It's an iPod, baby.: Photo: Beard Papa on FlickrOne great way to use an iPod is to record and play back your own study materials. For example, you might record a life script, or the results of your latest Poligo edit, or anything else that you have found or made that you want to memorise. You can either have a native speaker record for you, or you can record yourself. Many learners think that they should not record themselves, because they will reinforce their imperfect habits of pronunciation. It is true that it is better to have native speaker pronunciation on your recordings. But if you can't find a native speaker to do it for you, it is still far better to record yourself than to have no recording.

For the iPod, you only need to buy an inexpensive microphone to start recording. Or if you have an iPhone, you use it as a voice recorder straight out of the box.

One advantage of an iPod for this is that you can take it everywhere. This means you can continue your language study on the bus or the train, on your bike, as you walk, while you exercise, and so on.

Another benefit is the advantage that comes to all listening and speaking practice. There are many things you can learn from silent study on a page, either by reading or writing. But it also really helps your memory, your pronunciation, your fluency, and many other necessary language skills to do at least some of your study by listening and, most importantly, by repeating aloud what you hear. (If you are in public and don't want to look crazy by talking to yourself, you can at least mutter or mouth what you hear!)

You can make this study even more effective by varying what you aim to do with a single recording:

1. Begin by following along, saying what you hear just afterwards. You can either make the recording with gaps for you to repeat, or stop the recording to give yourself time.
2. Next do shadowing: try to repeat without gaps or stops, kind of like a simultaneous interpreter, except with the same language and words.
3. Then, try to memorise the script well enough that you can talk with the recording, or, even better, beat the recording and say what it will say before it says it.

If you can get to this last point, you can be sure you will have learnt the language on the recording very well indeed!

Try it! And let us know how you get on, and if you have any further good ideas that might help make such study even more effective.