🏓 Story — heard in class
It was the third offline class of a group that started early in the year. Opening the class, I ask what they felt over the past month. I expected talk of English, but what came up that day was a little different.
For a month, all these people had done was Korean speed-listening. English training had not yet begun.
Thinking it over, I could guess. Table tennis is played with the hands, but playing well takes the focus to watch the ball to the very end — ball sports especially. Speed-listening is training in which you cannot let your mind wander — lose it for a moment and you lose the next sentence. Repeat that state daily and you have, in effect, practiced focus. Seen that way, it was not a strange story.
In class we call stories like these side effects. It is a joke — you came for English and something else tagged along — not a medical term. I note it here so a word used for a laugh is not mistaken.
The stories above are all reports that the person felt that way. We did not measure, and there is no control group. So we do not say that speed-listening improves memory or works on any symptom. The one certain thing is that we have kept hearing stories like these for ten years — all I can say is, try it yourself and judge. A related write-up is in [[brain-fitness-speed-listening]].
This group, too, listened only to Korean in the first month. Build the ear that withstands speed with words whose meaning you know, then move to English → [[hangul-sokcheong-what]]
Source
Reconstructed from the class record in Ossam’s blog post “Daechung English #24” (2020-02-26). Participant details are given only to the age band. — Not carried over: the original’s “achieved the goal of doubling listening ability,” which has no measured basis, and the tuition notice. Memory- and health-related remarks are recorded only as the person’s own report. Results vary by person.
※ This article summarizes and restructures the key points of the source above.