Shadowing-Übung: Why Perfect Pronunciation Is a Waste of Time - Englisch Sprechen Lernen mit Video

I want to show you a quick video.

So if you're interested, if you're preparing for TOEFL right now, please continue watching.

This is me in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2016, sharing my TOEFL experience because I wanted to connect with like-minded people.

Fast forward to 2026, I've been living in California for over 10 years, I've grown a company here and I give talks, all of that in English.

Some people, especially in the comments, still tell me they hear my Russian accent,

But today, I really want to make a video I wish somebody had made for me back in 2014.

Everything I've learned about sounding like a native while living in California.

What actually worked for me and what was a complete waste of my time.

Let's get into it.

But before we start, I need you to hear this before anything else in this video.

You do not have or need to sound like an American or a British person or an Australian person.

you do not need to sound like me.

You need to sound like you.

In my case, I chose to work on my American accent because I moved to California.

I was raising money for my company and I thought that sounding more native would help me build more trust with people.

Also, my kids are growing up here and this is where I'll probably spend not the rest of my life, but a lot of years.

So this is my reason and you have your own reason.

Some people want to keep their accent exactly as it is because it's part of their personality, so all of it is completely fine.

But here's an important distinction I want you to understand.

When people say sounding native, they're actually talking about two different things at the same time.

One is, do you sound like you were born here, let's say in California?

I have worked on that for 10 years and I still haven't got it.

It's a lifelong process and honestly, I probably never will.

I moved here when I was 25 with my entire life already lived in another language.

The other one is how much work does it take for someone to understand me?

And this is the part where I got, hopefully, pretty good at.

This is the most important part because we learn a foreign language to communicate, to be understood, and to be able to get a point across.

So in this video, I'm going to sort everything I've ever talked about here on this channel into three groups.

Things that actually matter, things that are nice to have, and things you can completely ignore.

By the end, you'll know where to spend your practice time.

That's the whole point.

It is weird that I can understand everything you said without subtitles, but it's difficult for me to understand some movies without subtitles.

Haha.

This comment has 427 likes and 17 replies, and I think about it a lot.

I got a lot of comments like this, and for a while I thought people were just being nice to me.

And that could be the reason, but there are also four real reasons, and once you know them, the whole thing stops being mysterious.

One, I am not a native speaker, and this is a big one.

English is my second language, so I still sometimes pronounce sounds that Americans have spent their entire lives short-cutting.

And when Americans short-cut things, you just don't understand what they say sometimes.

So when I say, I'm going to talk to you about this, you hear every word.

When my American friends say it, I'm going to talk to you about this.

2. I'm here alone with you and my mic, and there is no loud music, no dishes in the background, nobody's talking over me.

In a movie, there are three people at a dinner table, music playing, and somebody laughing in the middle of an important sentence.

That's why it's easier for you to understand me. And 3.

I'm explaining something.

Explaining is naturally clearer than chatting.

I'm choosing words on purpose.

I'm pausing between ideas.

That's rare when it happens at a real dinner party.

And four, movies are regional and full of slang.

A show set in Boston, a show set in Atlanta, a show set in London, all have different accents, slang words,

and shortcuts, and you would need to know them all to understand.

And this is where it gets real, because it's not just about understanding movies.

When I first came here and ordered a hot coffee, it was really cold, I think it was March, and I said hot coffee the way I learned it in British English,

and I got handed a cold coffee because in American English it's hot

and what I said sounded like hot which reminded them of cold not hat

so drinking this cold coffee on a cold day was motivation for me to start learning American pronunciation

so the rest of the video is

which of these things cost you a cold coffee on a cold day

and which ones just make you sound different quick pause

if you understand everything I'm saying right now but you still freeze up

when you have to speak or you struggle with fast real-world English.

That is the exact intermediate plateau so many learners get stuck on.

That is why we created our course from intermediate to advanced.

It's a seven-week program with 35 short practical lessons covering grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and how to actually start thinking in English.

Plus, starting from the standard package, you get a live speaking session with a native speaker every single week.

So you get real-time practice instead of just passive watching.

More than 20,000 students have already gone through this program one of our students,

Tom, said it was the only school in his life where he attended every single lesson with pleasure

and his dream finally came true.

He actually started speaking English.

Because you're watching this video, we're giving you free access to one full lesson so you can meet our teacher, Venya Pak, and see how he breaks down every tricky topic.

I'm pretty sure once you meet Venya, you won't want to stop after just one class.

Use the promo code LINGUA MARINA for $20 dollars off any plan.

The link is right below in the description.

And now let's get into our tier one, the things that actually matter.

Word stress and sentence stress.

A 2005 study by a researcher named Field showed just how important word stress is for understanding spoken English.

