Shadowing-Übung: Sam Harris basically breaks down the secret to life (again) - Englisch Sprechen Lernen mit Video

You've got the cacophony of the unpleasant experience, and then you've got this place in the middle of it, or apparent place in the middle of it,

from which you're trying to resist this experience, right?

Or trying to figure out how to change it, right?

So let's say you have a terrible pain, you know, somewhere in your body.

You know, there's the pain, there's the strong stimulus of unpleasant sensation, you know, the burning and stabbing and twisting feeling.

And then there's this reaction to it from apparently some point outside the pain, very likely, you know, for most people up in the head.

I mean, most people feel like they're a subject in their heads

that is not truly coincident with the rest of their body.

Most people, for the most part, don't feel identical to their bodies.

They feel like they have bodies and these bodies can misbehave in various ways.

And again, so you have a terrible pain, the pain's down there.

Let's say it's in your knee.

You're up here now a hostage being tortured by the misbehavior of the rest of your body, right?

And you're trying to find some way of resisting these sensations.

And so it is with emotional distress or unpleasant thoughts, right? you know, that you can have thoughts that terrorize you.

And all of it seems to suggest, I mean, this is, you know, this is the extreme case of stark unhappiness.

But even in the best of times, right, even when things are going really well, and every experience is very smooth, and we're getting what we want, and that, you know, we,

you know, our favorite treats are just an arm's length away, and we're filling our mouths with gumdrops or whatever it is,

we're gratifying this thing at the center of our experience.

And it can never be finally gratified because experience itself is impermanent.

It's just, you know, it's just, you get to the thing you want and you gorge yourself on it.

And then not only - Then you want a new thing.

You want a new thing.

Then you need a drink of water because this lingering taste in your mouth of chocolate mousse or whatever it is, is too cloying and too much.

And you got to wash that out so that you just, I mean, you wouldn't want to stay in that state even if you could.

And there's kind of this rolling dissatisfaction, even in satisfaction, that we all encounter, even in the best of times, right?

Even when you literally can get anything, more or less anything you want.

And yet we know, at any moment, it can be subverted by something terrible happening.

You know, at any moment, you can suddenly feel like you might be having a heart attack, right?

And then that becomes the thing that the sense of me in the middle of everything collapses upon.

And it makes life, I mean,

again, the sense of being in this vulnerable center,

it makes life this kind of long emergency that can be pacified by increasingly strenuous efforts to control experience, right?

We have to control this thing because at any moment, we're constantly, if you just look at...

At any moment, we might die.

Yeah, we're avoiding death, you know, but even, you know, even for those of us who don't think about death very often, and there are those people,

we're constantly modifying our experience so as to avoid discomfort,

whether it's social discomfort or physical discomfort, or just every every correction in our body.

I mean, if you just try to sit still for an hour, you'll notice that all of the micro adjustments in posture that you're now no longer making

are made because you really don't have to wait long before you feel miserable.

I mean, your body, the amount of pain you can get just sitting in the most comfortable chair you can find in your home

and just resolving not to move is quite extraordinary.

It's just, you know, it's, it's just, there's no position that's comfortable enough that it will be comfortable an hour from now.

And so it is in fact true to say that for most people, I mean, literally 99 .9 % of our audience,

they couldn't pay attention to the breath for a full minute, say, even if their lives depended on it, right?

It's just like, it's simply not in the cards.

It's not, it's, you know, the fate of the world could depend on it.

And someone who's not really fairly well trained in this just couldn't do it.

And so that's interesting, right?

What's interesting is that despite your best efforts, you get carried away by thought helplessly moment after moment.

Now.

Being able to break that spell, being able to see thought as thought, eventually once you get some degree of mindfulness in hand,

you no longer confine your attention to the breath or any other arbitrary object.

You begin to open it up to everything you can possibly experience.

So it's just, you know, sights and sounds and sensations and emotions and thoughts themselves can become objects of mindfulness,

but when you can, but this is where, this is the kind of the crucial, you know, kind of almost binary difference,

which produces an immense amount of psychological benefit.

The moment you can really notice thoughts themselves as appearances in consciousness rather than what you are in each moment.

Because what happens is, in the default case, the thoughts kind of creep up from behind us in some sense.

They kind of come out of nowhere.

And that just feels like me, right?

So I'm, you know, I'm trying to...

It's a reflex of identification.

Well, you wouldn't act the damn things out if they didn't feel like you, you know?

And so they have to have that impulse to action in them that's part of felt identity.

Right.

So you're saying that you're saying, and this is part of, I suppose, part of the Buddhist tradition,

particularly, although not only that being the puppet of those thoughts is part of what prolongs suffering,

at least under some circumstances, especially being the puppet of them.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

And so, and so this is so, but the people, you know, listening to us now can feel this.

So, you know, the, you know, we're talking and people are trying to understand the thread of this conversation, but it's that they have a voice in their head that's competing with this, right?

They, you know, they're trying to listen to us, but they're also thinking, right?

And they think, so they might think, well, what the hell is he talking about?

Right?

Like there's just some, some intrusive thought comes in or like, oh, no, wait a minute.

He didn't answer the question that thought that that feels

if you're identified with it if you don't see it as mere language appearing in consciousness

or mere imagery right it feels like me it's like

that is the self

that isn't it feels like what i believe yeah that's interesting

yeah well one of the things you do in clinical work

all the time especially in the cognitive behavioral field is you

help people identify those thoughts in some sense as as objects

that yeah to no longer identify with them

and to say you know just because you think

that it's not necessarily true it's not necessarily you

and it's not necessarily helpful yeah

and it is it does have this dream like character of both coming out of nowhere

and seizing completely seizing the reins of attention and identity and taking us elsewhere.

And also we forget it, it has a...

