Shadowing-Übung: Ancient Greece in 18 minutes - Englisch Sprechen Lernen mit YouTube
C2
The Parthenon The Parthenon The Parthenon The Parthenon The Parthenon The Parthenon We might think we already know everything about ancient Greece.
273 Sätze
Wenn Sätze zu kurz oder zu lang sind, klicke auf Edit, um sie anzupassen.
1
The Parthenon The Parthenon The Parthenon The Parthenon The Parthenon The Parthenon We might think we already know everything about ancient Greece.
2
The Parthenon, the 300 Spartans,
3
and blind Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are familiar to all.
4
Yet there were far more than 300 Spartans.
5
The Parthenon was actually built as a kind of central bank bank
6
and no such unified state as ancient Greece with Athens as its capital ever existed.
7
The Trojan War was as distant in time to Alexander the Great as the Vikings are to ourselves.
8
So let's try to get our heads around ancient Greece and hopefully a little quicker than in 2000 years.
9
3,716 years ago, the pyramids of Egypt were already standing,
10
and Babylon was the world's first megapolis,
11
home to a prototype of the Tower of Babel.
12
On Crete, however, a mysterious civilization was flourishing.
13
It had three-storied palaces, and all this with no defenses.
14
The Cretans apparently led a relatively peaceful life,
15
admiring flowers, blue monkeys and beautiful women,
16
walked around topless, while the men preferred loincloths or skirts.
17
The Cretans had a navy and their own writing system,
18
and nobody has yet succeeded in deciphering them.
19
Until one day, on the island of Thera,
20
the modern-day wedding paradise of Santorini,
21
all this ended in the greatest volcanic eruption in European history.
22
Part of Thera sank beneath the waves,
23
presumably giving rise to the myth of Atlantis,
24
tsunamis hundred meters high, and vast ash clouds stretching for thousands of miles around.
25
Crete never recovered from this eruption,
26
and invaders soon swarmed in.
27
The once peaceful island then filled with bronze weapons and tablets written in a new strange language,
28
which turned out to be the earliest known form of Greek,
29
spoken by warlike tribes, which had settled the nearby Greek mainland,
30
building such cities as Thebes, Athens, Mycenae and Pylos.
31
But these cities already sheltered behind six-meter walls.
32
Life here was not peaceful at all.
33
A few centuries later, the Greeks themselves explained them with legends of Cyclopean builders
34
and were no longer aware that any other civilization had come before them on Crete.
35
By this logic, even the half-bull Minotaur was half-Greek.
36
Nobody batted an eyelid at the fact that games with bulls were a purely Cretan form of entertainment.
37
Greeks appropriated everything they met on their way with great virtuosity.
38
In conquering Crete, they had conquered the seas.
39
Marine trade saw them grow even richer.
40
Almost all the inscriptions found among the heaps of gold in the tombs of Mycenae are financial accounts.
41
Mycenae took the lead in the fight against Troy in Homer's Iliad.
42
As recently as 150 years ago,
43
this story was considered a fairy tale,
44
until a millionaire and amateur archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, excavated Mycenae.
45
And Troy, a replica of the legendary Trojan horse, now stands here.
46
Archaeologists have indeed found traces of fire and destructions at Troy,
47
but this was accompanied by the decline of virtually all regional settlements.
48
Unceasing attacks by barbarian tribes turned the whole Mediterranean into a war zone.
49
The next 400 years were a dark age.
50
Literacy fell into oblivion, leaving us with nothing to read about the events then taking place.
51
Fortunately, what we do have is Homer.
52
Everybody has heard about the blind poet,
53
the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
54
In actual fact, we don't know what Homer looked like,
55
or when he lived, whether he was one man or many.
56
But even though the Iliad and Odyssey were written down after the Dark Ages,
57
the daily routines of its characters take us right back to this time.
58
Odysseus, for instance, was only king by virtue of his larger flocks of flesh pigs and goats.
59
His father slept on the ground in ashes with his slaves.
60
Homer's characters were illiterate and used heads of cattle in place of money,
61
a far cry from Crete and Mycenae with their three-storied palaces.
62
What had happened?
63
The Mycenaean civilization was destroyed by the Dorians,
64
who, though Greek, were totally savage.
65
The earlier population either hid in the mountains or fled to the east.
66
Of all the achievements of the previous civilization,
67
the Dorians left only the essentials,
68
the sailing ship and the potter's wheel.
69
It took a further four centuries for them to start adding the most primitive depictions of animals and people.
70
At around the same time,
71
the turn of the ninth and eighth centuries BC,
72
the Greeks in Ionia borrowed a completely new alphabet from their Phoenician neighbors.
73
This bore little resemblance to the linear writing styles of Crete and Mycenae.
74
Do you recognize the modern Greek letters?
