Episode 72: How to Understand Podcasts and Audiobooks Without a Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to English, please, the podcast where we explore interesting topics in under ten minutes in clear, intermediate English. I’m your host, Christopher. I live in New York City, and I’ve always been passionate about languages and how we learn them. Whether you’re listening on your way to work, or while cooking dinner at home, this show is designed to help you with your English listening and comprehension skills.

Before we begin, I want to mention something free. If you go to comullen.com/free, you can sign up and get two guides sent straight to your inbox. One has 25 idioms native English speakers use every day, and the other has 60 common English phrases. Both are [00:01:00] written specifically for intermediate learners, and they’re absolutely free.

In this episode, we’re talking about something a lot of you have probably experienced: understanding podcasts and audiobooks without a transcript in front of you. With a movie, even with the sound turned off, you still have a face, body language, and action on the screen to help you guess what’s happening. With a podcast or an audiobook, you don’t have any of that. It’s just your ears. That makes it one of the hardest, and most useful kinds, of listening practice there is.

Here’s something worth saying clearly: podcasts are not all the same type of listening. Some podcasts have one person talking the whole time, planned out in advance, which is a lot like this show. Other [00:02:00] podcasts have two or more people having a real conversation with interruptions, side comments, and sentences that stop before they’re finished. If you’ve ever found the second kind exhausting to follow, that doesn’t mean your English isn’t good enough. It means you chose the harder version. Focusing on single speaker shows is a smart choice, and it’s absolutely nothing to feel bad about.

Let’s start with tips for the more difficult kind, podcasts with more than one speaker having a real conversation. The first thing to notice is that people repeat themselves more than you would think. When someone is explaining an idea out loud, they’ll often say it once, and then say it again in slightly different words. Sometimes they’ll even say it a third time, too! This isn’t [00:03:00] because they think you’re confused. It’s just how people naturally speak when they’re thinking as they talk. So if you miss the first version of an idea, stay calm. There’s a good chance you’ll hear it again, a few seconds later, said in a different way.

The second thing is about certain small words that show up constantly in conversation. Words like “so,” “anyway,” and “look.” These can feel like clutter at first, like they’re not really saying anything. But they’re actually doing something very useful. They usually mean a new idea or a change of topic is about to happen. Once you begin to notice these words, they work almost like signals telling you when to expect a shift, and that can make a whole conversation easier to follow, not harder.

Now [00:04:00] let’s talk about the other kind of listening: single speaker podcasts and audiobooks.

Here, the sentences tend to be longer and more carefully put together than in a casual conversation. There’s no, “um,” or “you know,” or “anyway” to give you a break halfway through. A useful skill here is to practice how to hold on to the beginning of a sentence in your mind while you’re still waiting to hear how it ends. This takes practice, but it gets easier the more you do it, the same way it did for native speakers when they were first learning to understand complicated sentences.

It also helps to remember that a calm, clear narrator and a fast-moving conversation ask two different things of you. A narrator rewards patience, since the pacing is steady and deliberate. A fast conversation asks more of [00:05:00] you. You have to catch the general idea of what’s being said, without needing to understand every single word along the way.

One last tip, and this applies to everything we’ve talked about today: if you miss a sentence, whether it’s in a podcast or an audiobook, the best thing to do is usually to keep going, instead of pausing or rewinding. It’s tempting, especially now that every app makes rewinding so easy. But pausing constantly to catch every single word actually makes it harder to follow the big picture, not easier. Missing one sentence rarely matters as much as it might feel like it does in the moment.

If you’ve ever felt lost listening to a podcast without a transcript in front of you, that doesn’t mean your English is weak. It means you need practice matching your ear to what you’re hearing, [00:06:00] which is exactly the kind of practice the English, please Accelerator is built around. Each lesson has you listen first, try to understand it on your own, and then check yourself against the transcript afterwards. The same listen first, check second approach we just talked about today. You can find it at comullen.com/listen.

Again, I’m Christopher, and I want to invite you to join me in future episodes of English, please to hear about a variety of topics, all focused on helping you with your English. Subscribe now wherever you listen, and let’s continue this adventure together in clear, understandable English.

Sincere thanks, as always, for listening. See you soon!