Working with your brain, not against it

Your brain is lazy…efficient

Your brain is optimized to be calorie efficient, much like the rest of your body. If it wasn’t your previous generations would have died in a famine a long time ago. If you don’t show your body you want to get stronger, it won’t waste calories building muscle, and if you don’t push the limits on any given mental exercise, your brain wont go through the effort and calories needed to build up that area of your brain.

The same is true for pushing boundaries in language learning. In the beginning you will have a “comfort level” for things like listening, a given speed, and simple structure. Staying at this level is great for extended listening, pickup up more exposure to grammar and vocabulary, and it keeps you from straining too much (which means you can listen for many hours), however you will eventually likely hit a wall, where you feel like native speakers speak too fast, etc. As part of learning its important to take some time each day (could be as little as 15 minutes) and watch some videos that are the next level up in speed, by doing this you will continue to stretch and eventually do more and more listening at the new speed, until you move to watching those videos as your new “normal” and choose a new option (new channel, etc.) to be your fast channel, up until you are listening to YouTubers that are targeting the native audience not learners. (It’s ok at that level if you don’t understand a lot of it since the vocab gap will be big for a while).

As a side note I’m opposed to increasing and decreasing speed using controls on Youtube, etc. because I believe this creates unnatural sounding audio (which means you lose out on the benefits of trying to learn how to sound natural in your pronunciation and spacing), and its much better to find a new video or new channel that speaks at a different speed. The only exception to this would be when you are first starting and even the slow audio is too fast, its sometimes beneficial to mix start/stop/repeat with slowed down audio so you can get that first level solidified.