Golden Week Reflections and a Shindig
May 7, 2025
Episode Notes
Hello. How are you doing doing today?
Excellent, sir. How you doing?
I'm doing great today. I've got a full day ahead of me with lots of work and I love what I'm doing.
Excellent. I heard you're uh you're writing a book to help your students. You want to tell me about that?
That's actually a good idea. Um I was looking back on the last 20 years of my teaching and I won't get into too much detail, but I I realized that there's sort of certain stages that I teach students for listening and when I talk in the class it's kind of messy but when I write it down I get a nice shape to it a nice structure and I thought I should write this into a book and then when students come I can give them the book and they can say oh I understand much easier so I decided to write a
so it's a book about listening listening skills listen listening techniques. What is this? Is it a Is it a guide book? Is it a textbook? Or is it just uh um what conceptual?
Okay, here's the cool thing. I want to show students techniques for improving their listening practice. If you do this, your listening practice gets better. And if I just explain it, it's really, really short. People tend to understand it on the intellectual level and then do nothing.
Right?
So, I decided I'm going to make a story. And the minute you get a story, people become interested in the character. They get emotionally connected and they actually see a character using these techniques in their own listening practice. So, it's sort of like a role model.
That increases,
they're engaged and they they have a better chance of actually doing the technique.
So, it's not just the technique, but it's it's I mean, it's not techniques for listening, it's techniques for how to study and improve your listening.
Yeah, let if I take a few points out of the book. Um, yeah, some of the techniques are theoretical techniques like the English language rhythm and the Japanese rhythm are so different and that blows most of my students out of the water. I found a way for them to not master the rhythm overnight. You can't do that, but how to practice learning the rhythm. So, it's a them technique.
Yeah,
I've got another tech.
Yeah,
I was going to say that's that's something even, you know, of course I also teach and I I I try to think about the best ways to communicate learning and and how to improve and that's something you taught us years and years ago because you've talked a lot about rhythm and how important you feel rhythm is to learning any language.
Okay. Yeah.
Yeah. I key point I think Thanks. Yeah, that's why I put that first in the book. But another one that's really big is closing your eyes.
The minute you close your eyes, all the attention that was going to your eyes has nowhere to go. So it goes to your ears
and your ears become much more.
So when you do listening practice, I tell students, close your eyes. Close your eyes. You'll listen better. When you're talking, you can open your eyes. Right.
I like your idea. And it's like the idea of when you lose one sense, the other senses become more acute. Um,
bingo.
Somebody who's blind has better hearing, somebody who's deaf has better sight and so on. But, but I'm going to argue with you because when I when I uh listen to Japanese, I find it very helpful to watch people's mouths movement.
Yep.
It helps me a lot. And during the pandemic, during the uh COVID pandemic, everyone was wearing masks and I found it harder to understand because I couldn't see their mouth.
So for me, for me anyway, and I understand your concept about how to learn, how to improve your listening and study, but I find it very helpful to see people's faces. So for me, TV is much better than radio in my second language. Okay, I understand. But remember that my target is pure listening. So I get the students to do some listening at home with with a machine. with a smartphone or a computer
and at that point there's nothing to look at. You could look at the words but you shouldn't because that's not listening. That's reading.
And so if you're not looking at words and you're not looking at people, close your eyes and your intensive listening practice becomes much more effective. When you get people then
you can use your discretion. Now I'm going to close my eyes. Now I'm going to open them.
I think the the word intensive is correct. However, I prefer the word you used before, pure listening. Pure listening sounds really nice. And on that note, I'm going to go drink my tea, close my eyes, and do some pure listening to some music.
Okay. Thanks a lot, Ed. I'll talk to you later.
See you later.
Excellent, sir. How you doing?
I'm doing great today. I've got a full day ahead of me with lots of work and I love what I'm doing.
Excellent. I heard you're uh you're writing a book to help your students. You want to tell me about that?
That's actually a good idea. Um I was looking back on the last 20 years of my teaching and I won't get into too much detail, but I I realized that there's sort of certain stages that I teach students for listening and when I talk in the class it's kind of messy but when I write it down I get a nice shape to it a nice structure and I thought I should write this into a book and then when students come I can give them the book and they can say oh I understand much easier so I decided to write a
so it's a book about listening listening skills listen listening techniques. What is this? Is it a Is it a guide book? Is it a textbook? Or is it just uh um what conceptual?
Okay, here's the cool thing. I want to show students techniques for improving their listening practice. If you do this, your listening practice gets better. And if I just explain it, it's really, really short. People tend to understand it on the intellectual level and then do nothing.
Right?
So, I decided I'm going to make a story. And the minute you get a story, people become interested in the character. They get emotionally connected and they actually see a character using these techniques in their own listening practice. So, it's sort of like a role model.
That increases,
they're engaged and they they have a better chance of actually doing the technique.
So, it's not just the technique, but it's it's I mean, it's not techniques for listening, it's techniques for how to study and improve your listening.
Yeah, let if I take a few points out of the book. Um, yeah, some of the techniques are theoretical techniques like the English language rhythm and the Japanese rhythm are so different and that blows most of my students out of the water. I found a way for them to not master the rhythm overnight. You can't do that, but how to practice learning the rhythm. So, it's a them technique.
Yeah,
I've got another tech.
Yeah,
I was going to say that's that's something even, you know, of course I also teach and I I I try to think about the best ways to communicate learning and and how to improve and that's something you taught us years and years ago because you've talked a lot about rhythm and how important you feel rhythm is to learning any language.
Okay. Yeah.
Yeah. I key point I think Thanks. Yeah, that's why I put that first in the book. But another one that's really big is closing your eyes.
The minute you close your eyes, all the attention that was going to your eyes has nowhere to go. So it goes to your ears
and your ears become much more.
So when you do listening practice, I tell students, close your eyes. Close your eyes. You'll listen better. When you're talking, you can open your eyes. Right.
I like your idea. And it's like the idea of when you lose one sense, the other senses become more acute. Um,
bingo.
Somebody who's blind has better hearing, somebody who's deaf has better sight and so on. But, but I'm going to argue with you because when I when I uh listen to Japanese, I find it very helpful to watch people's mouths movement.
Yep.
It helps me a lot. And during the pandemic, during the uh COVID pandemic, everyone was wearing masks and I found it harder to understand because I couldn't see their mouth.
So for me, for me anyway, and I understand your concept about how to learn, how to improve your listening and study, but I find it very helpful to see people's faces. So for me, TV is much better than radio in my second language. Okay, I understand. But remember that my target is pure listening. So I get the students to do some listening at home with with a machine. with a smartphone or a computer
and at that point there's nothing to look at. You could look at the words but you shouldn't because that's not listening. That's reading.
And so if you're not looking at words and you're not looking at people, close your eyes and your intensive listening practice becomes much more effective. When you get people then
you can use your discretion. Now I'm going to close my eyes. Now I'm going to open them.
I think the the word intensive is correct. However, I prefer the word you used before, pure listening. Pure listening sounds really nice. And on that note, I'm going to go drink my tea, close my eyes, and do some pure listening to some music.
Okay. Thanks a lot, Ed. I'll talk to you later.
See you later.