Daily Dose of English 226
The Actual End
Daily Dose of English 226
Intermediate
Hey, everyone! My name is Ben, and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on Ben's Language Lab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, I want to talk a little bit about the actual end. Because about 40 episodes ago, I think, 43, if I'm doing my math correctly, I talked about when I was planning to end this podcast. because I am over 200 episodes in, or at that point I was about halfway through a year, so six months of episodes in, and I thought that I wanted to keep going for an entire year. However, over the past week or so, I've been thinking about this and reflecting on this podcast, Ben's What? No, the channel's called Ben's Language Lab. This is Daily Dose of English. And I've been thinking about this a bit more, and I came to a different decision. Because I don't want to continue for that long. Because it's already starting to get to the point where it's kind of difficult to record, to come up with new ideas, and I don't really want to. And I don't really see a reason to continue with something that I don't want to continue doing, if that makes any sense. And so I decided, I'm not going to end it yet. I want to still do a few more episodes. And I decided that I want to get to episode number 240, a nice round number. Let's finish out because I've got a bunch more things I want to talk about. And what I did is I actually went through the rest of the year and I recorded and I found like all of the special dates and things. And I put those in because I've been doing episodes on like holidays and that sort of thing. Yesterday, we talked about Veterans Day. And so I want to talk about some of those holidays, give you a little bit more insight into American culture, come up with a few more ideas and then be done. So I wanna do 240 episodes, which is a good number, right? I forgot the math that I did, but 240 episodes times, they're approximately 11 minutes on average each, which brings us to 2,640 minutes divided by 60, which is, yeah, about 44 hours. So between 40 and 50 hours of podcasts. which I think is more than enough for an English learner to get a lot of value out of and that's my goal right to provide to provide value to English learners and so I don't feel I don't think that I need to go that much further with this because I think, if we're being honest, this is probably more content than most English learners want to hear from me anyways, right? There's so many other more interesting podcasts that you can listen to that go into much deeper topics or themes that have different kinds of teachers, different speakers. So I just don't think that there's necessarily a real reason for me to go that much further. And if I wanted to finish out the year, 365 days, that's an additional 125 episodes to record, which if I do two a day, right, if I'm really, two a day is kind of a lot on average. That would take me 63 to 62 days, 62 and a half days, right? Which is two full months of recording. And this is already becoming a bit of a weight on me because it does take at least, well, I mean, the episodes are 10 minutes long, so it takes me that long to record plus a couple extra minutes to upload and that sort of thing. So it's just becoming a bit of a weight on me and my life because there's other things that I want to be doing. And I'll talk a little bit about that in a second here. So yeah, that's generally why I've decided to finish up this podcast in the next couple weeks here. And so if you're listening to this episode, and you haven't listened to all of the other 225, there's still plenty of content for you to go through. Um, I started, yeah, well, it's 225 episodes ago. And so you have a whole lot of stuff that you can go back and listen to, um, whether it's somewhere in the middle of the beginning, in the end, whatever it might be. Um, there's pot, there's podcasts, there's transcripts for absolutely everything. And so assuming that I speak at a relatively, uh, Actually, relatively slow would be 180 words a minute. So let's just be conservative, say 180 words per minute times those 2640 minutes. By the end of this podcast, there's going to be almost half a million words spoken by me. which you can read every single, okay. It's not, they're not perfect, because I do use AI transcription, but you can read most of those words, because the transcription is really quite good for English. It's usually when I say like funny random words. Although I was looking at the transcription the other day for gibberish, which is like a, I forget where I recorded it, but I talked about this skit that I used to know a little bit of, and they just use totally nonsense words to speak. And the funny thing is that the transcription was actually quite good for these completely nonsense words, which I was very surprised about. But, Yeah, so the transcriptions are good. There's like half a million words or more on my website that you can read. Plus there's also other series that I'm going to keep doing. Because that's the other thing. I'm not planning to end Ben's Language Lab. I just don't want to do more of these daily podcasts and I'd much rather do some things that I'm actually interested in recording. So we're almost done as I'm recording this episode. We're almost done with the, oh, what's it called? Papers, Please series, which has been really fun. But yeah, like I've also been feeling the fatigue on that one, because it's getting to be a bit of a long series of like 16, 17 episodes. And since I leave time between them, I kind of lose the thread of what's going on and I get, It's just difficult to keep it totally up with exactly what's happening. But I'd love to record some more game ones like that. I might even do other things as I get the interest. But the primary purpose of this series, this channel is not necessarily to make English learning videos, but rather to learn the process of making videos in general that I can then replicate with other languages