How to Learn English on Youtube

Hi, Bob the Canadian here. As you know, YouTube is an amazing tool for learning a language like English. There are, however, a few tips that I can give you that might make that experience even better, so in this video, I'm going to look at YouTube as a language learning tool and I'm gonna give you as many tips and I'm gonna show you as many tricks as possible so that you can make that experience even better.

(light music) Well hey, welcome to this video on how to use YouTube to improve your English. Before we get started though, if you are new here, don't forget to click that red subscribe button below and give me a thumbs up if this video helps you learn just a little bit more English. The first thing that you can can do when you are watching YouTube videos to improve your English, is to adjust the speed.

If we look at a mobile device, if I do this on my phone, the way I would do it is I would click the three dots in the top right corner and after you click those three dots you can choose playback speed. From the playback speed menu, I would choose 0. 75 to slow the video down, and then when I play the video, hard working person, you can hear that it's a little bit slower.

You can also press the three dots and go to playback speed and set the playback speed higher to 1. 25 if you want to challenge yourself and play the video a little faster. As being the salt of the Earth.

They were people who worked hard. I'll pause that. Let's look at the same thing on the computer.

On the computer, if you want to change the speed, you would click down here where you see the gear. Once you click the gear, you would choose playback speed and you can see, you have the same options as what we did on the phone. When I select 75% or 0.

75, you can use them if you want, but when you, it is still very understandable and it is just a good way to slow down an English speaker. If I click on playback speed and choose 1. 25 it will be faster.

The cool thing about the computer though, is you can choose custom as one of your speeds. My favorite speed when listening to a video that's in French that's too fast is 0. 85.

We're at the store, everything. Which slows the video down, but still makes it very easy to understand. So, the first thing that you can do to help you when you are watching English videos on YouTube is to either slow the video down, so you can understand it better, or speed it up to challenge the speed at which you can listen to and understand English.

The second thing you can do so that you can understand YouTube videos better, is to turn on captions or subtitles. Now some people think that you should not turn on English subtitles when you are learning the English language. I, however, have this advice to give, I think you should watch every video once with the subtitles on and then you should watch it a second time with the subtitles off.

So let's look at how to turn subtitles, or captions, on using a mobile device. Again, on the mobile device, you will click the three dots in the top right corner, then you will look for the word captions in the menu that pops up, and when that opens, hopefully it says English. It might say English auto-generated, that means that the subtitles were made by YouTube by a computer, but hopefully it says English.

That means that the person who made the video created word for word English subtitles. All of my Tuesday videos have word for word English subtitles on them. Once that's done and you hit play, you will see that as the video plays it now has subtitles on it.

Let me pause this video for a sec. Let's look at how to do that on the computer. On the computer, you can just click the CC button, which will turn on subtitles, but you can also click the gear and then you can go to subtitles and you can choose the subtitle that you want.

You can see here now that English is on. This is a very handy thing to be able to do. The other thing you can do on a computer is you can actually move the subtitles and put them on a different part of the video.

This can be helpful if the subtitles are behind something. So, the second thing that you can do to increase the amount of English that you learn with each video you watch is to turn on subtitles or captions for the first time that you watch the video and then watch the video again with the subtitles or captions turned off. The third thing I wanna talk about is how to fast-forward or rewind a video quickly when you are watching it on YouTube.

Sometimes when you are learning English by watching a YouTube video, you don't quite understand what the person said and you want to quickly rewind. The way you do that when you are using a mobile device is to simply double tap on the left-hand side of the screen. When you double tap, the video will go 10 seconds backwards.

When you tap on the right side of the screen, when you double tap on the right side of the screen, the video will go forward 10 seconds. So if I'm watching a video and I don't quite understand what the person just said, I can quickly double tap and go back 10 seconds. On the computer, the way you do this is even cooler I think because you can hit play on the video and if you don't understand what the person said, you can just hit the left arrow on the keyboard.

