My Personal Favourite Posts on the Blog So Far...

As you might notice, I've started to post again.  I've also noticed that there are a few more people visiting the blog.  So to all the new readers - welcome!

If you are new to this blog and you don’t know where to start then I would like to recommend these 10 posts that are my personal favourites.  I think these 10 posts are the most useful and most helpful articles for learners of English.

1. What is Cohesion & Coherence? (Cambridge Testing Explained)

This is a very popular post which explains one of the things that Cambridge examiners are looking for in your speaking and writing.

2. Accent vs Pronunciation

This looks at the difference between the two and provides some advice and links to a wonderful resource for listening.

3. Cudunagonbeda

If you are having problems understanding native speakers with their fast talking, or you would like to improve your speaking, this might be of interest to you.

4. How much time do I need?

How long does it take to learn a language and how much effort do you need to be successful?  It is different for each person, but there are a few general rules here.

5. Anybody having problems with the Present Perfect?

This takes a poem/song to provide a little exercise for listening to examples of the present perfect tense.  You might find it useful, but I've added it here because it was fun to make!

6. Thinking about Superman a.k.a. Imaginary Situations (Conditionals)

Talking about things we wish were true makes up a lot of our conversations, so these grammar points are explained clearly and with lots of written and picture examples.

7. How Green is your Internet (Working with Numbers in English)

This is another very popular post that takes a two minute video and gives you a small listening task to help you practise listening to English numbers.

8. Learning and Forgetting Vocabulary & No Magic Please

Did you know that forgetting vocabulary is actually a very important part of building your vocabulary?  These two posts explain one of the best ways I know to improve vocabulary quickly!

9. Using Tongue Twisters for Your Pronunciation

I honestly feel that practising little tongue twisters is a great way to improve pronunciation in another language.  It is also very impressive to people when you get it right!

10. How Useful is Translation? (University Preparation Tip #1)

I love Google Translate and I think it had become a very useful tool to help language learners.  But it can't replace learning a language.  This article shows the problems of using too much translation.

The Soft War on the Internet (English Listening Practice)

I am very lucky because I live in Britain and our Internet connection is relatively free of censorship. Do you know this word, ‘censorship’? It is the action of a government or organization that limits information.

Last year, I wrote about how much I hated the censorship of the Internet in Turkey. I think this is a very important issue so I wanted to show you a short video about it. Here are a few questions for you to read before you watch the video:

1. How many countries did Freedom House include in their ‘Internet Freedom’ report? 
2. When was this report released? 
3. How were the countries categorized? 
4. There were 3 categories for scoring ‘Internet Freedom’, what were they? 
5. What was the worst scoring country? 
6. What is the population of that country and how many people have broadband access there? 
7. What is the general speed of internet there? 
8. What is the ‘Soft War’? 
9. The Iranian Government wants to unplug its country from the internet... by when? 
10. What is a ‘dual internet structure’?

Okay, now here is the video:

Did you get all the answers? If not, try listening again. Answers are below but try listening at least one more time before you scroll down to read them.

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

Okay, here are the answers:

1. 37 Countries
2. April 2011
3. Free, Partly Free, Not Free
4. Obstacles to Access, Limits on Content, Violation of User Rights
5. Iran
6. 73.2 Million & 560,000 Broadband Subscribers
7. 56K
8. ‘The Soft War’ is the Iranian government’s attack on the connection of government protestors, Internet users and international media.
9. Within the next two years (2013)
10. A ‘dual Internet structure’ is a system where a country has unrestricted access to the Internet, for tourists and government officials, and restricted access to the Internet for the normal citizens of the country.

Some of those answers were probably a bit difficult.  Here is a small activity to improve your listening.

Watch the video again and try to fill in these gaps.