He took recordings of words, shifted the stress to the wrong syllable, and asked listeners to write down what they heard.

When the stress was misplaced, comprehension dropped by as much as 20%.

This turned out to be a bigger effect than mispronouncing most individual sounds.

Think about it.

20% put the stress on the wrong syllable and as many as one in five listeners might not understand the word.

And it gets more specific.

Moving the stress to the right later in the word hurts more than moving it to the left.

So photograph, photographer, photographic.

Three words, same root, stress moves every time and if you put it in the wrong spot, people genuinely don't know which word you said.

Let's practice together, say them with me.

Let me give you another example.

Record is the noun.

Record is the verb.

I want to record a record.

Another one, present, meaning a gift.

To present means to show.

I'll present the present.

And it's not just inside words, it's across the whole sentence.

Listen to these two.

Yeah, the movie was really scary.

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First, yes, it was scary.

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Second one, it wasn't scary at all.

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I'm just making fun of it.

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Same words, the stress did all the work.

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Same thing with can and can't.

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This is actually my favorite.

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Americans don't really pronounce that T in can't.

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I can help you.

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I can't help you.

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The only way for you to know which one was said is by understanding which word I hit harder.

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If I stress the verb, then I can.

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If I stress that can't, I can't.

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I can hear you.

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I can't hear you.

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See the difference?

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This is such an important thing.

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So the task for you is to record yourself saying these sentences out loud

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and to pay attention not to the individual sounds that you're saying, but to where you stress the words and the words in sentences.

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Let's talk about the vowels.

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Number two.

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There are pairs of words, I'm sure you all know them, where switching one vowel, one sound gives you a different word with a completely different meaning.

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Bed and bad, pen and pan, beg and bag, sheep or ship.

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And you watch my mouth because the difference is how far I open it.

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Bed, bad, pen, pan, guess, gas, letter, ladder, beg, bag.

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I'm exaggerating this, but you get the difference, right?

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In a lot of languages, and definitely in Russian, my first language, we just don't open our mouths.

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much.

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In Russian, if you open your mouth too much, people might think weird things of you.

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When I first started speaking English out loud, some of my facial muscles started to hurt.

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When your muscles hurt, that means you're changing behavior of your muscles that are used to your native language.

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So when speaking different languages, we use different muscles to make different sounds.

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And what's funny is I also speak German

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and my muscles don't hurt like that when I speak German

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so because the different language my brain starts hurting because it has so much grammar.

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Okay let's exaggerate.

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This is how you build this muscle memory.

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Bed, bad, beg, bag, pen, pan, guess, guess.

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Okay number And 3.

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Not all sounds are equal.

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And I want to show you the research on this because it genuinely surprised me.

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Linguists measure something called functional load, basically how much a sound difference matters for understanding English.

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And here's what researchers found.

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Three low-priority pronunciation errors were easier to understand than just one high-priority error.

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In other words, not all pronunciation mistakes matter equally.

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It literally matters which ones you spend your energy practicing.

145

So, there are some high priority errors, they have high functional load.

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These sound differences separate hundreds of common English words.

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If you mix these up, the listener's brain gets completely lost because you are saying an entirely different thing.

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For example, L versus R.

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Light versus right, lead versus read.

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But here's the difference.

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This is the single highest traded constant contrast in English.

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R and L.

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So for L, you press the tip of your tongue firmly against the roof of your mouth behind the front teeth.

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For R, and for me, that was something that I had to learn because in Russian R sounds like R.

155

But for English R, you curl the sides of your tongue up along the upper back teeth.

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The tip must float in the middle of your mouth without touching the roof.

157

Because if you touch, you become Russian.

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Like me.

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I'm kidding.

160

P versus B.

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Pi versus bi.

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Pack versus back.

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Pride versus bride.

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The difference?

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Both sounds use both lips, but P is unvoiced with a quick burst of air, aspiration.

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While B is voiced, your vocal cords vibrate right as your lips release.

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Put your hand on your throat.

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When you say B, you feel a vibration.

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For P, you should feel no throat vibration, just a pull of air on your hand.

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Now that we talk about some sounds, let's talk about the connected speech.

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This is what you need to know to understand native speakers.

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Whether you use it yourself is completely optional.

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If you want to dig deeper into this, I have nine videos talking about this, but in this video, I want to mention just a couple of the most important things that are super common.

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Reductions.

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When you start learning English at school, you learn, I should have done this.

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You don't start learning, shoulda, coulda, woulda, I should have done this, I could have done this,

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I would have done this and of isn't of it's just a lot of stuff a cup of tea

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another thing that's important to mention

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when him her he have are unstressed the H just disappears I'll tell her about

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that I'll tell her about

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that I saw him yesterday I saw him yesterday was he there was he there

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and by the way yes Sometimes Americans say sounds that are completely different from what's written.

