Episode 1, let's begin. Welcome to the first episode of the Learn English podcast. My name is Melissa, but my students usually call me Dr. C, and I am so excited to have you with me here for the premiere episode. I have been working for a long time to launch this podcast, and it is thrilling to finally have our debut.
Since it's our first time meeting, I want to spend this episode introducing myself, discussing what my philosophy for learning English is, and discussing what my goals are for this podcast. So a little bit about myself. I'm from the United States. I was born and raised in Southern California, where I currently live, and I have been teaching English as a second language for a little over two years. What made me want to start teaching English?
Well, that goes back to my own language learning journey. So I have wanted to learn Spanish for almost my entire life. I have tried and failed a number of times. When I was in high school, I took Spanish as a foreign language, like most students in the United States. I took Spanish for two years, and even though I got good grades, my teachers gave me A's and I did good on our exams, after two years, I could not even introduce myself. Literally saying, my name is, would give me anxiety.
The most complicated question I could ask was, what is the date today? Not really something that comes up in everyday conversation, does it? So when I would try to talk with people in Spanish after taking my two years of classes, I would stumble and I would get so nervous and I struggled so much that the people I was talking with would switch back into English because they could see how much I was struggling.
I don't know about you, but for me, that was really embarrassing and it kind of broke any confidence I had with speaking in Spanish. For me, there was really nothing more soul-crushing as someone switching back into English because they could tell I was just failing miserably. For the next couple years, I would go back and try to learn Spanish. I would download apps on my phone, I would play games, but I never really seemed to improve that much.
At the beginning of the pandemic, when we all were in lockdown, I finally found myself with a bunch of free time and I promised myself, now, now was my chance. I was going to finally learn Spanish and be able to have a basic conversation with someone. I didn't want to fail again because honestly, I kind of already felt like a failure. I had tried for years to learn this language and never really had much success. So I decided to research. I Googled it. How do you learn a language?
What are the best methods to learn a language? How can you learn a language fast? What I came across was a lot of different strategies and a lot of different philosophies. The two that I really liked the best were Stephen Krashen and Steve Kaufman. I'll put links in the description for this podcast so you can check them out, but I'm going to talk a little bit about how they approach learning the language. Steve Kaufman is a polyglot. He knows, I think, 18 languages, maybe even more.
He has a YouTube channel where he discusses learning a language and he also runs the LingQ website, which is one of my favorite apps that I use when I'm trying to learn a language. His philosophy is that you need input. You need to be able to read and listen in a language. The more you do that, the more input you have, the better you're going to be at speaking and understanding that language, which makes sense. He also says that the input that you get should be engaging.
It should be things that you enjoy, that you like, things that you actually want to read and listen to. The more that you want to read and listen to them, the more likely you are to do it. And then the more you're going to improve in that language. On his YouTube page, Steve Kaufman also did interviews with Stephen Krashen. Stephen Krashen is a linguist. He's a researcher and he researches how people acquire languages.
His research has shown that people acquire languages by reading and listening, having engaging input and being exposed to the language as much as possible. This makes sense because this is how we acquire languages as children. When we're babies, we aren't speaking, but we're listening to the conversations around us, and eventually we are able to speak in that language. Hearing their conversation, seeing their methodology, I decided to try it and see what I could do with Spanish.
I started listening and reading as much as possible. I did it every day. And after three months, I could confidently say that I learned more than I did in two years of a traditional class. I realized that I never read or listened to anything in Spanish when I was in school. Our teachers would say words and we would repeat after them. We would write out conjugations for verbs. We would look at grammar tables, but I never actually watched anything in Spanish.
I never actually listened to anything that was designed for someone who was learning Spanish and that just wasn't the methodology that was used in high schools. Honestly, I don't even know if high schools teach languages that way. I highly doubt it, but it's one of the most effective ways to learn a language.
While I was going through my language journey, I realized that even though I was enjoying learning a language, what I really was getting the most joy from was helping people improve their English abilities. I liked helping people improve their English skills, so I decided to become a certified English teacher teaching English as a foreign language.
I have been helping my students for the past couple years, and I can honestly say that one of the most common questions I get asked is, how do I improve my English? When a student asks me this, what I almost immediately respond is, how much time are you spending reading and listening to English? How much time are you spending being exposed to the language? Input is one of the most effective ways you can improve your English abilities.
So I ask my students how much time, how much input are they getting? And I've heard from a lot of students that they have difficulty finding the right content to use for input. When you're a beginner in a language, especially with a popular language that's spoken all over the world like English, Spanish, French, there are so many resources out there for beginners. If you're brand new to the language, you can start learning right away because there's resources everywhere for you.
And if you are at an advanced level, there is a ton of content in English. You have the whole entire entertainment industry of the United States at your disposal. But when you're in that middle area, when you're at that intermediate area, that's where you have a lot of difficulty finding comprehensible input. When you are using beginner material, eventually you kind of grow out of them.
They become too easy and you're not really learning anything and you're not pushing yourself as hard as you need to to improve your skills. If you try to use native content though too early, you can get frustrated because it can be really hard to understand. A lot of my students tell me that listening to native content, watching movies or television shows in English is difficult because Americans speak really fast. They use a lot of slang.
They have a lot of cultural references that people who are learning as a second or third language just don't understand. That's what got me thinking about launching this podcast. I'm a native speaker. I'm speaking relatively quickly. And I want to make this podcast a resource to help people who are stuck in that intermediate bubble. My main focus will not be on grammar. Of course, I will talk about it occasionally as needed.
But my main goal is that this becomes comprehensible input for those of you who are at the intermediate, upper intermediate or lower advanced stage. This way you can push through that intermediate plateau and get to the point where you can understand native level content. I also want to keep these episodes to around 8 to 20 minutes. That way you can incorporate them into your language learning routine.
That way it won't take up too much of your time, but it also will allow you to go back and re-listen to the episode if you need to. If you're at the intermediate level, you might not fully understand everything I say the first time when you're listening to it. And that's okay. You can go back and re-listen and absorb more and more of the episode every time you listen to it.
Once you're at the upper intermediate or lower advanced level, then you might be able to understand everything I'm saying the first time around. And that's great. Well, that is a little bit about myself, my philosophy and my goals for the podcast. I hope you enjoyed this first episode. It was really exciting to record it and launch this podcast. If you enjoyed it, please like and subscribe so you don't miss our second episode when it comes out next week. Until then, keep on learning English.