• Many governments ____________ are locked in a fight with their citizens. 
• ...on a _________ of 0 to 100. 
• Most private ____________ only have 56k connections. 
• In June 2009, Iranians _____ __ the streets in protest of presidential election results. 
• Protestors relied ________ on the Internet... 
• With social media proving to be such a powerful revolutionary tool, it’s ___ ________ that the Iranian government... 
• ... only about 1000 individuals have direct access to the Internet, ___ _______ ___ the population has access to filtered content 
• Burma recently launched a intranet-like web portal that ____ ___ wean the public off popular websites... 
• With all this ____________, it’s hard to dispute that the war for Internet access is _____ __________. 

Here are the answers and a little bit of explanation about how you can use these phrases.

Enjoy!

MusicEnglish (Website Recommendation)

Here is a website that learners of English might like, especially if you like songs and music.

MusicEnglish

This is a great website that has popular songs from youTube and gives you the English subtitles to the songs as well.  This is really good because you will understand a lot more of the song if you can listen AND read at the same time.

One of the things I really like about this website is that I have a 'similar taste in music'* as the maker of the site.  There are lots of really good songs to listen and read through.  For example, 'Starlight' by Muse, 'The Man Who Sold the World' by Nirvana, 'Nothing Else Matters' by Metallica and many, many more!

Also, if there is a song you want that you cannot find of the website, you can request it easily.

Excellent website and helpful for learning lyrics to favourite songs in English.

* If two people like similar music, then they have a 'similar taste in music'.  If two people like exactly the same music, you could say 'they have the same taste in music'.

An Idea for Music in Your Learning

Fountain Pen
(Picture from Kartikay Sahay on Flickr)

My favourite pen is a fountain pen.  I love writing with a fountain pen.  I can’t really explain why I feel like this but that’s not important.  What’s important is that I love writing with this pen and when I pick it up, I immediately want to start writing.

If you feel like this or if you just like writing, then I have an idea about something you can start writing about.

Making Your Own Gapfill from Music

More than a decade (10 years) ago, I was introduced to a music group called Mana by a friend at university.  The first song I heard was En El Muelle De San Blas.  I loved it and still do.

What I decided to do to help my listening skills and my vocabulary was to do a gapfill.  I’m sure you know what a gapfill is:

We are _____ __ listen to a song now. (Fill in the gap)

We are going to listen to a song now.

I decided to listen to the song, one verse (part) at a time and listen again and again.  Each time I tried to write down as much of the song as I could hear.  Here are the results:

As you can see, it was not perfect but I did listen to more and more and I know my listening skills improved. I continued and did another verse and you can see the results of that too.

My feeling is that doing this definitely improves your listening skills and it is a fun way to do it because you can listen again and again to music you like.  The important thing is to actively write down what you are hearing.  This is difference between listening and hearing.

However, it is important to practise and do this regularly.  I didn’t practise for months and I tried to do this activity again.  Here are the results:

As you can see, I have not improved.  Why?  ...because I hadn’t practised.

So, try it with a song you like in the language you are learning and let me know how you do.

People you should be following, pt 3 (YouTube)

I don’t have lots of knowledge ‘when it comes to’ YouTube. When it comes to Twitter or blogs I feel much more confident but when it comes to YouTube, I still feel that I’m not really using that resource as much as I could be. By the way, the previous sentence is not very good because it has too much repetition of the phrase ‘when it comes to...’ but hopefully my repetition (see my earlier blogpost) will help you remember this phrase for you to use in the future! ;-)

A big, big thank you to Marcelo Mendes for recommending most of these channels! I highly recommend you explore his website. He is very generous with his time and obviously enjoys learning and helping other people to learn as well.

Two Great YouTube Channels

The Daily English Show amazes me – there is obviously a lot of work that makes this channel! On their blog, they say they are the world’s first daily online English language show. These videos come from New Zealand, which is great because it is very important to get used to listening to lots of different accents in English. This channel has been producing videos for over 5 years! What I really love about this channel is that the videos are about interesting things – I’m watching and learning from their New Zealand Summer Tour. Also, the English is clear and you can read the transcript of every video on the blog.

