Simple English Listening

How I Became a Teacher - Using 'Spaced Repetition' Apps to Remember Vocabulary - My Life Story / Background (Intermediate)

December 06, 2020 Tristan Palumbo
Simple English Listening
How I Became a Teacher - Using 'Spaced Repetition' Apps to Remember Vocabulary - My Life Story / Background (Intermediate)
Show Notes Transcript

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❤️ English: Your PASSPORT to the world! My name is Tristan, from England. I've been a university-qualified English teacher for 10+ years, and taught in five countries - UK, Italy, South Korea, Japan and Vietnam. So far, I've lived in 10 countries and visited over 45.

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0:01  
Hello, and welcome to another sweet, sweet Sunday from wherever you're listening from, I hope you have a nice week ahead of you, and are generally feeling positive and inspired. Today's topics are two great apps that will help you learn new vocabulary faster. And who am I? Some of you have been asking him. So I'll give you a little self introduction of my background, my life story. So you can get to know me a little bit.

0:42  
Welcome back, everybody. I hope you're doing well. It's nearly Christmas and nearly 2021. Whoa, when we're really stepping into the future now. And things really are starting to turn a little bit science fiction, a bit sci fi around us, don't you think? Many companies now have AI artificial intelligence departments being used in many different ways. We have trains now the Hyperloop, which is successfully being tested, which we'll talk about next episode. It's a kind of train that goes well 1200 kilometres per hour, can get from New York City to Los Angeles in only 45 minutes. many jobs now are being automated. So you have automatic systems that do the jobs rather than people. For example, in in McDonald's, now you order your food from a big TV screen instead of a person, right? Pretty soon, a robot will also bring you your food probably. Yeah, we've all seen this together, right? technology is developing at a faster and faster rate. By even just say 2035 things would have changed in a more ways that we can predict in more ways than we can even imagine. I mean, if you showed a modern smartphone to somebody, just 15 years ago, they would have been absolutely amazed, they would have found it mind blowing. And that's just 15 years. And things are changing faster. And faster. Oh, last week, we released a YouTube video. It was a topic lesson on the history of Santa Claus. And yeah, it was a good an interesting lesson. So please head over to the Simple English listening YouTube channel to enjoy it. Okay, so the first topic for today. So check out these apps for memorising for remembering new words. They are genius, in my opinion, and free. This is not an advertisement, they are not paying me to say this. I've just found them to be useful in my own language learning. And I want to share them with you. And I'll tell you why. One of these apps is called Anki. spelling is a n k i, this is my favourite one free for Android, but $24 on Apple, and the second one is called Brainscape

3:34  
Brainscape Brainscape b r a i n s c a p e.

3:45  
So why do I recommend these apps? They are flashcard apps. So they show you a word in English. you swipe and then it shows you the translation or definition of the word. Both these apps use something called spaced repetition, spaced repetition. This is a powerful technique, a memory memorising technique. So after every word,