When you hit the left arrow on the keyboard, the video will go back five seconds. I find this to be a lot handier. So again, when you are watching a video, sometimes you will not quite catch, you will not quite understand what the person said, and a very easy way to go back is to double tap the left side of the screen on a phone or to hit the left arrow key on a computer keyboard.

The fourth thing I want to show you how to do is how to quickly pause the video so that you can shadow the person who is speaking in the video. When you shadow someone, it means that you listen to what they say and then you pause and you say what they have just said. So this is a great way to use a YouTube video, not just for listening practice, but also for speaking practice.

So, once again, if you are using a mobile device, all you do is you simply tap the screen. So if I tap the screen it will pause. I had to double tap there because the controls weren't there, so if I was listening to this video, I could hit play and then I could repeat, that was not a very nice thing to do.

So this is a great way to shadow the speaker in the video. On a computer, it's even easier, you just use the space bar. So you can see the video is playing, if I hit space the video is paused.

I can even hit the left arrow key to go back if I need to like we just learned in the last part of this video, and then I can hit the space bar again to start the video. So it seems like a simple thing but the ability to pause the video and to rewind the video are very powerful tools when you are trying to shadow or trying to repeat after what the person in the video has said. The fifth thing I wanna show you only works on a computer, it doesn't work on a phone.

I know most of you watch videos on your phones but this trick I'm going to show you that you can do the computer is extremely powerful. If you look down here below the video on the right-hand side and if you click the three dots, you can click open transcript and on the right-hand side here you will see the entire transcript for this video. What you can then do is you can highlight and copy parts of the transcript and maybe you can put them into Google Translate so that you can see what Google translates it to be in your own language.

Or if you want, you can paste it into your own document, one second here, I did kind of an odd paste there, you can paste it into your own document and then you can read the transcript before you watch the video. The next trick I'm going to show you only works on the computer as well. I'm sorry about that.

I hope they build more features into the phone app at some point, but on the computer, you can share the video and you can share it with a link that goes straight to the part of the video you are currently watching. So let's say I'm watching a video and at the four minute and 55 second mark I have a question, I can click share and then I can copy, sorry, I can click share and then I can click start at 4:55 and then I can copy that and I could then email that link to someone and say, "Hey, I'm watching this video "and I don't quite understand "what the speaker is saying at this part. " The person who gets that email, when they click the link to YouTube, will go straight to that part of the video.

Here are four more general tips for how you can use YouTube to improve your English, and I'm going to talk about reading, writing, listening, and speaking. You might think YouTube is only for improving your listening skills, but you can actually improve all four. For reading, I highly recommend that you do this.

Read the description below the video before you watch the video. Oftentimes when someone makes a video, they will kind of summarize, or they'll give a little description of the video below the video. This can help your mind get ready to watch the video.

Also, for improving your reading, don't forget to read some of the comments, especially if the person who made the video replies to the comments and if they are a native English speaker. In order to improve your writing, why don't you take the time to leave a comment once in awhile on a video? Work hard at writing a three or four sentence comment in English and leave that on the video.

That is just a great way to improve your writing. How will you improve your speaking when you're watching a video? Well, we talked earlier about shadowing, or repeating, what the speaker says, this is just a great idea.

So continue to do that. Watch videos and aim to improve your speaking skills by repeating what the speaker is saying. And, of course, how do you improve your listening skills?

Well, you need to listen while you're watching the video. Oh, and one more thing, if you have the opportunity, you should join a live English lesson on YouTube. Many English teachers on YouTube teach English via live streams, where you can interact with the teacher in the chat while the live stream is happening.

So the teacher teaches a lesson and the students, or the viewers, can chat with the teacher and with other people while they are watching. It's a great way to improve your English. Well hey, thanks so much for watching this video about how to use YouTube to improve your English.

I hope it was helpful. If you are new here, don't forget to click that red subscribe button below and give me a thumbs up if this video helped you learn just a little bit more English. And, if you have a little bit of time, why don't you stick around and watch another video?