Try this video, and see the transcript here.

Next, EnglishClub.com is a huge resource for English learners and teachers but EnglishClub is also on YouTube and there is one specific series that I find very interesting – The Learning English Video Project. This project visits school and language institutes to ask learners and teachers about their experiences, goals, problems, solutions and achievements as well as getting tips and advice from them.

Like the Daily English Show, I love these videos because they are really interesting. Again, visit the website for the transcripts and lots of other things to help you when you are listening to the videos.  The project covers the UK, Brazil, China, Spain, America, Romania and Morocco.

Try this first video from Granada, Spain.

A Couple of Other Useful Channels

Daily Dose of English is a channel that provides short videos describing a few English phrases (usually with a common word or topic). There are now enough ‘doses’ (or videos) for one every day for 5 months. However, it is a good idea to watch one or two, take notes, write some example sentences to help you remember and then watch the same video again a week later. How much do you remember?

You can go to the website for transcripts and to download the mp3s. Unfortunately there are advertisements on the website but this is still a good resource.

By the way, a “dose” of something, refers to ‘a small amount of something that you take regularly’. This word is usually used to talk about medicine but we use it for metaphors and other phrases sometimes as well.

Use Phrasal Verbs is another channel of short videos by Linguaspectrum (who makes the Daily Dose of English videos as well). Each video talks about one specific phrasal verb. There is a website as well but I think it is quite confusing to navigate (meaning that it is not easy to understand where to find the information you want).

I like these two channels, Daily Dose of English and Use Phrasal Verbs, because you learn useful vocabulary and phrases but more important than that, you will get at least 5 or 10 minutes of listening practice (actually more than 10 minutes if you watch the videos more than once, which you should do if you really want to remember anything),

Next time I will look at websites you should be following with RSS – and if you don’t know what RSS is, I’ll explain it!

RSS - We see this sign on many websites, but
what does it mean and how can we use it?

Marcia Lima's "secret" to language learning

I just read this on Marcia Lima's blog and just had to share it with you:

"My secret to language learning was perspiration, really!"

Perspiration = sweating = hard work!

"I always had to be very systematic about what I was to learn: I diligently listened to audio cassettes in English and wrote down the tapescript (it must be said that this was not as fun as listening to songs and writing down the lyrics, but just as effective!)."

An excellent way to improve listening and writing skills and, as Marcia says, song lyrics are a fun option.

"I also wrote word lists and illustrated the meaning of the words with pictures and/or sentences and memorized loads of chunks of language. Yes, memorization!!! I memorized lists of vocabulary, phrasal verbs and even interviews in English: questions and looooong answers. I can’t say I enjoyed the memorization process, but when I succeeded, I felt really proud and challenged myself with further memorization. I wasn’t aware of the role of memorization in foreign language learning back then... I was just a teen, but I was able to enjoy its benefits anyway. Today, if asked for advice, I’d certainly say: be systematic about what you learn."

Memorization, memorization, memorization!  It's not the only thing you need to learn a language, but it would be impossible to learn a language without it.

Thanks Marcia, great advice!  Go visit her blog and leave a comment or send her a tweet!

How Green is your Internet? (Working with Numbers in English)

Did you know about this?  Thank you to Tom Walton for sharing this on his blog.

This video has lots of numbers in it, lots of big numbers.  Did you understand all the information in the video?  I have a small challenge for you.

Try watching it again and identify the significance of each of the numbers below.  I've done the first number for you as an example.

0.2 is the number of grams per second of carbon that is generated by 1 second of online video.

2,000,000,000

4,000

44,000,000

2%

130,000,000,000

10%

2,500,000

1,065

100,000,000

350,000,000

20,000,000

Are you surprised by any of this information?

Anybody having problems with the Present Perfect?

The present perfect is tricky. What do I mean by ‘tricky’? I mean it is sometimes difficult to understand and, in fact, it is used for a lot of different reasons. Many students learn these reasons but sometimes this means students can answer the question ‘What are the different uses of the present perfect tense?’ but they still can’t actually use the tense comfortably or accurately.