4:10  
it asks you how difficult it was. If it was difficult, it will show you the word again later today, or tomorrow in a few hours if it was difficult. If the word however, was easier to remember, it will show you the word in a few days or next week. So you'll be shown the words that are more difficult more frequently. And the ones that are less difficult less frequently until they completely disappear. Using Spaced Repetition means we're using our time more efficiently as the app learns to ask us to remember the words that are more difficult for us more frequently. Yeah, it's great. So and I'm able to remember words very quickly and my memory is pretty bad to be honest. Like I don't have a good short term memory at all. But yeah, no, it's great this app. So what you can do is any new vocabulary you learn on this show, you can put it into the app and make your own vocabulary sets. That's Anki and Brainscape names of these two apps, you can find them both on Google Play. I'll include links if possible in the podcast description. Another app I want to suggest is Castbox. Castbox is an app to play podcasts on. But what's great about castbox is that you can change the speed of the podcasts. Castbox is the main app, I used to listen to my second language podcast on, the best way to learn naturally by listening to a language is if you understand 80% or more of the language, or at least 80%. This is called the 'comprehensible input hypothesis', I find it to be a very fast way to learn the second languages naturally, I studied it in my master's degree. And this is how we learn on this channel. Right? I give you input listening for pre-intermediate and intermediate learners, where you understand maybe 70, or 80% of the language or more. So, if you listen to a podcast and you cannot understand 80% or more of the language on Castbox, you can slow down the podcast until you can understand more of it. Also, some people think my podcasts are a bit too slow, or too fast. So with Castbox, you can speed me up or slow me down until you're able to understand it. 80% ideally 80% of more or more of what I'm saying? So yeah, try Castbox you can choose the speed. Okay, topic two, I've just realised that I haven't really ever introduced myself or my background, or life story. So today, I'll summarise my life journey up to now. I'm Tristan. Hello. I'm now 35 years old. Yeah. It all started one summer's night in 1985. In Toronto, in Canada. Yeah, I was born there. I lived there for the first seven years of my life. My mother is English. And my father is Italian from Napoli, Naples originally. Like many people, they moved to Canada from Europe, when they were both children, the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout the 20th century, many people moved to you know, the 'new world': Canada, South America, Australia. These places I guess, represented a new beginning, from the war ravaged lands of the old world, right? My Dad moved from Napoli when he was about five years old. I think in 1955, his parents were factory workers. And his father was a cobbler, a cobbler, meaning a person who makes and fixes shoes. And my mother moved from England, from Leicester when she was about 12 in the 1960s, early 1960s. So, she still speaks with a posh English accent. Her father was in the RAF - the Royal Air Force. And her mother was a teacher

9:01  
originally. But when I was growing up, both these grandparents owned a costume shop in Toronto, for the theatre for plays and for special events. My grandmother would fix and make costumes and my grandfather took care of the business at the front of the shop and the customers. Yeah, they were very active, active in the local theatre community, often putting on plays, theatre productions. My grandfather would be the the bad guy or the dame, you know, dressed like a woman singing songs in his deep English voice or dressed as Captain Hook, or Ebenezer Scrooge, scaring the children. Yeah, he was great! Very popular in the local community there. Yeah, a costume shop is a very fun place for a kid. Yeah, back in those days, many days would be spent, you know, playing with costumes and props and wizard, capes, swords and shields. I have two sisters, by the way, an older and a younger sister who both have two kids. So I have four nieces and nephews. Now, all young kids, the oldest is only four years old. So they're all about about the same age, and they're all in the UK. I live in Asia now, so I'm able to visit them once every year or two years. Yeah, when I was about seven years old, my mother had the idea of moving to England. I remember thinking in my young mind about England, and had, I had this idea there being like, princes and princesses and elves and wizards. I mean, I didn't know you know, like in Canada, England, you think is like something from the movies. You know? It's like a kind of an ancient kingdom. It seemed like a mythical place for a Canadian kid. I and my mother had this idea in in her head, England being a cute little place, dotted with little villages in the countryside with castles and old pubs with fireplaces, etc. So we moved from slick modern Toronto, Canada, to a small town in England called Gosport in the UK, a suburb of a Portsmouth. Portsmouth is a real dirty, like Navy town, lots of old sailors and ships and a really strong smell of the ocean. And my mother worked in marketing and advertising. She finished her career as a professor at University, teaching these subjects and my father, he owns a hair salon in Portsmouth, he cuts hair, an Italian hairdresser. And yeah, he's still working actually. He's like in his mid 60s he refuses to retire. You know? He's got that old, kind of Canadian workhorse kind of attitude of working forever. Yeah, the town of Gosport in the south of England is where I grew up. I went to art college in Bournemouth, a nearby city in the south of England. When I was about 16, studying art and graphic design. Bournemouth was a cooler place than Gosport, it was more hip more fashionable, and the people there seem to be more open-minded and more multicultural. And it was an exciting place for a 16 year old and I stayed there in Bournemouth for the next eight years. I lived in London for a little while too when I was about 19 for about a year. Yeah, when I was 19, I quit school and moved to London to be in a rock and roll band to chase the rock star dream. And yeah, that failed, failed after a year. It didn't go anywhere. So I returned to Bournemouth University and I graduated from Bournemouth University in 2008. I think with a degree in music. Yeah. And I decided soon after that I needed a change. Yeah, I wasn't inspired in the UK. And it seemed like a bit of a dead end.

