G'day, how are you going mate? Today, I am going to talk about what the merits of doing Dictation as a part of your English study's menu are. There are so many different types of learning methods out there, but I highly suggest doing Dictation for the following reasons. Let's get underway.

Dictation helps revitalise your brain because you are retaining words and sentences from phonetic sounds

You can visualise spellings of words from phonetic sounds, which help understand the overall meaning of what an audio speaker is talking about. But, needless to day, if you haven't learnt any basic grammar and vocabularies, doing Dictation won't help at all. So, before embarking on Dictation training, you should master them in the first place. I am not saying it has to be too perfect, but at least all basic ones like simple English structures, 3000 Germanic-led simple words as well as simple word roots. These are super minimal requirements if you start doing Dictation. But for these, it's going to be a waste of time doing a meaningless training.

If you have these, then you'll be able to retain and understand words and sentences more accurately, and to amazingly activate your hippocampus. By the way, hippocampus, located under the cerebral cortex, helps function your working, short-term, and even long-term memory in the long run. Doing Dictation, in fact, accelerates the intensification of hippocampus, I reckon.

In comparison with just normal listening training, doing Dictation skyrockets your concentration level coinciding with the incremental increase in your study efficiency

That's fine if you are doing a normal listening practice. But, just listening does not really help develop your retention and comprehension skills, to be honest, in part because you intermittently lose your concentration, and end up in not intently listening to the audio. So, personally, I recommend using TEDtalks to do Dictation, because you can easily control listening and pausing the clip so that you could practise the same sentences as many times as you possibly want to. This is precisely what I do quite often. The shorter the clip, the better you could fully concentrate, which will be more efficient for your study.

Dictation leads you to the development of your writing skills as you're progressively getting the stability of English phrases and words from phonetic sounds

Dictation is sort of akin to the one a child does in the initial stages of learning a language. Shadowing is also nearly the same thing, but I prefer Dictation, because it just does have more benefits over Shadowing. If you're struggling to improve writing skills, then Dictation suits you very much indeed. But to this end, you've already refined the 44 sounds of English pronunciation, mastered basic grammar rules as well as basic vocabularies. I always reiterate the importance of these, precisely because it's not possible to develop English skills like a native-speaker unless you were born and raised in an English-speaking country. The mastery of the basics prevail!!

Anyway, dictating English sentences from phonetic sounds is critical to testing whether you could pronounce them accurately or not. Without this, you can hardly hear, understand, retain and dictate in a proper manner. If you could do so, then you will be able to absorb new phrases and words naturally, because you've already had all basics in your head.

Dictation provides you with the sense of how to produce a concise speech and writing

Everyone could technically be loquacious like energetic teenagers, but giving a concise speech and writing is not that easy. To this end, you have to undergo some proper trainings such as Dictation. Why? Because, you're concentrating on listening to a short sentence each by each, so what you should be doing right now is to already formulate a concise sentence as if you are at the speech. Thus, doing Dictation, as it were, gives us the feeling of being at a live speech. You learn how to speak and how to write more concisely.

That's all for today. Thanks for reading!

Have a good one!