How to practice listening with YouTube (without leaning on subtitles)

Turn the subtitles on and you follow every line. Turn them off and the same scene goes by as noise.

For years I put that down to skill. I studied English through grad school and still work in it, so missing half the jokes in a sitcom stung. What finally changed things wasn’t more hours of YouTube. It was noticing that the moment subtitles came on, I stopped listening and started reading.

This is the routine I landed on, and I still run it most days.

Pick talk shows over movies

I started with films I liked. Two hours later I had very little to show for it. Films have long stretches with hardly any dialogue, and the picture fills in whatever your ears miss, so it’s easy to think you understood.

What I wanted was a lot of fast, casual speech in a short clip I’d actually enjoy. That left late-night talk shows. The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, for one, puts a lot of its segments on YouTube, with captions from the show itself.

Check the captions before you commit to a video. YouTube’s auto-generated captions slip on mumbled or fast speech, and if you learn from a wrong caption, you learn it wrong. The practice videos page only lists videos with human-written captions, if you’d rather skip the vetting.

Loop the 30 seconds you missed

Rewatching a whole video is mostly wasted time. What you didn’t catch is usually one stretch of it.

Listen with captions off first. When a line doesn’t land, set an A/B loop around just that stretch and play it five or six times. If it still won’t come through, turn captions on, check, turn them off, and listen again. Once you’ve seen the answer, your ears stop trying.

If it’s too fast, go down to 0.5×. Most players make voices sag into a slow drawl when you do that. Dollim keeps the pitch, so it’s the same voice, just slower, and the places where words run together stop being a blur.

Write down what you hear

“I can’t hear it” gives you nothing to fix. You need to know where.

Loop a stretch and write down exactly what you hear, and the same culprits keep turning up. Mine were prepositions and contracted auxiliaries: of vanishing, would have collapsing into a single sound. Once I knew that, I knew where to aim, and it went much faster.

When a phrase is new to me, I tap the caption for the meaning and save it to my word list. I used to juggle three apps for this, a player, a translator and a notes app, and the switching broke up every session.

Say it back

A sentence you’ve finally caught sticks once it’s been through your mouth too. Dollim records your shadowing so you can play it right next to the original.

There’s no pronunciation score, on purpose. I’ve never looked at a number and known what to change. Play the two back to back and you can hear where yours runs short or goes flat.

Three sentences a day is enough

Trying to finish a whole video every day doesn’t last. I count a day as done once three sentences are fully clear without captions.

Get Dollim, open anything from the practice videos, and start by looping the part you missed. The list has Japanese, Korean, Italian and Spanish videos too.

I still do this every day. If something gets in your way, tell me at support@hyunsanglabs.com.