Lossless WAV speed listening, hearing science and gear.
📱 Apps
Speed English in April, Sound Power in May, Speed Bible in June — one a month. The trick was not speed but structure: a single engine that keeps consonants intact at raised playback rates, with different material poured through it.
🔬 Sound science
It is not that you are bad at remembering. The ear settles into its first language inside the first year and stops splitting sounds that language never uses — which is why a word you know on the page can go straight past you when somebody says it.
🔬 Sound science
A chart that hands each language its own frequency band — Korean around 500–2,000 Hz, English around 1,000–5,000 Hz — is used everywhere to explain why listening fails. Run the same chart on Japanese and its prediction falls apart.
🔬 Sound science
English meaning can turn on a consonant that lasts about 0.04 seconds. Missing that flicker — rather than missing the word — is what makes English sound blurred.
📚 Method
Months of shadowing and your listening has not moved — the problem may be your eyes rather than the method. The brain takes what it can see before what it hears, so the moment the transcript is open the ear has stopped working.
📚 Method
Nobody sits down to memorise the words of a favourite song; you play it enough times and the words move in on their own. These are the four steps that do the same thing to sentences in the language you are learning.
📚 Method
An hour of travelling a day is thirty hours in a month, and none of it has to be found — it is already being spent. Here is what to do with your ears on a train, behind the wheel, on foot, on a bike, and on the days you do not go anywhere at all.
📚 Method
The whole run of a sitcom uses around 15,000 different words, yet about 80% of what is actually said comes from roughly 350 of them. A beginner does not need a native accent or native idiom — only the standard the rest of the world can follow.
📚 Method
Drama is the hardest listening there is — slang, private jokes, an accent invented for one character. News is read in standard pronunciation with a shape you can follow, so moving it earlier in the order costs nothing and saves years of frustration.
🔬 Sound science
You start a listening course for a new language and find you read faster in your own. These are the five changes learners keep reporting to us — and the line we do not cross in describing them.
🔬 Sound science
There is a circuit that comes on when you are doing nothing at all. In one experiment, how the ten minutes after learning were spent still showed up in recall seven days later — which is why a listening session stops at ten minutes.
🧑🏫 Stories
Students at a royal school founded in Seoul in 1886 were interpreting within six to ten months, and a British consul reported home that Koreans were the finest linguists in the East. What they were given first was not grammar but sound.
🧑🏫 Stories
A Korean primer of the 1900s wrote child as 촤일드 (chwa-il-deu) and rice as 으라이쓰 (eu-ra-i-sseu) — closer to the sound an English speaker actually makes than the standard Korean spellings in use today. It is what happens when people write down what they hear.
📚 Method
Move to the country and the language will follow — it is the most expensive assumption in language learning. Exposure only turns into learning once the ear can take the sound in, and that part can be done before you fly.
📚 Method
The hard part of listening training is never the difficulty, it is finding the half hour. The easiest ten minutes to keep are the ones between brushing your teeth and turning the light off — not because sleep does something magic, but because nothing else wants that slot.
📚 Method
“4× sounds like noise”, “am I supposed to catch all of it?”, “my ears ache afterwards”, “can I leave the subtitles on?” — the questions we have been asked more than any others, answered short. Most of them resolve into the same sentence.
📚 Method
A baby born anywhere ends up speaking the language around it, because for the first months the ear can still tell apart the sounds of every language. What ear training loosens is not one language’s filter — there is only one filter.
🔬 Sound science
We filter the water we drink and the air we breathe, and nobody checks the quality of the sound we take in all day long. Here is what the broadcast experiments, the people who make sound for a living, and the market’s own price list have to say about that.
🎛 Gear
Choosing a lossless file is only the first link in the chain. If anything between that file and your ears compresses it again, the file stops mattering — and four questions will tell you whether that is happening.
📱 Apps
English tales read aloud over Korean court music, sent as uncompressed 44.1kHz WAV — which is why one episode runs past 100MB. This article says what is in the sound, and stops there.
📚 Method
Shadowing means following a voice the way a shadow follows a body. The name is everywhere, yet what you are actually meant to do is rarely explained — so here is the definition, and how it differs from reading aloud and dictation.
🔬 Sound science
The same sentence read with your eyes and read with your voice is not the same job for the brain. And yet “reading aloud is good for you” and “shadowing with the transcript open is fake” are both true — here is how the two fit together.
📚 Method
Four conversation lessons a week and a two-hour class on top, kept up for years, and the language sits exactly where it started. It is not laziness — it is arithmetic, and arithmetic has only two ways out.
📚 Method
Trying to be somewhat better at the thing you already do is the hardest move available. A line from a business talk turns out to describe language study exactly.
📚 Method
Most language courses begin with letters, words and grammar and reach listening last — the exact reverse of how every one of us learned a first language. Here is what changes when the order is put back.
📚 Method
A reader wrote in: months of shadowing Friends, long lines leaving nothing behind but rhythm, two weeks to finish one episode with a dictionary open. Going back to grammar was not the answer, and neither was switching to cartoons.
🔬 Sound science
Ten books read while working out speed listening and ear training. Rather than a bare list, this also records what we took from each one and what we left where we found it.
🔬 Sound science
A Korean science documentary measured what 10 minutes of MP3 does to the body. Reaction time, muscle response, plant growth — and a fetus that winced in one second.
🔬 Sound science
Degraded audio costs you even when comprehension is perfect. Pupil dilation, dual-task accuracy and reaction time put numbers on it.
🔬 Sound science
Pupils widen, memory drops, answers come later — all measured on listeners who felt they had understood every word. Three studies, three numbers.
🔬 Sound science
Speech compressed to 2–5× hands the brain a harder-than-normal task. Start with Korean you already understand, and the processing speed you build transfers to English.
🔬 Sound science
The Lancet: around 40% of dementia is preventable, and hearing loss is the single largest modifiable risk factor. Here is the evidence, cited.
🔬 Sound science
Hearing fades from the top down, so the highest tone you can still hear is a rough gauge of your hearing age. What the number means, how it is measured, and why training moves it.
🔬 Sound science
Studio masters are uncompressed WAV without exception. What reaches your ears is FLAC, ALAC — or usually MP3. Here is what happens in between.
🎛 Gear
A file of ones and zeros is not sound. A DAC turns it into the analog vibration your ears feel — and that little stick you plug into your phone is exactly that.
🎛 Gear
Listen over Bluetooth and most of what makes BrainHz different — lossless WAV and restored high frequencies — is gone. Here is why wired is the rule.
🎛 Gear
Feed in 48 kHz lossless and it still fails if the receiver smears the signal — the brain goes back to reconstruction work. Why the receiver matters, plus four picks by situation.
🔬 Sound science
Vinyl is analog, CD is digital. Here is the whole landscape sorted into three simple buckets: analog, digital-lossless and digital-lossy.
🎛 Gear
Over Bluetooth the Charge 6 is lossy, but connected by USB-C it plays up to 24-bit/96 kHz lossless. Here is how to switch it on.
🔬 Sound science
Lossless files like WAV and FLAC keep everything the recording captured. Here is what MP3 throws away, whether the difference is audible, and what you need to hear it.