This is because students need to understand 3 things:

1. Don’t worry, the present perfect tense is not the most common tense in English... but sorry, we still use it a lot! So this is a very important part of communication in English that you... can’t... ignore! 
2. Making mistakes is good. If you are not sure how to use the present perfect then don’t, don’t, don’t avoid using it! We learn from our mistakes because mistakes = experience. 
3. If you are not comfortable with the present perfect tense, then you need more experience with it. 

For this last part, I have a short activity for you.

1.  You are going to listen to a poem (in fact, lyrics to a song) that uses the present perfect tense a lot. Listen once and while you are listening make some notes about what verbs you hear. 

listen to ‘Present Perfect Poem’ on Audioboo

2.  Now listen one more time and see if you can add more to your notes. REMEMBER, these are notes... you shouldn’t be writing down every word. 

3.  Now with the help of your notes and this slide show, see if you can rebuild the whole poem – the final slide has the answers.  Each slide is visual help for one line of the poem.

You might know this song. It is by U2 and it’s called “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”. If you want a final challenge and a little bit more practice then do the interactive gap fill with a YouTube video of a live performance.

“Still Haven’t Found What I’m Look For” at Lyrics Training (remember to select a game mode: beginner, intermediate, advanced or expert)

or, just enjoy the original video below... :-)

Laugh at me on YouTube

At the moment I am editing the video of my recent charity event.  For this reason I started to look at the other videos I have posted on YouTube.  You might have seen them already... but have you watched them with the English subtitles?

Believe me, the subtitles make the experience a bit... different, and it makes me think I need to speak more clearly the next time I make a video for this blog! :-)

Simply follow one of the links below to play one, or all, of the videos in YouTube.  At the bottom of the video you should see a button that says "CC".  Click on it and select "Transcribe Audio".  Then sit back, watch and listen, and see if you can understand what I am saying better than YouTube can. :-)

SMART Goals for the 1000 Challenge (from mid June)

Personal Challenge for Charity‬‏ (from early June)

Blog Introduction‬‏ (from early March - my hair and beard are MUCH shorter in this video!)

Enjoy - some of the errors are quite funny.  Have a good weekend!

Gordon

I don't remember saying that, I don't know what it means...
but I like it! :-P

Favourite Websites for English Practice, pt 3 (Listening, continued)

My first post about websites to help you with your listening skills gave recommendations for the BBC’s 6 Minute English, Videojug and Lyrics Training.  There are many more sites and I think it is time to share more recommendations with you from things I’ve found in the last few months.  I’ve divided these sites into levels of difficulty and given some suggestions about how you can use them for self-study.

For Low Intermediate students:

Spotlight Radio

Spotlight Radio has a huge (massive, very big) range of podcasts (about 15 minutes long) to download and you have the transcript (the text) that you can read as you listen.  Spotlight Radio is a great website if your listening skills are low – the speed of the talking is low and the pronunciation is very clear.  This is not very authentic (realistic), but it is good practice to start improving your skills – you can start listening to faster podcasts on other websites when you are more confident.

There is an amazing variety of topics to listen to: Drugs, Sport, History, Music, Health, Technology & Science, etc, etc.

Suggestion for Self-Study

1. Choose a podcast, for example ‘Stories for Wise People’.
2. Go through the transcript (perhaps copy it to Word or print it off) and highlight or circle words or phrases you are not sure how to pronounce.
3. Play the podcast and listen carefully for the difficult-to-pronounce words.
4. Vocabulary work – read through and identify words you are not familiar.  Write them down in a list and try to guess their meanings from context before you check in your dictionary or on Google Translate.  Remember that some new words might be repeated a few times so you will have plenty of context to help you.  Just looking up a word will not help you remember it – thinking about the word and guessing the meaning before you 'look it up' (which means to find something) will help you remember it much more.
5. Speaking practice – listen to the article again, try to read the words silently, moving your mouth like you are speaking.  This helps to exercise your mouth to make English-speaking sounds.  This sounds stupid but it’s really very useful, believe me. :-)

You can ‘like’ Spotlight Radio on Facebook.  Just click here.