That's part of the totalitarian spirit of rationality, that proclivity.

Well, but a lot of these thoughts aren't rational.

It's just, you're just rehearsing your experience.

It's just like, I mean, you'll tell yourself the same thing 10 times in a row and never, and you won't be bored on the 10th time.

You'll, like, if you just imagine

what it would be like to externalize your thoughts on a loud speaker for everyone to listen to, you know, and you were just, it was just helplessly, you know, externalized.

100

Every, every normal person would sound insane, you know, because, because of the, the perseveration and the, and the, just the redundancy and the,

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and the strange structure to the discursiveness this.

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I mean, this is ever -present.

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It's so ever -present that it doesn't strike people as strange.

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But to be presuming...

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We have a dialogue with ourselves as though the eye could talk to the me and that made any sense at all.

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It's like, you know, I'm sitting here

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and you're getting set up for this interview right

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and i i'll think um oh i gotta get some water right now i know

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if i'm the one to say it

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and i'm the one to hear it i know i need

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water who am i telling yeah it's like it's like i'm

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telling someone else right who needs to be informed about this well you're probably telling the prefrontal cortex

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and it tells the motor cortex

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so you know it's that's probably the hypothalamus talking to the prefrontal cortex

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because it doesn't have direct output over the motor cortex.

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It's something like that.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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So there are two levels at which we can address this problem of thought and its connection to suffering.

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And one is at the level of thought itself, right?

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So you can replace bad thoughts with better thoughts.

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And you can get some, you can triangulate on your tendency to have one kind of conversation with yourself and engineer a better conversation with yourself, right?

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And that's, you know, yes, in cognitive behavioral therapies.

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Yeah, you can stop thinking like a six -year -old, for example, and start thinking like a 30 -year -old.

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Right, right.

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And what's more, a 30 -year -old that actually has good intentions for you, right?

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Like a friend, right?

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Yes, right, right.

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You can make your mind your friend.

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Yeah, yeah, a loved one even.

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Yes, yeah, yeah, can you imagine that?

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Yeah, imagine that.

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290 Sätze

Wortschatz und Sprechhinweise zu dieser Lektion

Dieses Video enthält 132 Sätze und 1715 Wörter zum Nachsprechen. Der gesprochene Teil dauert 10:19. Der Sprecher spricht in natürlichem Tempo, etwa 166 Wörter pro Minute, ähnlich wie im Alltagsgespräch. 89 % der Wörter gehören zu den 3.000 häufigsten im Englischen; den Rest solltest du dir vor dem Üben ansehen.

Wichtiger Wortschatz in diesem Video

15 lernenswerte Wörter aus dem Video, mit Aussprache und Bedeutung:

Wort	Aussprache	Bedeutung
cortex Substantiv	/ˈkɔɹtɛks/	Rinde, Cortex
necessarily Adverb	/ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/	notwendigerweise, nötig
sensation Substantiv	/sɛnˈseɪʃən/	Gefühl, Empfindung
unpleasant Adjektiv	/ʌnˈplɛzn̩t/	unangenehm
discomfort Substantiv	/dɪsˈkʌmfɚt/	Unbehagen
suffer Verb	/ˈsʌfɚ/	leiden
nowhere Adverb	/ˈnoʊ.(h)wɛɹ/	nirgendwo, nirgends
breathe Verb	/bɹiːð/	atmen
depend Verb	/dɪˈpɛnd/	abhängen, ankommen
resist Verb	/ɹɪˈzɪst/	widerstreben, widerstehen
consciousness Substantiv	/ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/	Bewusstsein, Gewahrsein
mere Adjektiv	/mɪɚ/	bloß
cognitive Adjektiv	/ˈkɑɡ.nɪ.tɪv/	kognitiv
puppet Substantiv	/ˈpʌpɪt/	Handpuppe, Marionette
seize Verb	/ˈsiːz/	ergreifen, fassen

Phrasal Verbs, die du hören wirst

Wort	Bedeutung
figure out Verb	herausfinden

Aussprache, auf die du achten solltest

Der Sprecher verwendet 48 Kurzformen und abgeschwächte Formen, zum Beispiel you're, we're, I'm. Sprich sie in der kurzen Form, so wie du sie hörst.

Die „th“-Laute: breathe /bɹiːð/, thread /ˈθɹɛd/, smooth /smuːð/
Die Laute „sh“ und „zh“: sensation /sɛnˈseɪʃən/, consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/, crucial /ˈkɹuː.ʃəl/, emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/, identification /aɪˌdɛn(t)ɪfɪˈkeɪʃn̩/
Lange Wörter – auf die Betonung achten: necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, behavioral /bɪˈheɪvjəɹəl/, extraordinary /ɪksˈtɹɔːrdɪn(ə)ɹi/, psychological /ˌsaɪ.kəˈlɑː.d͡ʒɪ.kl̩/, identification /aɪˌdɛn(t)ɪfɪˈkeɪʃn̩/

So übst du mit diesem Video

Höre dir das ganze Video einmal an, ohne zu sprechen, und notiere die Wörter, die du nicht kennst.
Beginne mit 0,75-facher Geschwindigkeit, sprich Satz für Satz nach und wechsle zur normalen Geschwindigkeit, sobald es leichtfällt.
Nimm dich auf und vergleiche mit dem Original; achte dabei auf Wörter wie cortex, necessarily, sensation.

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.

Shadowing-Technik: die vollständige Schritt-für-Schritt-Anleitung lesen →

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Wortschatz und Sprechhinweise zu dieser Lektion

Wichtiger Wortschatz in diesem Video

Phrasal Verbs, die du hören wirst

Aussprache, auf die du achten solltest

So übst du mit diesem Video

Was ist die Shadowing-Technik?