#180 Listening In The Background

Welcome to the Speak English Now Podcast, your resource for practicing your English speaking and listening. You will also learn about lifestyle and culture, language, vocabulary, and how to learn English more effectively. Transcript: Hi, everybody! I am Georgiana, your English teacher and founder of . My mission is to help you speak English fluently.  In this episode: I’ll be talking about passive listening, or in other words, listening in the background.  Later on, we’ll practice conversation skills with the powerful Question & Answer technique. Ok, let’s get started! In the language industry, there’s an approach called passive listening. This means playing some English in the background while performing other tasks. In theory, you’re learning because the brain is always learning, no matter how. Interesting, huh? You just need to play some English while you’re cleaning, jogging, surfing the Internet, etc. Well, although this approach may be appealing to many of you, here’s the bad news: It doesn’t work as a whole system for developing a complete fluency in English. The main drawback is that when we need to learn new content, our brain needs to pay attention, to be active. So, in an ideal world, we would be 100% focused all the time while listening: We’d pay attention to every tiny detail: vocabulary, pronunciation, intonation, etc. However, as you may already know, idyllic things are sometimes hard to achieve. If you need perfect conditions every time you listen: for example, feeling rested, motivated, in a quiet place, then you will never start listening. What you need is a compromise. It’s ok to lose concentration from time to time.  Here’s my suggestion: For new content, try to maintain your concentration as much as possible. However, when you’re repeating the same content, you don’t need to focus 100% of your attention anymore because, in this case, you’re just remembering and consolidating. Another aspect to keep in mind: in this case, q