ESLPod

ESLPod is another great archive of podcasts.  These are from the USA.   The podcasts are usually about 15-20 minutes long.  Each podcast has a short dialogue (conversation) between people and then analyses it carefully.  It works by first listening to a slow version of the conversation, and then most of the podcast is an explanation of various difficult words or common phrases and metaphors inside the conversation.  At the end of the podcast, the conversation is played again but at a regular speed.

Like Spotlight Radio, there is a wide variety of topics such as Competitions and Prizes or Wild Parties.  If you want to search by topic then you can search through all the podcasts in the left column of the website.  There is a Learning Guide for each podcast but you need to subscribe to download them and that costs $10 a month.

Suggestion for Self-Study

1. Choose a podcast, for example ‘Being Late for an Event’.
2. Read the transcript.  The new words and phrases are already in bold. Try to guess what they mean before you listen to the podcast.
3. Listen carefully and check if your guesses were correct when the words and phrases are explained.

For Intermediate/Upper Intermediate students:

Listen a Minute

Listen a Minute is a great site of short listenings – only about 60 seconds long.   The speech is clear but not as slow as Spotlight Radio or most of ESLPod.  Again, there is a wide variety of topics such as advice, clothes, credit cards and parenting.  What I really like about this website is that there are lots of interactive quizzes and if you want to print the transcript you will have a listening gap-fill, a word jumble, a spell checking exercise and even a writing assignment!

Suggestion for Self-Study

1. Choose a listening, for example ‘Gun Control’.
2. Print the transcript with exercises.
3. Listen to the mp3 (on the website or download it) and try to complete the gap fill.
4. Listen again to check for the answers.  You can obviously just look at the complete transcript but you will get more listening practice if you check the answers by listening again – remember the saying in English, “practice makes perfect” which means you get better and better with more practice.
5. Move on to the ‘Correct the Spelling’ exercise but hide the gap fill.  You can check your answers when you finish by looking at your completed gap fill.
6. Try the ‘Unjumble the Words’ exercise.  You can check the answers by looking at the transcript or, even better, listen to the mp3 again... practice makes perfect! :-)
7. If you are working by yourself, move down to the bottom and challenge yourself to do the writing exercise.  You can then ask a teacher or another English student to read it after you finish.

Listen to English

This is a wonderful website if you are interested in British culture.  I am from Britain and I learn things from these podcasts.  I really like these podcasts which are about 7 minutes long.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found a convenient list of podcasts but you can improve your skim reading by looking through each of them to find one you would be interested in listening to.

Suggestion for Self-Study

1. Choose a podcast, for example ‘Old money, new money’.
2. Listen to the podcast while reading the transcript.  Some words and phrases are highlighted and you can click on the link to see definitions.
3. When you have finished listening you can read the comments that other listeners have posted and maybe leave your own comment about what you think about the topic.

You can ‘like’ Listen to English on Facebook.  Just click here.

Feel free to make more suggestions about websites you like to use to improve your listening.

Gordon

BTW, you can also ‘like’ Videojug and Lyrics Training on Facebook by following the links.

EXTRA - Warming Up (a tip for IELTS and other exams)

My father helping me to get ready for the
Brighton Marathon last year (2010).

I was reading another blog recently and it talked about ‘warming up’. As a runner, I certainly understand the need for warming up – you need to get your body ready for the physical activity of running. When I was doing martial arts as a teenager, we probably spent the first 10 minutes of every hour session warming up. It’s very important.

It’s also very important for mental preparation as well. You need to warm up for your big language event: the IELTS exam, or FCE, or CAE or whatever. One of the suggestions that Aaron Myers gave was to use his travel to an interview to listen to a Turkish audio lesson. For the day of your big event, you don’t want to focus on anything new so choose a piece of listening that you are familiar with (a podcast you have listened to a few times already, for example).

