right?

They're speaking like they are to native speakers, and you're going to get a lot of new vocab, you're going to get a lot of, like, idioms, you're going to get a lot of different expressions.

So, you're building your vocab, you're building your idiom base, and you're improving your listening skills.

Now, keep in mind that these are not the only places you can do this.

There are lots of video sites that will offer you the playback settings.

For example, CNN, if you go to CNN.com and click on their videos, they don't give you this.

So, look around the internet, find things that you're interested in, and just practice your listening that way, okay?

Another thing you can do, and this will be part of the speaking, after you've listened to a lecture on TED, for example, or you watch a show on YouTube, and you've gone through the transcript and you're ready, then when you have your transcript, try reading the transcript similar...

In a similar way to the way that was spoken by the original speaker.

So, if you're listening to a TED speaker, pay attention to how they're delivering it, and then try to repeat and record yourself, and then compare your recording to the original lecture.

And this is good for listening and for speaking practice.

But, I'm going to show you another tool that will help you with the speaking...

Okay, so now we're going to work on our speaking skills.

It doesn't work on Edge or Mozilla Firefox, etc.

If you open this page in Chrome, and you must sign in, so you must have a Google account.

If you don't, just make one, it's free, it's easy, it's good to have, anyway.

Once you're in Chrome, go to Google Docs.

You can just put it in the search engine and it'll show you the link for it, or you just put Google Docs in the address box.

Once you have Google Docs opened, open a blank page.

So, it's going to look like basically a file to type on and do, like a Word file, a little bit similar.

If you go to the top, you will see a bunch of different tabs that you can choose, like File, Edit, all these things.

Click on that, and then you will see something called Voice Typing.

When you do that, you will see a little icon of a microphone, a mic.

Click the mic, start talking, start speaking.

Now, the whole point of this tool is it's a voice-to-text tool.

So, you speak, and Google types what you said.

Now, what the point here is to try to speak clearly enough that Google types the words correctly.

If you have an accent, that's no problem.

If you mispronounce a word completely, Google will not type it correctly.

Either it will type some gibberish, some nonsense word, or it will type some other words that are close enough to it.

So, for example, one time I said retreat, and it, like, I said this word, retreat.

So, it's not perfect, but again, if you're by yourself and this is the only way you have to practice, then this is a very good tool.

Google's AI, artificial intelligence, is actually pretty smart, and it will help you a little bit.

It will put some words incorrectly just because of the context.

So, basically, Google knows which word should go next, even if you didn't necessarily pronounce it correctly.

If you pronounce it close enough and it fits the context, it will fill it in for you.

But overall, the key here is to try to get as many words correct as you can.

So, what you can do is just take a small, just take a paragraph from an essay or from a magazine or a newspaper, and just read it out loud and see how many words Google types correctly, okay?

Another thing you can do is you can combine the listening skills we talked about and the  So, watch a little piece of a TV show or a lecture or just come to www.engvid.com and just take one of our lessons and try to take this lesson, even.

Just try to take the transcript, and all engVid videos have transcripts.

You can get all of the transcripts for the videos.

Just take a piece of that and then speak it into the voice typing application, the tool, and see if you can repeat saying what we said or what Ted.com lecturer said or what some other channel said.

And that way, you're getting your listening and your speaking practice in one.