Speaker 1: If you're a language learner, chances are that you want to improve your listening. Even advanced learners often don't feel like their listening is as good as they'd like it to be. One of the reasons for that is that listening is just hard. It's a specific skill that takes hours and hours of practice to get comfortable with. But another common issue is not being able to find enough readily available and easy to consume content that you're interested in. But it just so happens that we're in the age of podcasts, and so I want to share the number one tool with you that I've found for immersing in and enjoying podcasts. Most people use the default podcast app on their phone, or Spotify, or maybe listen to them on YouTube. But there's a better way. Podcast is a wonderfully simple app that really allows you to spice up your podcast listening experience, or even some of your own audio files if you have some. It might look like just any other podcast app, but all the little features and customizations truly set it apart. Today I'm going to walk you through the features that made me really love this app. Let's jump into the app. So the first thing that you can do is subscribe to podcasts. This is a pretty common feature, but what it does is it allows it to show up into your podcast feed of all the podcasts that you're subscribed to. And you can configure a ton of settings per podcast. So if I click on the podcast and I go to the little gear icon, the settings, you get a ton of different options. My favorite one is setting the playback effects that are custom for this podcast. This is great for language learning because you might have different podcasts that you want to listen at different speeds, but don't want to constantly change it in the listening panel. So for example, I could set this one at 1.0 or I could set it to 0.8 or whatever it might be. Another great feature is the trim silence and boost volume options. Trim silence just cuts out any little bits of audio that are silent. I've listened to almost 280 hours on this app and it saved me almost an hour of my life. It's not huge, but it is something. And volume boost is great as somebody who's hard of hearing. All it does is boost the volume of voices a little bit more so that it's a little bit easier to hear. Another great per podcast option is the skip first and skip last options or the auto skip features. If a podcast always opens with the same advertisement or music intro, you can just skip it. It's pretty easy to do. You set the first 10 seconds or whatever it might be. I like this because it just makes me feel like a power user, but it doesn't really change the quality of life. Another few things you can see up here are the notifications and auto download options. If you turn on auto downloads, it'll just download every new episode automatically when it comes out. But you might not want that. Instead, you might want to be prompted to download it with the notification. So you turn on notifications. You can also just straight up add the podcast to your queue. It can go to the play last, it can, there's a bunch of different settings you can play with, but I mostly just stick with auto download for the ones I want to auto download and notifications for the one that I want to be notified about. Pretty simple. Now what about finding new podcasts? Because it's not easy. One option is just to ask other learners of the language, but pocket casts also has a discover tab down here at the bottom. The front page is often very English oriented, right? As you can see, but if you scroll down to the very bottom here, you can find a content region and so you change that to a country that speaks your target language or whatever it might be. So Mexico for now doesn't really change the top here, but if I scroll down again, there's a little section that says popular in Mexico or popular wherever you are. And this is a great way to find podcasts that people listen to from that country. This is fantastic for intermediate or advanced learners who are looking to learn a bit more about culture and the slang that's used in a country there. But finding good beginner podcasts is a little bit more difficult because they're not going to show up in the popular in a country option. So one of the recommendations is just to search for on Google best podcasts for X language learners or best check podcasts for learning or whatever it might be. Or if you're learning a pretty large language, you can always search in name of the language pod 101. It's a pretty common series of beginner or learner podcasts. So I could try Swedish pod 101 and we find the Swedish pod, right? So this is a great option for Swedish learners, obviously they have a ton of different languages. You can go on their website and see all of the ones they have. Another common option is the coffee break languages series. So if I put in coffee break Spanish, it finds me another very good learner podcast full of a ton of episodes and lessons and things like that, that you can listen to, to improve your listening and your general ability in the language. Now let's use this podcast as an example of what you can do when you find a new podcast that you want to listen to. So first I'm going to subscribe. So it shows up in my podcasts tab over here. And then there's a couple of features that I like to use when I find a new one. If it's a podcast I'm listening to for fun, I generally would just add the most recent couple episodes, but, and you can actually see that it's already done here. I like to sort episodes from oldest to newest rather than newest to oldest, which is what you'll usually see. Right? So we, this one, see this one's from December of 2022, but if I go to sort episodes by oldest newest, I'll see the ones from all the way back in 2008. And so I immediately have a humongous, humongous list of stuff that I can listen to, to improve my Spanish. Another thing that you can do is, oops, you can download all, you can group episodes, whatever it might be, or you can select a bunch of them to add them to your queue. So on this device, you just hold down on it and it brings up the selection icon. So I can go boom, boom, boom, boom, all these first 10, and I can either add them to my queue. I can download them all. I can archive them all, whatever it might be. So here I'll just add them all to my queue, all to my up next. And I used to see that they pop up down here in the player. And so this is what the player looks like. By the way, you have your time control settings here. You can turn on a sleep timer if you want it to go to stop playing after 5, 15, 30 minutes or whatever it might be. You can favorite an episode. You can share an episode. There's so much that you can do here. And also if you ever want to see the notes, you can swipe over and you can see if there's notes or a transcript that they have in the description of the podcast. And this is your up next queue over here that you can see everything that's going on. And it's fantastic. So those are all the main features that I wanted to show. But before I end the video, I quickly also want to show that there is a wonderful stats section. And I'm actually going to throw up my real account, all the stats that I have there. And you can see the various things that I've saved on time, on auto skipping, whatever it might be. You can also see your listening history, not your learning history. And you can see what episodes that you've listened to in the past. So if you ever forget the name of one or whatever it is, you can always go check. And lastly, you can also upload your own files. I don't act, I don't personally use this, but it can be great if you have audio files that you want to listen to on a nice listener, right? Some people download audio and they don't quite know what to listen to it on, but this is a great option for a lot of people. Okay. I'm going to end this video here, even though there's more that I could talk about, I want to keep this relatively short and hopefully inspire you to get out there and listen to some podcasts. Thank you so much for watching and happy immersing.