How I'm using NotebookLM to power up my language learning

Hi, Steve Coffin here again to talk about language learning and to

talk about something really quite exciting that I just discovered.

Many of you may already be aware of it.

Notebook lM, which I think is a really exciting tool to power up our

language learning, and in particular to make our listening more effective.

Listening is

a key element of language learning.

We need good listening comprehension.

Listening has resonance in a way that reading doesn't, listening gets us

going towards speaking, and it's always been that way throughout history.

A lot of the great works of literature in the world going back to the legend

of Gilgamesh in ancient Sumaria,

which was an oral story told in two languages, Sumerian and Acadian, or

Acadian, however that's pronounced.

The Iliad and the Odyssey from Homer was oral in its tradition, the famous

romance of the three kingdoms in Chinese, the uh, Ramayana cycle in

Sanskrit and other Indian languages and Thai and Southeast Asian languages.

The Bible, the gospel, according to St. Mark, St. Luke, John, were originally

spoken either in Aramaic or Greek, eventually in Latin, and later on in

the vernacular languages of Europe, long before they were written down.

And there are many other examples from Iceland, from the American continent,

the African continent, and so forth.

And of course people love to sit around and listen to these

professional storytellers who knew how to spin a yarn, who knew how to

make it interesting and captivating.

And of course, in many cases people already knew the story.

So it was the familiar and it's quite captivating.

I find this myself.

I'm listening to, you know, audio books in French or in Swedish and in Persian,

and depending on my degree of familiarity with the language, I'm either consciously

trying to improve in the language or simply enjoying a language that I have

learned to a level where it's now simply entertainment and acquiring knowledge.

But very often it's the fact that it's a content that is familiar to us that we.

Understand that we're able to understand the language and the voice of the

narrator that make it all captivating.

Too often in learning languages, we are dealing with textbook material, which is

of no interest to us, where the voice of the narrator is, he is bored or she is

bored, and therefore it's boring for us.

And yet at the same time, some of the material that we would find