"You do not need to download it manually, I'll help you!" iTunes said.

Hello world, full of beans me this midnight, smiling with an innocent face in front of the laptop screen while all of friends are having dreams in color. You might even think what I am doing while they are sleeping. Maybe you feel curious what time I do sleep, don’t you?  But you can guess what I did when you are reading this post; I am blogging, of course. Haha. Kidding guys.

Well, tonight I am going to share you a tip about how to get access to English Learning sources by using an easy way. In this post I will bring you on how to find Listening Materials for improve your listening skills, without wasting time in downloading it.  First, let’s find out what the definition of Listening is. As I found at tutorvista.com:

·      Listening is the act of hearing attentively.

If we are listening, it means that we are hearing. What kind of hearing? Of course we have to attentively to hear it. Thomlison (1984) defines listening as, “Active listening, which is very important for effective communication”. What is going on if we do not hear attentively? That is, we are not able to get the message from what we listen to. It is very important for us to listen attentively when we talk with someone. If we do so, the interlocutor definitely will be appreciated by us. Then, he/she will appreciate us too. Remember, if you do not want to lose your friend, do not ever try to listen to him/her inattentively.

·      Research shows that 45% of our time is spent on listening.

I very agree with this statement because obviously what we are doing every day is spending time with listening to all the things, which are producing sounds. We hear rooster in the morning, planes, cars, machines, motorbikes, and even, the important thing, is when we have interactions each other. Listening to the teacher or lecturer in class, talking with classmates, hanging out at the canteen with friends, and so on, are the common activities as a student in which the listening activity is never be apart.

However, listening is not always have to attentive; it depends on the situation and environment. In addition, there are few tips to master the tool of listening skill. Clickhere

Okay, now, we are going to see what tip that I will share with you. As we know, there are many websites provide listening materials (especially for English). BBC, VOA, NPR, etc., are common websites which provide those listening materials. I will explain my favorite site, that is BBC. In the BBC, you can find so many information such as News, Sport, Weather, Capital, Future, Shop, TV, Radio, Entertainment, and Learning.

In order to improve our listening skills, of course we must have the materials to practice. More practice we do, more skill we have (a word from a lecturer of mine). One of several links which is going to direct us to the listening materials is http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts. This is still the home of the podcasts page. In this home page, you will find many genres. Each genre has many listening files. Then you will say “Wow! So many listening materials that I will download here! I want to download this all!”. And then you will find a problem, that is, whether you must download the materials one by one. Won’t you feel tired to download it one by one? It is so many you know? And it is obviously going to spend so much time to download it. That is actually the problem that I am going to tell you, so here I am also will help you to solve this problem.

Have a look at here:

There you can see the download link has provided so you can download it easily. However, do you want to waste your time too much by clicking, clicking, and clicking the download links one by one? Even, sometimes, you need to set the folder where you want to put the file, repeatedly. It is such a party of wasting time.

Don’t worry, I am coming to help you so that you are not going to stop to download the files and still downloading without having a party of wasting time. Here is the solution. Last night (11/06/2014), I accessed http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/eaw to look for the update of the episode. This is my favorite podcasts because it is a serial story about working atmosphere, and there are many tips in each episode. I found that it has already updated so many episodes that have been updated. Unfortunately, I have lost episode 46. Then I wanted to download the rest of episodes so that I will not lose the others. While I would start to download the files, I saw SUBSCRIBE links that related to some media player applications and social sites:

There you can see the links; those are iTunes, and Zune media players. And below those applications, there is a sentence “Subscribe to this podcast and automatically receive the latest episodes”. Actually, I had ever seen before but I did not take care about that. Then I started thinking, ”Oh, this is the answer! I don’t need to download it one by one anymore.” After that I downloaded and installed the iTunes. After it was installed, I ran the program, I came back to the http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/eaw, and I clicked the iTunes subscribe button at the website, then the link was directed to my iTunes application. It started to download one podcast file. Just one? How’s the others? Let’s see.

Click the iTunes button. And then you will be directed to the iTunes application:

At the first time, it downloads one audio file. And for the other files, just right click the Album (see picture below), and then click “download all”. It will download all the audio files which are still available online.

Then it is downloading all the available audio files automatically (in one genre)

Do not forget! If you want the files still exist in your computer, don’t forget to make a little change of the setting. See the picture below. Click setting, and then select “off” at the “delete played episodes”, click done. The file / played episode will be deleted in 24 hours.

When someday you want to check for updates of the episodes, just click “Refresh podcasts”

Well, that is my explanation, hope you will satisfied. When you get stuck in doing this, I always ready to help you. Find me at my Facebook, and then I will come to you. Thank you very much.