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

0:00 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

0:48 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.

1:34 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.

2:21 And yet at the same time, some of the material that we would find captivating is too difficult for us. And this is where Notebook LM comes in, and I'm gonna describe to you how I used it, and I very much wanna hear back from you if you have been using it or if you wanna explore it. There are all kinds of videos on YouTube about how to use, uh, Notebook LM. Of course, Notebook, LM was not designed primarily for language learning. It was designed as a means for people to collect information from different sources in different formats, uh, where they could somehow get those summarized for them. They could even, uh, produce, uh, a chat which they could listen to in their car, all as a part of becoming more and more familiar with this

3:07 information that they have collected in their Notebook. But for me, the most exciting aspect of this is the audio overview. The audio overview, and we can select the language that we want to use, which may or may not be the language of the material that we have collected. And what is exciting about this is that the quality of the audio is so good that in many cases it is more pleasant to listen to then the original audio or a natural conversation where, for example, I find it very annoying listening to Levantine Arabic, that they mix in French and English all the time. Sometimes they speak too quickly or whatever it might be. Whereas there's something incredibly soothing and clever about the quality of the narration of these chats generated through AI in Notebook LM.

3:56 Now just as if we want to enjoy, for example, the Ramayana stories or if you want to enjoy Homer in the original Greek, or you wanna enjoy any of these other audio materials we need to be at a certain level and the better we understand the language, of course, the better we're able to enjoy it. But we still have to get there and to get there, we need to use certain tools. For most of history, people couldn't read, but we can read. So we can, even if we don't understand what we're listening to, we can then read it. We can read it online, we can look up words, we can review those words, we can repeat the audio. There's so many ways that we now have of expanding our ability so that we can increasingly enjoy what we're listening to because in language learning, the process is the reward. So we will eventually be able to understand more and more,

4:41 but even on our way to getting there, we can enjoy ourselves. And that's where I suggest you look into the Notebook LM. So some of the things that I did, for example, I took a variety of sources of Persian content, either relating to history or literature or the news, and I asked Notebook, LM to sort of collect it and do a synopsis and create a chat. The resulting chat in Persian is so pleasant to listen to. Uh, I can look up the words at LingQ. I can listen to it more than once, which is not usually the case with artificial voice, like text to speech. So I think it's gonna be a great tool for me.

5:26 If I have a 30 minute mp3 file of news in Persian or something I've pulled from a YouTube video, I can listen to five to eight minutes of that in a very pleasing chat discussion, which gets me started into that material and I can listen to it more than once. I can look up the words. It's gonna really, I think, power up my, my learning. But just as an experiment, I also gave Notebook LM the task. Basically what I said was, in Canada, we now have a big conference between our federal government and provincial governments talking about energy projects and the environment and national unity. And it's gonna be very difficult to find compromise. Uh. And so I just said, please go out and find all the information, you can come up with a summary, but then I wanna see a chat between two people in French but in Canadian French.

6:12 So if you look up LingQ in the French section, you'll see a, a lesson there called Energie. And there you'll hear Canadian French discussing some domestic political issues in Canada. The quality of the voices, the accent, the French Canadian accent, all of this has been done so well. It's, it's just remarkable. Obviously I don't need to improve. I shouldn't say I don't need to improve my French, but that's my, not my main goal, but it's just as an illustration because more people are gonna be familiar with French than are familiar with Persian and you'll see that the quality

6:58 of the audio is simply remarkable. So what we have now is an ability to define what we wanna listen to, define the level of difficulty, define the accent, bring in a variety of types of information, and there's far more there that I haven't yet explored. One caution. I discovered that you're only allowed three audio overviews per day. So if by two o'clock in the afternoon, I have used my three audio overviews, I cannot generate a new audio overview until after 2:00 PM the next day. Now some of you may wanna explore this. I think that is enough for me, and so far as my needs are concerned, there is a range of additional functions we can have if we go to the next level.

7:43 I haven't gone there yet, but I look forward to hearing from you. Listening is powerful. The more we can do to make listening, the kind of material we use for our listening cater to our needs, the more we're gonna a, be able to achieve this goal of making the learning process itself the reward as we move towards an an ever greater ability to enjoy the language itself. Thank you for listening. Bye for now.