Shadowing-Übung: Think Less. Do More - George Mack - Englisch Sprechen Lernen mit Video

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What are some of the other low agency traps?
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Another one kind of related to what you mentioned there is the rumination trap.
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So, hey, any updates on breaking me out of this jail?
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Sorry for the slow reply.
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I've been thinking about it.
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I know I've spent the last year thinking about it.
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I think I just need more time to think.
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I'm trying to think about my overthinking problem.
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If I can solve that, I think I can start.
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So the rumination trap is one I began to learn a lot more from doing cognitive behavioral therapy.
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And it's just this endless loop.
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I mean, we were chatting about this the other day of
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if you could analyze the 50 to 60,000 thoughts per day and really see them.
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The problem with the human brain is you have these 50 to 60,000 thoughts, but because they're constantly in short-term memory.
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You don't fully, if you could see the graph- You'd love a dashboard.
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Yeah.
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If you could see the dashboard, you'd go, I've thought about, I've worried about that conversation with somebody 20% of the week for the last three years.
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And it's just ruminating around.
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But when it's there fresh in consciousness, you don't see the dashboard.
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You don't see that.
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So you just ruminate- Well, there's two things going on there.
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There's the fact that you're in a new place, a new time of life, and you can always have an old thought in a slightly new way gives it a sense of novelty.
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So you kind of are kidded into believing that it's something new.
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And the other part is that we're creatures of habit and old thoughts, even ones that are quite uncomfortable, are familiar to us.
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And that familiarity gives us a sense of comfort and that comfort gives us a sense of sort of habituation.
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You know, you might not, obviously not with this show because it's fantastic, but many people will watch or listen to YouTube channels that they kind of don't really enjoy anymore,
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but they just know where they're going to go.
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It's very predictive.
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It's like putting on an old, comfortable leather pair of shoes.
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Slide my feet into these.
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I know what his opinion's going to be.
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This is sweet.
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And the algorithm just keeps you in this static loop.
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Of course it does.
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So yeah, rumination trap.
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So the rumination trap, I'm going to guess, is diametrically opposed to bias for action.
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Yes.
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It's the opposite of that.
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So a personal rumination story that I had was,
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and the problem with rumination is you try and forecast into the future constantly.
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That's the big thing from cognitive behavioral therapy is they call it the crystal ball
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or you're trying to forecast in the future ahead.
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And unless you can get a perfect outcome, you just kick the can down the road.
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And then ultimately you end up with not much road left and just a lot of cans.
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So one that came to mind for me.
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So when I was thinking about clear thinking, there's the three big decisions, right?
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There's where you live, who you're with and what you're doing.
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And one thing I struggled with for ages was, I'm in this location right now.
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Maybe I could go to this other location.
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And what would happen in my head is I would have option A of me staying in current location, or option B going to new location.
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And when I would think of option A, it would go nightmare mode.
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So everything that could possibly go wrong would go wrong.
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And the other option has worked out perfectly.
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And then I'd flip to the other option and the reverse was true.
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When I had left and gone to that location, everything's gone wrong and I've now missed out on everything.
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And as a result, it's this doom loop that then begins to occur.
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And the more you kick the can down the road, the more you ruminate, the bigger this thing becomes.
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And it's this absolute doom loop cycle.
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And then you go, I don't want to think about this, which makes the thing bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
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Yeah.
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I mean, this is a conversation I heard recently about action being an antidote to anxiety
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and that the bias for action just, Just look, you might think that by worrying and obsessing
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and ruminating and thought looping and fearing and gripping your way through this problem, that it reduces down the likelihood of it happening somehow,
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that it brings to bear more control, that it almost like impacts reality in some sort of a way.
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It makes no difference.
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Again, what are we focused on?
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We're focused on outcomes, not on inputs.
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and the people that have that bias for action, they end up just finding out whether or not this thing is going to work way quicker.
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The biggest thing that I actually found for people listening who probably had
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that doom loop that I have and still have
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is in terms of getting a bias to action is rather than calling it a decision, just moving to experiments.
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So just looking at the two and going, okay, I think this one has 60% probability.
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This one has 40% probability.
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I'm going to go with the 60% one
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and I'm going to fully back the decision
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and I'll book time six months from now to review how it went and then change if not.
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Because I realized in the five years spent ruminating about the two different options, I could have lived in both cities multiple times.
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Both of us have done things where we've spent more time
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making a decision than it would have taken to have worked out whether it was going to work or not.
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Yes, so much time wasted.
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And the thing I love about that is if you actually just did the thing,
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the amount of real data that your amygdala can't just sit there creating these doomsday scenarios.
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The big realisation I had when I spoke to the CBT guy
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that I worked with was when you actually look at those nightmare modes that are playing,
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what's really strange about rumination is it skips like two to three years in the future.
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And the worst case scenario, it's always, I won't be able to cope.
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The worst case scenario will happen.
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I won't be able to cope and people will judge me.
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It's what happens in the doom loop in the rumination cycle, but it always skips two to three years in the future.
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He made a great point of it's like a horror film.
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It just starts now and goes two to three years in the future.
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He goes, but real life's more like a documentary.
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What's you have agency?
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What's all the steps that lead you up?
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You can bail out or change or adjust course at any point along that.
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Yeah.
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I think a good way of moving out the rumination cycle, I kind of call it the difference between clear thinking and muddy thinking.
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And ultimately we spoke about this the other day, the kind of aphorism I have, you know, the Nietzsche thing of never trust a thought that happens indoors,
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never trust a thought that happens in your head is a good rule of thumb.
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And I like that Balaji idea of transformation.
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So if thought happens in my head, it's not true until I've drawn it out, written it down, spoken it out loud to another person,
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create an equation, put it in a spreadsheet, whatever it is.
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And I actually think probably 50% of the benefits of therapy
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is just going from head to out loud it's more it's more than
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that you know this is one of the reasons why uh i'm i'm not on substack
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but i'm an avatar for people having a substack
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or some form of written publicly consumed uh form of artistic output uh
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or self-reflection specifically for self-reflection uh i'm a really good avatar for someone
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that would not have been able to keep up a writing practice for four
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and a half years or however long it's been now since i launched my newsletter
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and now we're like a quarter of a million words written in whatever four
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and a half years something like that
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but it's invariably the best part of my week it's my favorite thing the guy
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that does the podcast his favorite thing is the hour
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and a half that he spends writing every week because of
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that precise reason it synthesizes down the most salient thing that I've learned from that one week.
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And I know I only have whatever 500 words or a thousand words to write this in.
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So I need to be like high in brevity.
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I need to be pretty precise.
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Uh, I need to triage what it is I want to talk about.
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So if I talk about this, I can't talk about that.
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So which one's it going to be, which one's more important to you, which one are you feeling more right now? and um
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yeah you know big big fan of people having especially a
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public facing version of this i understand here we go yeah we have a people that journal it's phenomenal in many ways
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because you're able to say things that you can't for public consumption but i get the sense that at least for me, when I write things for public,
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I'm held to such a rigorous standard for precision to really, really clarify my thinking that I'm sure I miss lots of advantages that proper journaling would allow.
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But it also does other things, which is, I think it's easier for you to create structures and frameworks and ideas that you can then later refer to,
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supposed to like referring to this messy thing that's kind of all over the place that's in a journal.
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So yeah, It's a mixed bag.
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One thing on the writing side that I found specifically useful related to that is a photo can't do this.
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A video can't quite do this.
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But writing actually gives you the ability to go back 10 years, let's say 10 years in the future now, and understand how you think today or be able to nap today, go back 10 years.
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It's a snapshot of your mind.
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Yeah, that's how I thought.
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And because so many of the thoughts just disappear completely down the drain, it's so beautiful in that regard.
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Thank you very much for tuning in.
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If you enjoyed that clip with George, the full-length conversation about agency in all its glory is available right here.
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Come on.