This warming up is necessary to ‘switch on’ your English and get your mind ready for the task.

If you have an English exam soon, good luck!

75 Times

Yes.  In this case 75 is the magic number.  It is believed that a learner needs to hear a word about 75 times before they have acquired it.  If you don’t believe me, look here (http://langwitches.org/blog/2011/03/30/listening-comprehension-podcasting/).

First, let’s look at learned vs acquired.  There is a BIG difference.

Learned - How many times have you learned about the rules of the present perfect?  How many rules have you written in your notebooks?  How many times have you got it wrong when speaking?  How many times have you needed to stop and think if you should use present perfect or past simple?

Probably you have had LOTS of lessons about present perfect vs past simple.  You’ve learned it and you know the rules but you still need to think about it and sometimes you know you get it wrong.  That’s because you haven’t acquired it.

Acquired – Ok, now if I say to you, “Hey, how’re you doing?” then you will probably say something like “I’m fine thanks.”  Now, were you thinking about the grammar? 

Were you thinking, “Is it ‘I fine’ or ‘I am fine’?”   Probably not.  You don’t need to think about that because you have acquired it.  You have heard it so many times, from so many different people.  You don’t think about it, you just do it, you just know it, you just have it.

That’s the difference between learning and acquiring.  I never really learned English, I simply acquired it.  We don’t learn our native languages, we acquire them.  Yes, of course, we learn about our languages at school but we already know them because we have already acquired them.

So how long does it take to acquire new words and phrases in English?  75 times, more or less.  You need to hear the word, the phrase, the context approximately 75 times before it is comfortably part of your English.

But remember this is not only passive hearing.  It is active listening.  You can help yourself and speed up this process by actively listening.  I know lots of students who don’t have very advanced English, but they know every single exact word to their favourite English-speaking songs.  How many times do you think they listened to those songs?

It is important to learn the rules of a language we want to use well.  It helps our understanding.  However, you also need to make an effort, use the language you’re not sure about a lot, make sure you are corrected a lot and make sure you do lots of active listening for what you want to understand better.  Past tense verbs, phrasal verbs or conditionals, for example.

So, that English podcast you listened to, that TV show you watched, that IELTS listening practice you have… have you listened to them enough times?  Almost certainly not.  Just listen to it one more time, go on!

What do you think and what is your experience of learning and acquisition?  As always, I look forward to your opinions.

Gordon

Is English Difficult to Learn?

This post is inspired by a similar post on Warren Ediger’s Successful English blog.

Personally, I always thought English is an easy language for giving information but a difficult language for getting information.  As I continue with my Spanish studies, I think this is probably true of most languages.

For example, a low level learner’s vocabulary in English can be good enough to explain a problem they are having.

“I have very bad stomach-ache.”

But understanding the huge variety of possible replies needs a wider vocabulary (we say “wider” for vocabulary, not “bigger”).

“You should go to the doctor.” 

“You might want to see a doctor then.” 

“You’d best go and see a doctor.” 

“I’d go to the health centre, if I were you.” 

“You’d better make an appointment with the GP then.” 

“Do you reckon you need to see a doctor?” 

“There’s a clinic on the next street if you want to drop in.” 

“It sounds like you could do with an appointment to see the doctor.” 

“It’s probably a good idea to see your GP then.”

Think about all of these different phrases and parts of language you might need to understand the reply. There are modals verbs like ‘should’, ‘would’, ‘could’ and ‘might’.  Phrases like “You had better + verb” or “You had best + verb” which we use for suggestions.  Direct questions using phrases like “Do you reckon…” or indirect questions “…if you want to see him.”   The change in title from ‘doctor’ to ‘GP’ or not talking about the ‘doctor’ but about the ‘clinic’ or the ‘health centre’.  The variety of verbs you could use; ‘see a doctor’, ‘make an appointment’ and ‘drop in at the clinic’.

