4 ideas to get the most out of my YouTube videos

In today’s post my friend Elfin will tell you how to get the most out of my videos on YouTube. Let’s see what tips she has in store for you!

Do you ever wonder where your day has gone? You wake up, have breakfast and the next thing you know, you’re dozing off on the couch after a long day and it’s time to go to bed.

That’s when learning Italian ends up on the backburner.

Luckily, you can always watch Lucrezia’s vlogs that have the power of making you feel like you’re here, in Italy. Taking in the views while practicing your Italian.  

Wouldn’t it be great if you could improve your speaking skills by watching her Youtube videos? Watch life in Rome unfold as you become a more confident speaker?

In this post, I’m going to give you ideas to get the most learning power out of these videos so that you never have to worry about being too busy to sit down and study.

Dictations are a great passive exercise

No matter if you are  beginner or intermediate, you can pick any of her videos and simply use 30-second snippets for dictation. It’s a great way to practice your listening skills.

Choose a very short part to work on, 30 seconds tops, listen for 3-4 times and pause the video if you need to. Then, check out if what you wrote is correct by turning on the CC, the Closed Captions.  Closed Captions are the subtitles that you get under some videos.  Of course, depending on what you’re going to work on, turn the CCs on or off.  

For this exercise, I recommend using the vlogs instead of the grammar tutorials because they expose you to trickier vocab that you’re not familiar with.

When you find new expressions, research what they mean and gather them in some Quizlet flashcards. Or Anki if you’re savvier.  

Getting more out of watching the vlogs

Here are other practical examples of exercises you can do from the vlog It’s all about pizza. In this video, Lucrezia and her boyfriend go to a pizza festival and eat many kinds of pizza.

You could pause after watching the vlog in one-minute increments and describe what you’ve seen until then. Just a little sentence. Let’s say you watch the first minute. Then you can write:

“ Lucrezia è sul divano di casa con il cane, Angelina, e parla del festival della pizza.” 

Lucrezia is on the couch at home and she’s speaking about the pizza festival with her dog, Angelina.

One sentence every minute isn’t bad, is it? Then they’ll add up and you’ll have a summary that you could have corrected on websites like Lang-8  or Italki.

If you want to know more about Italian culture

Videos like these, allow you to explore areas of Italian culture. For instance at 2:29 of the video she says: “ Questa è più napoletana dell’altra perché è molto spessa”. This pizza is more Neapolitan than the other one because it’s very thick.

What does spessa mean? And why is it such a big deal? She mentions it more than once in the video, right?

When you have a question of this kind, you can hop over to Quora and ask in as much detail as possible your Italian culture questions.

Quora is a question-and-answer website where you can get amazing and accurate replies to your questions from experts. Italians on Quora are glad to help people figure out elements of Italian culture that can be hard to decipher. By the way, the reply to the pizza question above is here. 😉

So let’s recap.

You can get the most out of Lucrezia’s videos by:

• Using short 30-second segments for dictation and check for corrections turning on CC.
• Dividing the vlogs into short parts and describing EVERYTHING that happens.
• Taking notes on new expressions and importing them in flashcards
• Looking out for cultural differences and asking questions about them on Quora.

You don’t have to do all of these things for each video. Depending on how busy you are, you can pick one and have packed in a full Italian work-out for the day. 🙂

Now, over to you. What activities do you like to add to watching Lucrezia’s vlogs? We’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Elfin helps English speakers find fun ways to learn Italian over at Italki. You can follow her on Instagram, where she gives daily lessons for intermediate students. Also, you can get your hands on the free guide she created on learning Italian by watching videos and movies.