Was du lernst

Dieser Clip hilft dir, zwei zentrale Sprechfertigkeiten zu verbessern: Zum einen, wie du komplexe Gedankenstrukturen (wie über "Rumination" oder "bias for action") klar und flüssig ausdrückst. Zum anderen, wie du Gesprächsbeiträge naturgemäß einbaust, ohne die Themenschiene zu verlieren. Ideal fürs Englisch Shadowing – übe, wie du die Rhythmen von Diskussionen nachahmen kannst!

Horch auf diese Klänge

Achte auf verbundene Rede: Wörter wie "kidded into believing" werden oft zu "kiddin'tinto believing" reduziert (das "g" fällt fast weg). Oder "kick the can down the road" – hier fließen "can" und "down" nahtlos ineinander ("can down" wird zu "can'down"). Solche Verbindungen machen deine Aussprache natürlicher und helfen dir, Englische Aussprache zu verbessern. Achte auch auf schwache Formen: "I've been thinking about it" wird oft zu "I've bin thinkin' 'bout it" gesprochen.

Sag es wie ein Native

Der Sprecher nutzt eine lockere, konversationelle Rhythmik – kopiere das! Betone Schlüsselwörter wie "rumination trap", "bias for action" oder "crystal ball", um deine Botschaft zu stärken. Lass kurze Pausen nach komplexen Sätzen, wie "And then ultimately you end up with not much road left and just a lot of cans" – das macht deinen Sprechstil flüssiger. Nutze shadowspeak-Techniken: Wiederhole Sätze direkt nach dem Video, um Rhythmus und Betonung zu internalisieren. Auf einer guten shadowing site kannst du das üben – probiere es mit diesem Clip!

Mit diesen Tipps wirst du nicht nur deine Aussprache verbessern, sondern auch lernen, wie native Speaker denken und sprechen. Also: Denke weniger, mache mehr – und übe shadowspeaks!

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 →