Shadowing Practice: How Gross Was the Past, Really? - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creando lección...
1
Right now, you're probably clean.
2
You showered this morning, or yesterday, or at worst, the day before.
3
You have running hot water, soap that actually kills bacteria, toilet paper, and a toilet that flushes.
4
You live in conditions that most humans who ever existed would consider a miracle.
5
Most of them did not have any of that, and the ways they managed without it were, in some cases, genuinely stomach-turning.
6
This is a video about those ways.
7
Let's start with the Romans, because nothing in recorded history quite prepares you for what the Romans did despite, and this is the important part,
8
being the most technically advanced civilization of the ancient world.
9
They had aqueducts delivering fresh water into the city from mountain springs miles away.
10
They had sewer systems so large you could row a boat through the main channel.
11
They had public bathhouses where thousands of citizens bathed every day.
12
By the standards of their era, they were a hygienic civilization.
13
They also shared a single sponge on a stick to wipe themselves after using the toilet.
14
It was called a tersorium.
15
A sea sponge fixed to the end of a wooden rod, roughly the length of your forearm.
16
It sat in a bucket of salt water or vinegar in the corner of public latrines,
17
which were communal, open, social spaces where Romans thought nothing of sitting side by side doing their business while having a conversation.
18
When you were finished, you reached for the tersorium, used it, dipped it back in the bucket, left it for the next person.
19
The vinegar had mild antiseptic properties, and they understood this empirically even without knowing why.
20
But mild antiseptic applied to a sponge shared by dozens of people a day was not going to prevent disease transmission.
21
A 2012 study by Philippe Charlier and colleagues published in Clinical Infectious Diseases found
22
that Roman public latrines were actually efficient vectors for intestinal parasites and infection, in part because of the communal sponge.
23
The Romans had a sewer system that still functions in parts of Rome today.
24
They also gave each other worms.
25
And before you feel too superior about your toilet paper, In most of human history, toilet paper didn't exist, and people wiped with whatever was nearest and practical.
26
Ancient Greeks used smooth pebbles called pessoi.
27
Medieval Europeans used moss, leaves, hay, or simply their hand in a water source.
28
American colonists used corn cobs.
29
Dried, smooth, widely available, and evidently effective enough that outhouses well into the 19th century kept a bucket of them on hand.
30
The farmer's almanac, which many households had, was printed with a hole in the corner not for decoration, but so it could be hung in the outhouse and used page by page.
31
Before mass paper production, ordinary people improvised and the improvisation was highly regional, seasonal, and deeply practical.
32
It worked.
33
It was also, by our standards, horrifying.
34
But before we continue, there's something interesting I want to show you.
35
A lot of the ideas on this channel come from books, research papers, and long-form articles.
36
The problem is that there simply isn't enough time to read everything in full.
37
That's one reason I've been using Shortform.
38
Shortform is a premium learning platform with in-depth guides to books, podcasts, and articles.
39
Unlike most summary apps that just give you a quick overview, Shortform goes much deeper.
40
They break books down chapter by chapter,
41
ad analysis, counterpoints, commentary, and connect ideas across multiple sources so you can understand not just what an author believes, but why.
42
They cover topics like psychology, history, science, and education.
43
Recently, I was reading their guide on Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich.
44
And one thing I found fascinating was how modern DNA evidence reveals
45
that human populations have been mixing and migrating throughout history far more than we once thought.
46
They also publish new book guides and articles every week, and subscribers can even vote on which books they cover next.
47
And if you're researching online, they have a browser extension called Shortform AI that can summarize articles, emails, and even YouTube videos.
48
So if you're someone who enjoys learning but doesn't always have time to read every book cover to cover, you can try Shortform for free using my link in the description.
49
You'll also get 25% off the annual plan.
50
Now let's get back to the video.
51
Now let's talk about bath water.
52
In the 1700s, heating enough water to fill a tub was a significant undertaking.
53
Carrying water from a well or river heating it over a fire pot by pot was hours of labor.
54
So when a household bathed, they bathed in the same water.
55
All of them, in order of social importance.
56
The father went first while the water was hot and clean, then older male relatives, then the mother, then the children working down from eldest to youngest.
57
By the time the baby of the household got in, last, always last, the water was cold, brown with dirt and soap scum,
58
and had already been used by everyone else in the house.
59
The expression, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, exists because the water was genuinely murky enough to hide an infant.
60
That saying has been around since at least 1512, first recorded in a German text, which tells you how long families have been bathing this way and how widely known the practice was.
61
This was not exclusive to the poor.
62
Working families in the 1700s, many of whom bathed roughly once a month, went through this process every single time.
63
The father got a bath, the baby got warm soup with a body in it, And when you needed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, you didn't go anywhere.
64
You used the chamber pot, a ceramic or metal bowl kept under the bed specifically for this purpose.
65
You did your business into the pot in the dark next to wherever you were sleeping, and in the morning you opened the window and threw the contents into the street below.
66
Not quietly.
67
There was a shout first, the French guardé l'eau, meaning watch out for the water, which is also where the modern English word, lau, comes from.
68
The street outside a medieval or early modern home was the combined destination of every household's chamber pots, kitchen waste, animal droppings, and general refuse.
69
Pavements as a concept barely existed.
70
You walked in what accumulated there.
71
In summer, in a large city, this was not just unpleasant.
72
Contemporary sources describe the smell of medieval Paris and London as something detectable a significant distance from the city walls.
73
A Venetian diplomat visiting Paris in the 15th century noted the
74
smell as reaching him at what he estimated was roughly half a day's ride from the city.
75
This continued in parts of European cities well into the 1800s.
76
The River Thames in London was essentially an open sewer by the mid-19th century.