75
The fog of Dark Ages had started to clear.
76
Only here do we begin to recognize ancient Greece,
77
the country that never actually existed.
78
This was no state with an established border or capital,
79
but rather a multitude of distinct and completely independent cities, polices.
80
How did this come about?
81
Greece is a land divided by sea and mountains into separate little parts of which only a handful was suitable for agriculture.
82
Even grain had to be imported.
83
But why not grow it yourself,
84
over there, across the sea?
85
Thus, the great colonization began.
86
If the first historians are to be believed,
87
Miletus alone founded 90 colonies.
88
The heel of the Italian boot was colonized too,
89
followed by the alphabet that would form the basis for Latin,
90
for Latin and take over the world.
91
Greek civilizations spread from the modern-day Rostov-on-Don to Marseille,
92
laying the foundations of the French wine industry.
93
Fragments of amphoriae scattered from Gibraltar to Georgia.
94
These were containers for grain and wine.
95
The latter was diluted with water in proportions of one to three.
96
Only barbarians would drink it neatly.
97
For trading purposes, coins appeared.
98
Like the alphabet, these too were borrowed from their neighbors.
99
According to Plato, a few centuries saw the Greeks settled around the Mediterranean like frogs around a pond.
100
And yet, two cities, Athens and Sparta,
101
almost did not participate in colonization.
102
The Spartans descended from the warlike Dorians that had destroyed the Mycenaean civilization.
103
They solved the land issue by conquering their neighbors in the broad,
104
fertile region of Massinia.
105
The locals were declared helots,
106
something midway between slaves and serfs,
107
and greatly outnumbered the Spartans proper.
108
Sparta transformed from an ordinary polis into a military camp,
109
whose main task was the prevention of any uprising.
110
Things were quite different in Athens.
111
Land hunger there had forced the aristocracy and the people to come to terms.
112
And from this, democracy was born.
113
But first, the tyrants took power.
114
A Greek tyrant did not necessarily terrorize people, rather the opposite.
115
Typically, he was an aristocrat who had quarreled with his peers,
116
holding out promises of a better life.
117
He used the common people's support to seize power by force.
118
From then on, all his energies were focused on retaining power.
119
The tyrant therefore made no reforms and simply drove any rival aristocrats from the polis.
120
To divert the attention of the populace,
121
tyrants introduced and fostered new festivals and cults.
122
The dissatisfied could perish in the brazen bull.
123
But you can't roast everyone.
124
The tyrants were overthrown, and the suppressed aristocracy attempted to negotiate with the people,
125
giving birth to Greek democracy.
126
If an ancient Greek were to see modern democracy,
127
he would just say one word, oligarchy.
128
Ancient democracy was direct, with no representatives.
129
If a polis had 6,000 citizens,
130
they could all freely participate in the assembly.
131
Admittedly, the number of citizens was less than a quarter of all residents,
132
excluding slaves, women, and the migrant workers called metics.
133
By the middle of the 6th century,
134
the Ionian cities were most advanced, eclipsing Athens and Sparta.
135
They were the first to master such Eastern innovations as the alphabet,
136
coinage, mathematics, naval fleets, and complex trade logistics.
137
Meanwhile, a sudden threat appeared to their rear, the vast Persian Empire.
138
Meletus still hoped to preserve its independence,
139
and with Athenian aid attempted to resist.
140
Unfortunately, this was in vain,
141
and the Persians torched the city and pressed on.
142
Their attempts to subdue Greece lasted 20 years.
143
We owe our knowledge of this to the first historian, Herodotus.
144
According to his account, as many Greeks fought for the Persians as supported Athens and Sparta,
145
how did they win?
146
The first reason was military innovation.
147
At the Battle of Marathon,
148
the Greeks used the phalanx,
149
a body of troops fighting in close formation.
150
The Persians allegedly lost 6,400 men and the Athenians a mere 192.
151
Plus the messenger who ran the 42,192 meters to Athens to announce the victory,
152
after which he dropped dead.
153
The second reason was already becoming a meme.
154
At the narrow coastal pass of Thermopylae,
155
King Leonidas led the 300 Spartans,
156
who held back hundreds and thousands of Persians for three days.
157
Sure, a few thousand Greeks from other cities and their helot subjects were a big help,
158
yet the Spartan spirit was key.
159
Not for nothing did they live in barracks,
160
even during times of peace.
161
And the third reason was the fleet.
162
Several years prior to the invasion,
163
silver deposits had been found near Athens.
164
This windfall might have been spent on anything,
165
but it was decided to put towards a construction of 200 trirums.
166
Fast and maneuverable warships with three rows of oars.
167
Thanks to this new naval force,
168
the Greeks broke the Persians in a decisive naval battle.
169
A counter-offensive began.