13:53  
You know, there was nowhere to turn and I knew my town as well. As I know, the back of my own hand. It wasn't exciting for me anymore. I felt limited. Nothing to capture my young, ambitious imagination. So I realised I needed a change. It was involved with, I started working at an English language school. My job was to organise activities and trips for my students. Sometimes if a teacher was sick, I'd cover the teacher. So I did a few classes with no teaching qualifications. I was just at the front with absolutely no idea what I was doing in the classes. Once there was just a piano in the room, so I just played the piano to the students. Yeah, this is my early 20s maybe I was 22/23 Well, another big part of my life was was music making music, but yeah, it got me thinking. Working at this language school, I saw the job that the teachers were doing, working with young people, helping them learn something new that might help them in the future might open their minds a bit with English, you know, as a language as a tool. So I woke up one day and decided in my mid 20s, maybe I decided I'm going to move to South Korea. I knew nothing about South Korea at the time. Nobody did. But this time, it seemed exotic and very mysterious. So this was a time before Korean culture and Korean, you know, dramas and pop music, football players and food became more popular worldwide, right? Korean things are quite, quite like, fashionable now. But back then nobody knew anything about South Korea. Anytime I said to my friends, I'm going to move to Korea guys, you know, they'd say that they thought I meant North Korea every time. So I thought originally about going to Japan, but thought maybe Japan had become too like, I don't know, Americanized / globalised, so I chose Korea instead to get a more authentic, more real cultural experience. But how wrong I was! In actual fact, I'm sure some of you listeners come from Korea. But Korea is massively more Americanized than Japan is. Yeah, like much more so I guess because of the Korean War. America is a very close part of the recent history of South Korea. Anyway, so yeah, I studied my CELTA certificate by Cambridge University. It's a one month course where you learn to teach English. I completed it. And the next month, I moved to South Korea, and my life changed forever. Yeah, I was supposed to live in Korea for only one year.

17:12  
But when I got there, the whole world opened up. I met all these other English teachers who had taught in all these fascinating countries around the world. After Korea, I was I was inspired that I moved to Japan to teach English, then to India to Italy, then to Saigon, otherwise known as Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnam, and now in Hanoi, in the capital of Vietnam. During this time, I completed more teaching courses, more postgraduate qualifications in language acquisition, which is the learning of languages and education. I won't go into detail of my experiences in these countries. But we can, maybe I'll do that another time! Yeah - tell you a bit about the places I've lived in, in in other future podcasts. But yeah, that's the story of me pretty much in a nutshell, which is a great idiom in a nutshell, which means, in summary, to tell you quickly, something in just a few words, my life - in a nutshell. So today, I'm still living in East Asia. It's been about nine years since I woke up in my bed in England and randomly decided to move to South Korea to start a teaching career teaching English, which started a chain reaction of events like a domino effect, which brings us to today. So yeah, I think that's enough input, 'comprehensible input' for you today. We've been talking for about 15 minutes, which is a nice, achievable amount of time for you to listen. So next week will be the season finale. I'm going to take a break for about a month after next episode. While I find the job, enjoy Christmas and New Year's have a small holiday move to a new city. Most likely, I've got my eyes on Danang a beautiful city in in the centre of Vietnam, and a few other things. So have an awesome week. guys. See you next week. It's been a pleasure to reminisce to remember, you know, my background. And I will see you guys next week. We'll talk about the exciting things that have happened this year. You know, the positive things, such as the Hyperloop and some other awesome discoveries, which will help take humanity forward. I know we've had COVID-19 and a few of the bad bits of news but also remember some great things have also happened some exciting things this year. Okay guys, all the best. Lots of love.