potentially, right? One of my dreams is to work with native speakers of some early different languages, but currently the focus is on some Nahuatl language, which is a native language to Mexico. I have not really been able to pursue that as much because I'm kind of dragged down by this and also I haven't really been putting enough effort into it but like this is one of the reasons that I don't really feel able to put enough effort into other things. Is because I go oh I'm trying to record on one of these every single day so I got to keep up with that and I can't necessarily put time into looking for speakers finding a finding speakers of a similar dialect right because part one of the issues with a lot of native languages is that there are pretty fragmented dialects and so like. If my goal is to actually learn with them, you kind of can't combine really different dialects. So it's like there's all this other stuff that I have to do that is not strictly related to the production of more content. And so, yeah, that's what I'm thinking right now. Is that I'll continue with smaller series that I find interesting or if I want to try out an idea for how to produce other content, right? That was sort of what the there was the very basic English videos that I stopped doing because those started to become a big those because those are a lot harder. I would say then most of the other ones and so if I go to content playlists what I think we called it English from zero. Yeah, English from Zero. I only was able to make four episodes of that before I burned out because they take a lot more time and effort to do. Not necessarily time, I guess, but effort because I have to be a lot more specific with my words. I have to record them. I don't know, they're just harder, right? They take a lot more mental energy. And so I only really made it through four, especially because I'm busy with other things. I just wanna do other things, right? And so I stopped doing those, but I learned a lot about how to do them and how to make them better, which was my goal. And so for me, they are already successful, but for learners, like they might want more of them. And so it's a little bit maybe, I wouldn't say sad, but hopefully not sad. I also did the same thing with how English works. I learned a lot about that and I found kind of how I want to do that. The comic series, the image talk ones. I learned a lot about the production of content, which is my goal. I don't necessarily see a reason to continue doing these things if I've already learned what I need from them, since my real goal is to do this with languages that are a little less supported than something like English, which is the most learned language in the world. I would love if other people, other English speakers did what I did and I'm happy to share my processes and things that other people can do this consistent of content but it's no longer the thing for me. I noticed that we hit the time limit so I'll finish up here but like The main reason that I don't want to do this anymore is because I want to do other things. I'm interested in other ideas and I'm trying to reduce the amount of time that I'm on the computer since I'm on the computer so long. So, so long. Because I work online, I have a lot of hobbies online, I language learn online, and so I just don't need more time on my computer. And so I would like to reduce that. And this is one of the things that I can reduce. Other things in my life are more important, right? So like for me, learning my language, learning Czech, learning Spanish, those things are more important to me than doing this. Work is more important, kind of obviously. But also more and more connecting with friends and like playing games online or whatever is becoming more important. And so, yeah, that's I guess generally where it is for me. So I hope that this makes sense. And I really love to hear your thoughts down in the comments below. Do you have something similar in your life that's kind of dragging you down a little bit or anything that I say reflect? No. Resonate with you. That's the word that anything I say resonate with you. I'm very curious to hear your thoughts There's not that many of you out there. And so I'm more I'm able to read every single comment you read you put down there so even if you're a little afraid of Writing in English feel free to use a translator or even as right in your native language. I can use a translator I'm I'm very curious to hear your thoughts on really any episodes, right? If you found an episode interesting and wanted to say something but didn't, go back to it and leave a comment. I will see it. I'll still check the comments on here, at least for quite a while. So I'd be very curious to hear your little thoughts because it's not like this is a massive audience of people that I will lose your response in. And so I would love to see what you, how many, let's see, I actually don't, haven't checked the views on a lot of these episodes. Let's go back to, let's go back to the original end episode. Let's see what that was a little bit ago. So I'm scrolling back in the YouTube thing. So Home server is the end. Here it is. That one has 31 views. And 30, 30, yeah, 30 is pretty normal for this. So it sounds like there's about 30 people that watch these or listen to these podcasts pretty consistently. And, oh, the Papers, Please ones get closer to 50. That's cool. Oh, and the English ones get about 100. Interesting. I've never really looked at these numbers. They're pretty consistent. So I'd assume that the 30 of you or ish, who are listening to this are relatively consistent. And so I'd love to hear your, your, um, your thoughts. So yeah, don't be shy. Anyways, that's all I've got for you today. Thank you so much for listening. I hope that you enjoyed, um, maybe learned a little something about, uh, me or yourself or I don't know, whatever it is, but anyways, Oh, hi. Um, I will see you all in the next one. Bye.
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