170
The Greeks of Sicily defeated their old rival Carthage.
171
A scattered array of polices thus defended the territory in which classical Greek culture was born.
172
To permanently defeat Persia and liberate the cities in Asia,
173
Athens founded a maritime union.
174
Finally, Athens had become the center of the Greek world.
175
150 cities agreed to make annual payments for the maintenance of a common army and navy.
176
The treasure was kept on Delos,
177
the sacred island of Apollo.
178
Shortly afterwards, however, patronage was passed to Athene,
179
motivated by greater fiscal reliability, of course.
180
Little imagination is required to suppose which polis was chosen for her headquarters.
181
The most elite real estate in the 5th century BC was the Parthenon.
182
It was constructed not so much as a temple,
183
but as a kind of central bank,
184
housing all the Allied treasury.
185
Without these funds, the Greek classics wouldn't have existed at all.
186
No sculpture, drama, philosophy.
187
The strategist and orator Pericles became the head of this new financial center.
188
He concluded a 30 years peace with Sparta,
189
restored the Acropolis that had been sacked by the Persians,
190
and extended fortress walls to the city harbor.
191
This was rebuilt to a grid layout,
192
a forerunner to New York.
193
While the sculptor Phidias was immortalizing grease and stone,
194
the philosopher Anaxagoras expressed an outrageous idea But the sun was not the god Helus,
195
but a burning body equal in size to Theloponnese.
196
A whole great culture was created in half a century.
197
Sparta and its allies grew jealous of Athens' prosperity.
198
A Cold War had smoldered between them ever since the victory over the Persians,
199
and things warmed up in 431 BC.
200
The Spartans and their allies besieged impregnable Athens.
201
The two inhabitants took cover behind the walls.
202
The grain supply from Africa was cut off,
203
and those shipments that made it through brought either typhus or the plague.
204
Even Pericles himself perished.
205
He was replaced by demagogues.
206
Whoever promised the most was elected strategist.
207
So Alcibiades, the unscrupulous nephew of Pericles,
208
became the head of the Athenian armed forces.
209
He proposed a short but victorious war.
210
Let's pack it all in and sail for Sicily,
211
as if the altercations with Sparta weren't enough.
212
The fleet was ready, but something inexplicable happened the night before the voyage.
213
All around the city, someone smashed off the most prominent parts of the Hermes statues.
214
Alcibiades was accused of provocation,
215
but he fled to Spartan to beg political asylum.
216
The chief strategist then proceeded to advise the enemy.
217
The Allies began to drop out one by one.
218
Athens agreed to a humiliating peace with the condition of demolishing its defensive walls.
219
They had targeted Hermes, and the might of Athens was crushed.
220
On the bright side, this was the heyday for Greek tragedy and comedy.
221
Aeschylus, Sophotus, and Euripides, the three great tragedians,
222
and the comedic playwright Aristophanes,
223
created plays that are still relevant today.
224
And yet they penned them in the full confidence that the first production would be the last,
225
as was the way in theatre at the time.
226
Classical drama was always about current events,
227
and while things may have been getting worse in the city, culture flourished.
228
There was no winner in the Peloponnesian War.
229
All Greek cities fell into decline.
230
On the other hand, unexpected surprises would come from the Macedonians,
231
distant relatives of the Greeks who had always been regarded as semi-barbarians.
232
And then even the great philosopher Aristotle went to work in Macedonia as tutor to an extremely talented boy boy.
233
The boy's father was Philip II.
234
It was he who built up the Macedonian kingdom, defeating a Greek coalition.
235
He almost managed to unite Greece in order to fight the Persians.
236
But Philip was killed, and his son,
237
known to us as Alexander the Great,
238
blazed his way through Asia,
239
broke the army of the Persian king Darius,
240
but still refused to turn back, reaching India.
241
Thus, A new world was born, the Hellenistic world.
242
Greek and Eastern culture blended to form a new home,
243
as cities by the name of Alexandria sprang up in almost every land,
244
though without any democracy.
245
All officials in Asia spoke Greek,
246
and new Oriental gods became neighbors with the old Greek ones at Mount Olympus.
247
Alexander was proclaimed a god himself in Egypt.
248
Protocol obliged all to follow Eastern tradition and fall at his feet.
249
We can only wonder at how this might have ended.
250
Greek decrees have been found urging the spread of Buddhism,
251
but Alexander died young.
252
Babylon, the place of his death,
253
had become the capital of an empire,
254
which immediately began to crack at the seams.
255
While the successors of Alexander warred with one another,
256
a new ambitious power was growing in the West.
257
In 146 BC, the Romans conquered Greece,
258
and in 30 BC, they conquered the last stronghold of Hellenism, Egypt.
259
But Greek culture was victorious even here.
260
Spread by the Romans, it finally conquered the world.