As you can see, there’s a lot of English that you might get from this one simple sentence, “I have very bad stomach-ache.”  For me, this also shows that vocabulary needs to be learned in phrases around topics instead of learning the grammar first.  What I mean is that there are some complicated conditionals in there "I'd go to the health centre, if I were you."  Do you think you should wait until you are Intermediate/Upper-Intermediate before you can understand that and reply to it?  You need a doctor!

But I don’t think this problem is limited to English because I know I have the same problem not understanding replies to what I say in Spanish.

One of my problems in Spanish is anxiety.   My worst skill is conversational listening.  This is very different from passive listening.  I can sit in a café or pub and listen to a group of people speak in Spanish and I will follow the gist of the conversation (gist = the general idea, the main points).  But listening in a one-to-one conversation is more difficult because you have less time to think about the language you are hearing and you need to think about what you want to say as well.

The problem is that worrying and anxiety do not help learning.  So how do we stay calm?  Well, it is good to work together with other people who also want to learn English or other people who want to help you improve your English.

So, is English a difficult language to learn?  Well yes, and no.

The main points I haven’t mentioned here are motivation and opportunity.  Are you motivated to improve your English?  What is your motivation?  Do you have the opportunity to use your English?  These are also important questions to ask if you want an answer to the question, “Is English hard to learn?”

What do you think?  As always I look forward to your opinions.

Gordon

P.S.  And for a more humorous opinion about why English is so difficult, click here. 

Comments and Suggestions please...

Do none of you have ANY favourite websites to help you with your listening?  Do none of you focus on improving your listening skills?

I don't believe it.

Like I said, don't be shy - contribute. :-)

Favourite Websites for English Practice, pt 1 (Listening)

So this week, I think we should start sharing more.  Sharing is good!  I have started with ‘listening’ because it is probably the easiest to give examples for – there are LOTS of podcasts and youtube videos to listen to and watch.

Nowadays there is almost TOO much and it is difficult to know where to go for GOOD listening material.  Of course, what is good depends on you, the learner.  What are your favourite subjects?  This is important because if you are interested in what you are listening to, then you will be more engaged and less bored.

I didn't have so much energy at the end!

One site which I know some of you use is BBC Learning – 6 Minute English.  I like this because it is short (only six minutes, obviously) and the topics change every week.  A friend sent me the link for one about marathon running last April just before I did the Brighton Marathon.  Then two weeks later the topic was punk music.  You see, there is a lot of variety.  There are also a lot of supporting activities if you have more time.

In general, I think that the BBC has a lot of really good material to improve you English with their Learning English site.  Some of it is more useful that other parts.  Explore it, see what you find and don’t forget to tell us on the blog what you find. J

Another BBC website which is very useful (especially if you are living/staying in Britain) is “RAW – Skills for Everyday Life”.  These are videos which clearly show and explain normal, common things like credit cards or shopping online.  You can watch them with or without subtitles and they explain things basically.  The good thing about this is that the language is authentic and it the topics are useful.
UPDATE (25/06/11):  Unfortunately it looks like this website has been terminated by the BBC.  What a pity!

For something a bit different and useful for ‘instruction English’ you might want to look at www.videojug.com.  This has everything and it is growing!  EVERYBODY should be on this site!  (I hope that with this site, I might actually learn how to cook!)  Some of these videos are serious and some of them are funny but they are all about 4 minutes long.  Be careful, a few of these videos are NSFW (Not Suitable For Work) which means that they have some ‘adult’ content that children shouldn’t see and some adults might find offensive.)  But, you can also learn magic tricks while improving your English!

I have a few more suggestions but I want to know what websites you use to improve your listening.  Just listening at the moment (remember, this is only part 1). ;-)

Thanks for all of your support.  Let’s keep this going and growing.  As always, I look forward to your opinions. J

Gordon