3 Things That Feel Like Progress But Aren't
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What is the purpose of this episode and how does it differ from usual episodes?
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the British English Podcast with me, your host, Charlie, the show that helps you better understand British culture and British English. Now, it's been running a while. It's been six years. I think I've got 250 to 300 episodes in the back catalogue. And um The majority of the time I'm aiming to Give you a culture-led conversation that naturally exposes you to vocabulary that you can use in your day-to-day language, right? But this time I'm gonna do something a bit different. I'm gonna call out three things that could be problematic for people towards how they're going about their studies, how they're Learning English, how they're interacting with it in their day-to-day, in their week.
Okay? So these three things will speak to you if you've been putting in a lot of hours of learning and you actually haven't found yourself moving forward with your English. So we're going to be focusing on why that might be in this episode. All right, let's get into it. I should say up front that I'm going to have a go at the couple of things that I personally make money from. So in a way, I'm arguing against my own interests here. Alright, first one then. Don't just watch YouTube. Now, I'm on YouTube. I make videos for English learners on YouTube. I would quite like you to watch my YouTube videos. So this is a strange video. Place to start, but here we are. Um, the thing I've noticed about YouTube is YouTube's job is not to improve your English.
Despite there being just endless resources for you to learn English, when you go on there, its primary job is to keep you on the platform. That's it. That's the whole business model, right? As much time. Time as I can get this individual on this platform, the more ads I can give this person to watch, and therefore we get more money. And the way you keep somebody on a platform is by giving them things that are easy to watch, nice to look at, and rewarding within about eleven seconds. So the algorithm watches what you enjoy, learns it very quickly, and then just keeps handing you more of that stuff, which means you end up watching what you want to watch. Not what you need to watch. And those two things can sit very, very far apart.
What you want is the video where you understand everything, you feel clever. Um, what you need is probably the one where you follow about 70 to 80 percent, have to concentrate properly on the rest, and you come away a bit tired. The algorithm. will never recommend you the tiring one over and over again. Tiring is is bad for business for YouTube if you think about it. To think of a metaphor for for this, uh for you know watching the easy stuff. It's a bit like getting fully kitted out for the gym. Right? You you think, oh I'm gonna go exercise and you get all the the new stuff to go to the gym, new trainers, the shorts, the water bottle, the little tag. Howl, um, you know, the lot. Walking all the way there in maybe the the cold weather, so you've done some sort of
Challenging things in a way. To get to the gym and then standing in the lobby, you just watch everyone sweat it out through the glass panel and uh you don't actually do any exercise. I feel like that is what um watching English lessons on YouTube can be like. There are some really, really good ones that make you get active as well, but the m vast majority, vast, vast majority are ones that that metaphor that going to the gym and just staring at people watching. And I want to be clear, I'm not I'm not telling you to quit YouTube. That would be terrible for my business. Um watching English is genuinely useful. And it's how a lot of people stay in love with the language. What I'm saying though is if you do do this, of course, um what I'm saying is stop treating the video as the whole meal.
It's it's the ingredients, we could say. So you watch Watch the thing, that's fine, but then do something with it. If it was a vocabulary video, then write those phrases down, actually use them in a sentence and think strategically. Am I actually going to use these phrases?
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
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