261
Romans began to read the Iliad and Odyssey in Greek,
262
followed by the Greek New Testament too.
263
In 330, Emperor Constantine built a new city on the site of the old Greek colony of Byzantium, Constantinople.
264
This was the starting point for the history of the Byzantine Empire,
265
which extended the life of Greek culture another thousand years,
266
leaving us the weird Russian alphabet for instance.
267
Did you like our video?
268
We have another one.
269
This time about ancient Rome.
270
Or you can watch the shortest history of Russian art of the 20th century.
271
We've squeezed 100 years into just 25 minutes.
272
And that's not all.
273
Subscribe to the Arzamas channel and you'll be sure not to miss out anything.
App herunterladen
KI-Bewertung für jeden gesprochenen Satz
TRENDING
Beliebt
Über diese Lektion
In dieser Lektion werden Sie sich mit der faszinierenden Geschichte des antiken Griechenlands auseinandersetzen. Sie werden eine Vielzahl von historischen Fakten und Erzählungen kennenlernen, die nicht nur Ihre Englischkenntnisse verbessern, sondern auch Ihr kulturelles Verständnis erweitern. Durch das Hören und Nachsprechen des Videos lernen Sie wichtige Vokabeln und Redewendungen, die in Gesprächen über Geschichte und Kultur nützlich sein können. Nutzen Sie die Gelegenheit, um Ihre Aussprache und Sprachfertigkeiten zu verbessern, während Sie die spannende Geschichte von Zivilisationen und Mythen erforschen.
Schlüsselvokabeln & Phrasen
- Das Parthenon - Ein bekanntes antikes Bauwerk in Athen.
- die 300 Spartaner - Berühmte Krieger aus der griechischen Geschichte.
- der Trojanische Krieg - Ein legendärer Krieg, der in der griechischen Mythologie erzählt wird.
- die Minoische Zivilisation - Eine frühe Zivilisation auf Kreta, bekannt für ihre Paläste.
- der Minotaurus - Eine mythische Kreatur aus der griechischen Mythologie.
- Stadtstaaten - Unabhängige Städte, die mit Militärstaaten vergleichbar waren.
- Archäologie - Wissenschaftliche Untersuchung vergangener Zivilisationen durch Ausgrabungen.
- literarische Werke - Texte wie die Ilias und die Odyssee von Homer.
Übungstipps
Um das Beste aus Ihrem Lernprozess herauszuholen, empfehle ich, das Shadow Speaking zu nutzen. Schauen Sie sich das Video in einem gemäßigten Tempo an und versuchen Sie, die Aussagen des Sprechers genau nachzusprechen. Achten Sie auf die Intonation und den Rhythmus des Redners. Wenn das Tempo des Videos zu hoch ist, verlangsamen Sie die Wiedergabegeschwindigkeit, um einfacher folgen zu können. Nutzen Sie dabei die Technik des Shadowspeak, indem Sie die Sätze laut wiederholen, während Sie gleichzeitig auf den Bildschirm schauen. Diese Methode wird Ihnen helfen, Ihre Aussprache zu verbessern und mehr Selbstvertrauen beim Sprechen zu gewinnen. Indem Sie die wichtigsten Vokabeln aus der Lektion einbeziehen, können Sie Ihre Sprachgewandtheit im Kontext der Geschichte weiter stärken. Je mehr Sie üben, desto besser werden Sie im Englisch lernen mit YouTube! Alternativ können Sie auch auf einer Shadowing-Website nach weiteren Ressourcen und Übungen suchen.
Was ist die Shadowing-Technik?
Shadowing ist eine wissenschaftlich fundierte Sprachlerntechnik, die ursprünglich für die professionelle Dolmetscherausbildung entwickelt und durch den Polyglotten Dr. Alexander Arguelles populär gemacht wurde. Die Methode ist einfach aber wirkungsvoll: Du hörst englisches Audio von Muttersprachlern und wiederholst es sofort laut — wie ein Schatten, der dem Sprecher mit nur 1–2 Sekunden Verzögerung folgt. Anders als passives Hören oder Grammatikübungen zwingt Shadowing dein Gehirn und deine Mundmuskulatur, gleichzeitig echte Sprachmuster zu verarbeiten und zu reproduzieren. Studien zeigen, dass es Aussprachegenauigkeit, Intonation, Rhythmus, verbundene Sprache, Hörverständnis und Sprechflüssigkeit signifikant verbessert — was es zu einer der effektivsten Methoden für die IELTS Speaking-Vorbereitung und reale englische Kommunikation macht.
☕ Kauf uns einen Kaffee
ShadowingEnglish bleibt 100% kostenlos dank deiner Unterstützung. Server- und KI-Kosten sind hoch — dein Kaffee hält uns am Laufen! 🙏