Episode #1 Unlisted Video

In this podcast, I introduce myself and talk a little bit about my reasons for making this podcast, where the name comes from, and what to expect in future episodes. I offer some advice on how best to listen and use the subtitles to improve your English skills, and ask you to be understanding while I get used to talking to myself into a microphone!

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Hello and welcome to the Comprehensible Podcast. This is the first episode and today I will just introduce myself and tell you a bit about the podcast.

So, my name is Dan Luba. I'm an English teacher living and working in South Korea. I've been living here for about 15 years. I didn't originally intend to stay here for this long, but, I don't know... after a couple of years I got married to a Korean woman... you know how it is!

Of course, I speak some Korean, and there are a few nice podcasts online for Korean learners like me. My favorite ones are Didi's Korean podcast and Tayoni's podcast. Shout out to you!

They're not lessons. The podcast just... the PODCASTERS just talk about everyday things in Korean, in a way that is easy to understand for learners. I couldn't find very many podcasts like these in English, at all. So, I decided to try and make one myself.

So, this podcast is not English lessons. It won't teach you explicitly grammar or vocabulary like many podcasts do. Here, I'm just going to talk about everyday things to give you listening practice in English that is not too difficult to understand.

I will talk about life in Korea, life in England, where I'm from, news, current events, music, movies, technology, and many other topics.

So the name of this podcast comes from Comprehensible Input Theory, which is a theory of language learning by a linguist named Stephen Krashen, way back in the 1970s. The theory says that people learn languages by understanding language that they read and hear, not by speaking and writing.

I think that speaking and writing are definitely useful, but I agree that reading and listening are the most important For improving your overall language skills. They give you the most bang for your buck, as we say, sometimes.

But the language needs to be comprehensible. It needs to be understandable. It should be just a little above your current level. So I will try to make a few versions of each episode, each version for a different level, and you should choose the level that has some words and grammar that you don't know, but that you can mostly understand.

So, what I do when I listen to Korean podcasts is I listen with my phone in my pocket and try to listen to the whole thing without looking at subtitles. Then if there's a sentence that I understand, but there's a word or some grammar that I don't recognize, I will look at the subtitles to see if that helps, and then if I still don't understand, I will look it up with Google Translate or whatever.

Sometimes the whole thing is just way too hard for me, and in that case I sit and read the subtitles for each sentence before I listen to it - sometimes the host is just speaking too fast or mumbly and so that helps. In that case I listen to each sentence a few times so that my ears get used to those sounds.

Sometimes though, it's just that I don't understand the grammar or the syntax, and then I Google it, and I work it out, and then I try to make some new sentences with the same grammar using Google Translate or ChatGPT to check that I'm that I'm doing it right.

So, that is how I would recommend you approach this podcast, although obviously you know you do you.

I think episodes will usually be five to ten minutes long. They might sometimes be longer or shorter depending on the topic, and I guess depending on my mood, maybe.

I don't normally speak to myself through a microphone and so this is a little strange and uncomfortable for me right now. I mean, I talked to myself. all the time, so I guess it's the microphone that's the problem, really!

So anyway, please understand if I sound a little wooden at first - hopefully I'll get used to it and later podcasts will sound a bit more natural.

Of course, it might never feel natural for me and maybe I'll always sound like this. That's my biggest fear. Perhaps I'll spend so much time speaking like this into a microphone that I actually just start to speak like this all of the time! I'm starting to wonder if this is a good idea...

Anyway, that's about all for this episode, so thanks for listening, and don't forget to like and subscribe if you're listening on YouTube or Rumble. Or if you're listening on a podcast feed then I guess just subscribe so that you get a notification whenever I put out a new episode.

So, well, keep calm and keep studying English.

See you next time.

Bye-bye.