I started using a textbook called CNN News Listening. The book is good, and the apps I built help me keep going, so a good cycle is starting to form.
CNN News Listening
I had several things going that I hadn’t kept up with, so I wasn’t sure starting another one was a good idea. I bought it anyway.
It turned out better than I expected. Buying it was the right call.
- 20 news stories of 30 seconds each → not too long, not too many
- One volume every six months → that looks good for keeping it up as a habit
- The PDF version and the audio can be downloaded → generous!
- 1,100 yen → cheap!
- About 110 words and phrases went into my flashcards → that feels right for my level too
The apps I built are getting real use
It feels good that what I made is actually useful, and it seems to help the habit.
- Offline PDF Viewer
- The content is laid out in two-page spreads, and moving between spreads has no friction, so it proved to fit what I made it for. Comfortable.
- In Preview on the Mac, I can’t choose whether a spread starts on an even or an odd page, which was inconvenient.
- Adobe Reader pushes me toward the paid version, needs to be online, and has so many features that the menus got in my way.
- SmartList Flashcards
- Writing word notes in markdown and importing them is easy for me to keep doing.
- When I practice in typing mode, my fingers stumble on words I’m not used to. A good discovery, and that looks useful for practice too.
What I notice about building the habit
I do a little at a time, and my understanding moves forward in a spiral. Looking back, I feel like I’m going about this in a fairly proper way.
- Just listen: on my commute and while walking
- I can catch the words but can’t follow the meaning
- I can’t catch the words at all
- Read the English and the translation in the PDF, and mark the words I don’t know
- Reading does make it clear
- I’m listening on my commute and my walks at the same time, so it starts to come together
- Move the marked words into a text file to import into my flashcards
- While I do that, I ask an AI things like “why does this word mean that?” and add what I learn
- It goes into the notes field of the card
- For example, these were discoveries:
find ... guiltyis not “to find” something, but to judge someone to be so- Where a Japanese speaker would just say blonde, what is “milk tea”? → milk tea is one of the shades under blonde
- Keep listening
- Around here it gets corrected: “ah, that is what they’re saying”, or “so that’s what I was hearing”
- It’s only “I can hear it because I know it”, but a sense of getting somewhere shows up
The book goes on to shadowing and to translating in chunks, but that’s a bit above my level, so I’ll leave it.
A small change I noticed
Something happened that I hadn’t experienced before. I think it will stop being noticeable once I get used to it, so I’ll record it as the change I feel now.
CNN News Listening also comes with slow audio, and audio with pauses at the chunk boundaries, so it’s easy to give myself room until my understanding catches up.
That’s where I felt the change. When I saw a phrase like “bring in”, I used to guess at the meaning before reading on: “bring in is this, bring about is that…”. But the audio keeps moving, and I noticed that I had started waiting for the next word instead: “bring in → to bring something in → what? how much?” Only a few examples so far, but it feels like a good change.
I think this is the same thing as Tonikaku Akarui Yasumura’s “Yes, I’m wearing” → “Pants!” The joke only works if you wait for the last word. So I feel like I got a small taste of how people who grew up with English hear it.