Listen and read along with the blog post here: https://www.leo-listening.com/feel-good-texts-transcripts/Do you remember those times at school where you were allowed to listen to a recording in English and read along with the transcript at the same time? If you answered no, then I’m not surprised. I don’t remember doing that when I was learning French at school. The goal of listening back then was to sit their terrified hoping to catch a few words and answer the multiple choice questions. That’s because nobody taught us how to listen. We didn’t learn the pronunciation rules that would have helped us not only sound better, but also hear better. We didn’t learn strategies for dealing with fast, spoken French. Well, apart from learning to say “Pouvez-vous répéter s’il vous plaît ?” We didn’t learn any techniques for improving our listening apart from: - listen a lot or - answer these comprehension questions. The unspoken rule was that having a transcript is bad. It’s cheating. You should just listen and deal with it. If you listen with a text, then you’ll never improve your listening skills. And besides you can just guess from context if you don’t understand. And it’s okay to not catch every word. But what good is just listening whenYou don’t know how the language sounds, how words join together or how sounds disappear. You don’t have effective strategies for your listening You’re relying on multiple choice or true or false questions to tell you if you’re any good. But the reality is you can guess the answers to these questions. And even if you do get the answer right, you don’t know why you’re right. You need to do more than just guess from context. What if you guess wrong? You could misinterpret an entire conversation. You could misunderstand important instructions from a boss or colleague. You could miss your train or your flight because you misheard the announcement (they just mentioned our flight number - but are they telling us it’s delayed or cancelled? It makes a big difference). What good is it to not worry about every word? The words that are hard to catch in English are precisely the words that ARE important! Take the difference between affirmative and negative sentences for instance: You should come and You shouldn’t come The first one could be a friendly invitation to a party or some other event. The second is a warning telling you not to attend. Pretty different meanings right? The problem in English is that we squeeze all these little grammatical words into the same space. That’s why 2 similar sentences take the same amount of time to say. All those poor little grammatical words get squashed right down to the point where they’re very difficult to catch. And if you don’t catch them, then you’re going to have communication problems. Even though, 9 times out of 10 you know these words perfectly well. Because you know the grammar of the language and you read often enough. This is why you get stuck in these all too familiar situations. Can you identify with them? Reading subtitles for years and never getting the feeling that you’re improving. Or worse regressing because you’re just reading words you know but still can’t recognise in speech.Avoiding situations where you have to talk to groups of native speakers for fear of not understanding. Even when you can express yourself perfectly well. And people even compliment you on your English. I’m proud to be a “broken record” on these issues because I’m so passionate about them. I don’t want past assumptions like “transcripts are bad for your listening” to stop you from making progress.