5 ways to listen better In our louder and louder world, says sound expert Julian Treasure, “We are losing our listening.”
In this short, fascinating talk, Julian Treasure shares five ways to re-tune your ears for conscious listening — to other people and the world around you 5 ways to listen better.
There are some great tips here for language learners.
Listening is probably the most difficult task for almost all learners of English as a foreign language. The most important thing is to listen, and that means as often as possible – regularity really is the key.
Once you have begun to listen on a regular basis, you might still be frustrated by your limited understanding.
Here are a few action steps you can take:
Accept the fact that you are not going to understand everything.
Stay relaxed when you do not understand — even if you continue to have trouble understanding for a while.
Do not translate into your native language.
Listen for the gist (or general idea) of the conversation.
Don’t concentrate on detail until you have understood the global ideas.
First, translating creates a barrier between the listener and the speaker. Second, most people repeat themselves constantly.
By remaining calm, you can usually understand what the speaker had said.
However, understanding is the final goal and there is a long road to get there, fist you need to be able to hear the sounds that make up a language.
Spelling place names in English can be difficult, especially if the sounds of the letters are similar to the letters of the alphabet in your own language as this can lead to confusion.
Spelling place names in English is not difficult, but it takes a lot of practice for you to become proficient, especially if you are trying to understand spelling over the phone, for example.
Most people read words more accurately than they spell them. The younger the learners are, the truer this is.
Spelling, however, is a very different matter.
Once learners have learnt more than one way of spelling particular sounds, choosing the right letter or letters depends on their either having made a conscious effort to learn the words or having absorbed them less consciously through their reading.
The problem is generally that learners have not had enough time to learn or absorb the accurate spelling of all the words that they may want to write.
This illustrates the need to fully use the fours skills in language learning ; Listening, Speaking, Reading and writing – it is a little like making a cocktail, too much of one ingredient and not enough of another and the cocktail can taste either delicious or horrible.
In language learning, learners need to use all four skills in a balanced way – reading and writing will ultimately help spelling, but practice is needed to become fully familiar with the sounds of words and letters in order to become skillful in spelling words, which will improve with practice.
The Proust Questionnaire is a questionnaire about one’s personality. Its name and modern popularity as a form of interview is owed to the responses given by the French writer Marcel Proust.
At the end of the nineteenth century, when Proust was still in his teens, he answered a questionnaire in an English-language confession album belonging to his friend Antoinette, daughter of future French President Félix Faure, titled “An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, etc.” At that time, it was popular among English families to answer such a list of questions that revealed the tastes and aspirations of the taker.
Proust answered always with enthusiasm. The original manuscript of his answers of 1890, at the time of his volunteer internship or some little time afterwards, titled “by Marcel Proust himself,” was found in 1924. It was auctioned on May 27, 2003 for the sum of €102,000.
The French television host Bernard Pivot, seeing an opportunity for a writer to reveal at the same time aspects of his work and his personality, traditionally subjected his guests to the Proust questionnaire at the end of the French broadcast Apostrophes.
Inspired by Bernard Pivot, James Lipton, the host of the TV program Inside the Actors Studio, gives an adapted version of the Proust Questionnaire to his guests. Lipton has often incorrectly characterized the questionnaire itself as an invention of Pivot.
A similar questionnaire is regularly seen on the back page of Vanity Fair magazine, answered by various celebrities. In October 2009, Vanity Fair launched an interactive version of the questionnaire, that compares individual answers to those of various luminaries.
Another version of the questionnaire, as answered by various Canadian authors, is a regular feature on the radio program The Next Chapter.
For the benefits of this quick-fire question podcast, we have simplified it even further and we make no claims that it reveals the true personality of the person – especially as the questions are asked in English to a non-native person.
In this podcast we talk about surnames in The UK, especially including some famous names and where they originate from – so we are looking at what is in a name.
Everyone has one, no matter where you are from (with a few notable exceptions) and they are what make us, ‘us’.
Your surname, or family name, links you to thousands of people around the world, and the development of surnames, and their unique qualities are something that has interested people from all over the world for many years.
Your surname is your last name, your family name, and gives you a sense of belonging to that group of people with the same name as you.
Surnames originated in places where highly concentrated populations meant that first names were not sufficient enough to differentiate between people, some were from physical appearances, some from family, some from geographical features and some were from trades and jobs.
The variation in the meaning behind a surname is wide and far reaching.
In some areas around the world, the surname is written first, but the aim of the surname is still for the same common goal, to differentiate people from other groups.
Some surnames originated in far off lands and were changed slightly to fit into the country where people emigrated to and some are composite names, made from both the mother’s and fathers family to make what we call a double-barrelled name.
During the reign of King Richard 1, known as “The Lionheart”, 1189 – 1199 surnames became necessary when governments introduced taxation. In England this was known as Poll Tax. Throughout the centuries, surnames in every country have continued to “develop” often leading to some unusual variants of the original spelling.
Let us know your surname and if you know the origins, then please share it with our listeners in the comments below.
You may be one of the 2.14 billion monthly users of Facebook, but how well do you know Facebook?
Facebook is undeniably the largest social networking site in the world, it should come as no surprise then, that there are many wild and interesting Facebook facts and statistics.
There are some truly mind-blowing Facebook statistics and facts as Facebook continues to ensure its dominance and power throughout much of the world. Some we have included in this quiz.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, along with his fellow students—and roommates—Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.
How well do you know Facebook?
How much do you know about Facebook?
Odds are that you are one of the many users of Facebook, but how much do you
know about your go-to
social media platform?
Some of the facts about Facebook are pretty
amazing - let's see how much you know - NO Googling 😉