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They don't pronounce every sound separately.

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Sometimes one sound changes because your mouth is already preparing for the next one.

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Good boy.

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Good boy.

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The D turns into B because the next sound is a B and your mouth is already getting ready for it.

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Handbag.

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Handbag.

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Green park.

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Green park.

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I can buy this?

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I can buy this.

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These are not official rules by the way.

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There is no rule in any textbook that would tell you to replace N with M.

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This is just what I notice when I walk around California and listen to people and try to decode them.

197

The letter T, my favorite letter in English and I have a whole video dedicated just to it.

198

There are so many ways to pronounce this letter.

199

Okay that was, I think that was the first American sounding word that I learned.

200

I used to say water because I wanted to sound British

201

and then I came to the US and my friend Vanya told me water.

202

Letter, letter.

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Beautiful, beautiful.

204

Button, button.

205

Mountain, mountain.

206

If you try to say worst job, it turns into a worst job.

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Just one, Americans would say just one.

208

The tea just leaves.

209

And let's finish up with some classics.

210

Going to, gonna, want to, wanna, got to, gotta.

211

When it comes to what are you, I would say, what are you doing?

212

What are you thinking about?

213

And some people would say, what you doing?

214

What you talking about?

215

It doesn't mean you have to copy them, but it's so much easier to understand people when you know what they might do with a phrase.

216

And the thing is, what really helps you understand a language

217

and speak like a native is knowing all these different patterns and what people might do with a sentence or a word.

218

And then you use whichever parts you feel like using because in Silicon Valley, people have a different style of saying things.

219

And because I live here, I naturally try to copy them.

220

There's another thing that I wanted to mention.

221

Everybody's obsessed with the TH sound, th and th.

222

And in that functional load research that I talked about, they actually rank it as a low priority error.

223

If you say as this and that instead of this and that, most people will most likely understand you.

224

And millions of native speakers don't use it either.

225

So if you want to work on it, absolutely please.

226

But if you have limited time and you just want people to understand you, this is not what people are going to struggle with.

227

Basically, it is not why anyone is asking you to repeat yourself.

228

Then the perfect American R.

229

It's totally okay if you don't have this one mastered yet.

230

Half the English speaking world doesn't pronounce R at the end of the words at all.

231

Britain, Australia, a lot of the US.

232

Another one is the glottal stop.

233

Sometimes people say button instead of button, which kind of sounds cool.

234

I think I heard a lot of it in Great Britain.

235

It's better to know this to understand others.

236

And yes, that makes it sound more local in some regions where people use it, but it does nothing for whether people understand you or not.

237

Sounding like you're from a specific place.

238

Look at my comment section.

239

India, Brazil, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Cuba.

240

people who just moved to the US.

241

All of these people are talking to each other in English every day

242

and understanding each other perfectly and not one of them sounds like they're from California.

243

Move all of that time into stress and meaning-changing sounds.

244

I want to finish this video with one more piece of research because we love research.

245

There is a well-known study from 2010 in which they played people trivia statements.

246

Some statements were read by native speakers, some by non-native speakers.

247

The exact same statements.

248

People rated the ones with an accent as less true, which sounds awful.

249

But then they dug into why, and it wasn't prejudice.

250

It was effort.

251

When a sentence takes more work to process, your brain reads that difficulty as less believable.

252

It is a bug in how listening works.

253

And then in 2021, a follow-up study was conducted.

254

They took people, exposed them to more accented speech, and measured them again.

255

Their trust went up just from listening to more of this type of speech.

256

The discomfort is real, but it's on their side of conversation and it goes away, the more they hear you.

257

Which means the answer is what?

258

To keep talking, not to hide until your English is perfect, because that day is not coming for me either.

259

I've been working on this for over 10 years, and I know people who've been working on this even more.

260

But because we spend most of our lives in a different country, speaking a completely different language.

261

It's just hard for us to sound exactly like Americans.

262

And I'll be probably working it for another 10 years.

263

I still say things and think, oh God, can we re-record that?

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Especially when I create podcasts with the most amazing minds.

265

And of course my English flops right there and I start forgetting words and I'm like, why am I the dumbest person in the room?

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But with that exact English, I've built a company, I've built a podcast, I've raised money for both my company and my podcast.

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And I live a life here in a language I started learning

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when I was back in a country when nobody around me spoke it.

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Your accent is not the thing standing between you and what you want.

270

If this was useful, hit like and subscribe if you haven't already.

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More than a half of people watching my videos are not subscribed and it genuinely matters for my team and me.

272

Will we reach 10 million followers someday on this channel?

273

Maybe yes if you help us.

274

See you in the next video and bye bye.

📺 Gleicher Kanal

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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.

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