Listening tasks

Listening has never been my favourite activity, because I have always preferred reading or looking to the pictures. I think, that the memory type that I have is the visual one and I’m happy for that. Having an ability to remember faces, places that I’m visiting, paintings that I love and the beauty that surrounds me in everyday life do not distact me from the things that I must do. Of course, it becomes a difficulty to remember thing, which are told just once for me, or the facts that I’m hearing for the first time. The best way which I’m using to remember the information, is to listen, to see that person, who is telling it, and to take notes. The only thing that I can do to make my listening tasks more effective is writing down main ideas each time. After listening the podcast once, I read my notes and then I try to listen the speech once again. This technique helps me to remember the main point of speech, to notice the words, that are unfamiliar to me and to concentrate more.
The podcast, that I was listening to, were quite simple and easy understandable. I was choosing them by looking to the title, and downloaded just the most interesting ones.
The first, which I have chosen was just one minute long, so I had to search better. The ones, that were specified for students, who are learning English as a second language, were too easy for me. The speaker was talking too slow, he did not have any accent and the words were quite simple. The second speech was quite good, because after the talk, speaker explained the most difficult words, their meaning and how to use them appropriately.
I think that those texts, of what I was hearing about, are useful when some words are new and you do not know how to spell it. By looking to the text, I can find their meaning in the dictionary.
To my mind, the most useful podcast are those, which are specified for native speakers, and are more difficult than we are used to. I concentrate more to difficult things, than to the tasks, that I consider to be easy.
I’m not saying that I have learned everything and now I need just difficult tasks, I think that the best way of getting better is learning form your mistakes. There is a long way to make my English good enough for serious conversation, and these tasks really helps. Talking with the foreigners who are visiting me in Lithuania is also a good practice, but we are use just casual everyday English, so I think it is not as good as listening news on BBC and using the webpage that our lecture suggested.