Podcasts - are they useful?

As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, one of my tasks for this course was the listen to science podcasts. I'm usually quite picky about what I listen to and there are only two podcasts that I actively follow. However, those ones are completely for entertainment purposes, and I don't think I should include listening to them as a part of my learning.

So instead, I looked for new podcasts to try out. I was not surprised to find out that Spotify has a huge library of all sorts of science podcasts and finding a Geography podcast wasn't difficult either. The one I will talk about now is called 'Geography Is Everything' and it's hosted by Geoff Gibson and Hunter Shobe. This podcast can be found both on Spotify and on YouTube, though I've been listening to it exclusive on Spotify. The episodes are fairly short, from one hour to an hour and a half most of the times. There is a new topic in every episode, and they range from the Olympics to traveling during summer vacations. I haven't listened to all episodes, as there are more than a hundred of them, but it truly seems that they speak of everything and anything, which is quite fitting when looking at the name of the podcast.

Now as of whether I have found it helpful or not… well, definitely not in the traditional way. By that I mean I haven't learned grammar or much of new vocabulary. This specific Geography podcast isn't academically very serious, it's just two dudes talking about geography. I believe Gibson is a professor of Geography in the USA, but it's clear that this podcast is something he does with Hunter for fun, and that it's meant perhaps for people who have no background in Geography. So no, there isn't much hard vocabulary to pick up on.

Still, I wouldn't say that listening to podcasts for English practice is useless. Constantly listening to any language you're learning is beneficial in my opinion. I am already quite confident and comfortable with my listening skills, but it's not like I can't improve even more. Besides, listening to normal conversations is a good way to also listen to pronunciation and to the flow and the pace of speaking – both of which are very different from how I speak in Finnish. And even if this podcast isn't as academic as I first expected, I believe that hearing two people, who clearly know what they're talking about, speak of my discipline in a more casual way has helped me feel more relaxed about it as well. By which I mean that perhaps next time, when I must speak about Geography to someone, it won't feel as daunting as it used to.

References:

https://www.youtube.com/@GeographyPod