Listening tips&tools

1. Podcasts
A great way to learn languages. What is a 'podcast'? Simply put, a podcast is A 'a broadcast of multimedia information (usually audio) over the internet' . For example, music, lectures, and announcements are often podcast. Podcasts can be found all over the web. It's important to find 1 or 2 sources for podcast to your liking and stick to them. (The web is so overloaded that you're simply have to limit yourself!)
Some sources you could check out are below:

BBC World Service 6 minute English
BBC News, video and audio
BBC Learning English Homepage (for even more options)
Culips ESL podcasts

2. Internet Radio
Another great way to listen (even at the background, while doing other work at your computer, is webradio. There are some good radio applications but I can recommend a simple but effective program like Screamer Radio: very stable, userfriendly and with a very helpful website guiding you to choose the stations you want. On top of that it also offers the possibility to save to mp3. If you want to have a choice from 1000-nd's of radio stations all over the world than I can advise to use online radio sites.
Three very good ones are listed below.

• Live Radio&TV from around the world
• Radio Time
• Radio Roku
• Foreign Internet Radio and Online News Radio

Tools for listening to and recording of streaming radio, podcasts, mp3's:

Radio Stream Player [streaming only]
Screamer Radio [streaming, recording]
Foobar2000

3. Internet TV
Watching people speak English is a good way to gain exposure to the language in a non-study environment. This is great for folks who aren’t living where the language is spoken and especially those already able to understand basic English.

Nice online source:

• Broadband TV Broadcasts

Some good tools to view video and tv.
(Hold your mouse over the link to get some information)

4.Using and downloading (YouTube) video's
Get yourself an application to download videos. There is several freeware to do this. Search video's with a subject you feel connected to and familiar with. This again is very important to encourage learning since it's much more easy to understand any English text if it's within your field of interest!
Trick. If you put the word 'kick' for youtube, in a youtube videolink, the file will be downloaded.
(Example: change http://www.youtube.com/....etc into
http://www.kickyoutube.com/....etc and the file will be downloaded)

Some video-searching, downloading tools below.
(Hold your mouse over the link to get some information)

Miro
Ashampoo Clipfinder (needs free registration)
YouTube Downloader

For study-purposes I recommend Ashampoo. With this userfriendly application you can search for any video and download it immediately. The program's 'search-clip' functionality is advanced: it allows you to search and very quickly find a video from any subject you feel connected and familiar with. This again is very important to support learning since it's much more easy to understand any English text if it's within your field of interest!

If you manage to find transcripts of the videos you download (mainly in case of speeches) you will be able to SEE, READ and LISTEN to the language you are learning which is a wonderful and productive learning activity. Have a look at the my speeches pages of this site to experience what I mean.