77
In the summer of 1858, the smell from the Thames became so severe during a heat wave that Parliament, located directly beside the river, was unable to function.
78
Members of Parliament soaked the curtains in chloride of lime trying to mask it.
79
This event was called the Great Stink, and it was directly responsible for Parliament finally funding the construction of London's modern sewer system,
80
designed by engineer Joseph Bazalgette and completed in 1875.
81
For most of London's history before that, the water people drank came from the same river the city used as a toilet.
82
Parasites were not a problem of the poor, they were a problem of everyone.
83
When archaeologists excavated the remains of Richard III in Leicester in 2012, in 2012, they found his skeleton heavily infested with roundworm eggs.
84
Richard III, King of England, one of the most powerful and presumably well-cared-for individuals in 15th century Europe, had roundworm.
85
When the preserved remains of Ferdinand II, King of Naples, who died in 1496, were examined, he was found to have both head lice and pubic lice simultaneously.
86
Medieval and early modern latrines across Europe, when excavated, consistently show parasite eggs across all social classes.
87
A 2013 study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases examining parasite remains in medieval Cambridge found
88
that intestinal worms were so prevalent that they must have been considered a normal part of life.
89
People didn't go to a doctor because they had worms.
90
Having worms was just what having a body was like.
91
Now let's talk about medical treatment, because in many periods of history the treatment was substantially worse than the illness.
92
The standard medical response to almost any disease in Europe for roughly 2,000 years was bloodletting,
93
removing blood from the patient either by cutting a vein directly or applying leeches.
94
The underlying theory came from ancient Greek medicine.
95
Illness was caused by an imbalance in four bodily fluids.
96
Blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.
97
To restore balance, you removed the excess.
98
For fever, remove blood.
99
For infection, remove blood.
100
For a broken bone, for a headache, for a cough.
101
For childbirth complications, remove blood.
102
A patient with a fever is already dehydrated and stressed.
103
Removing blood made the situation critically worse.
104
A patient with an infection needs a functional immune system.
105
Removing blood reduced that capacity significantly.
106
The practice killed patients who would otherwise have recovered.
107
It was the standard of care.
108
The people performing it were barber surgeons.
109
The same man who cut your hair also performed bloodletting.
110
Extracted teeth and amputated limbs, often in the same chair, with the same tools, without cleaning them between procedures.
111
The red and white striped pole outside a barber shop today is a direct legacy of this.
112
The red represents blood, the white represents the bandages used to stop it.
113
George Washington was in good health until December 1799, when he developed a throat infection, likely epiglottitis, which is serious but survivable with rest.
114
His doctors removed roughly 2.5 liters of blood from him across his final day of treatment.
115
An average adult body contains about 4.5 to 5.5 liters of blood total.
116
They removed nearly half of his.
117
Washington almost certainly would have survived the original infection.
118
He died from the treatment the following morning.
119
The surgeon who amputated your leg in the early 19th century
120
considered the blood stains on his coat a mark of professional distinction.
121
The darker and more layered the stains, the more operations performed, the more experienced the surgeon.
122
Washing the coat would have seemed as strange to him as not washing it seems to us.
123
He had no germ theory.
124
He didn't know that the dried blood from a previous patient's infected wound, transferred to his hands, then to your open incision,
125
was why surgical wards had mortality rates approaching 50% for major procedures.
126
When Ignaz Semmelweis demonstrated in 1847
127
that requiring doctors to wash their hands in chlorinated lime solution
128
before delivering babies reduced the mortality rate in his maternity ward from around 18% to under 2%, the medical establishment rejected him.
129
Colleagues found the suggestion that they were killing their patients through unwashed hands personally offensive.
130
Semmelweis was eventually committed to a psychiatric institution where he died in 1865.
131
Two years later, Joseph Lister published his work on antiseptic surgical technique and proved that Semmelweis had been completely right.
132
The medical establishment spent 18 years dismissing the man who had figured out how to stop surgeons from killing their patients.
133
Romans washed their clothing in fermented human urine, fullers, textile workers, collected urine in large pots placed outside their shops,
134
passersby would urinate into the pots, the urine was left to ferment, producing ammonia, and the ammonia was used to break down grease and protein stains in fabric.
135
This genuinely worked.
136
Ammonia is an effective cleaning agent.
137
Roman clothes were clean, and the chemistry behind why they were clean was real.
138
Even if the Romans had no name for the chemistry, the emperor Vespasian actually taxed the collection of urine, producing the phrase pecunia non olet ,
139
after his son objected to the revenue source.
140
The same Romans also used urine as mouthwash for teeth whitening.
141
Catullus, the Roman poet, mocked a man for having unusually white teeth, implying he used a great deal of urine to achieve them.
142
The Portuguese specifically imported Spanish urine for this purpose.
143
They were doing applied chemistry before the field existed.
144
The results were effective.
145
The method remains completely revolting.
146
So here's the full picture.
147
For most of human history, you shared bathwater with your entire household and got in last.
148
Your toilet was a pot under the bed that you emptied out the window every morning.
149
If you lived in a city, the street outside your home was where all of that went, along with everything from every other house on the street.
150
If you were sick, someone removed your blood.
151
If you needed surgery, the surgeon wiped his hands on his coat and got started.
152
If you had worms, and you almost certainly had worms, nobody thought it was worth mentioning.
153
If you needed to clean your clothes, you used what was available, which in Rome was whatever your neighbors put in the pot outside.
154
Every single person who lived through any of this thought it was normal.
155
Because it was.
156
It was all they had ever known, and in most cases it was the best available option given what they understood.
157
The Romans weren't stupid for sharing the sponge?
158
They didn't know about bacterial transmission.
159
They were rinsing it in what they had empirically found seemed to help.
160
George Washington's doctors weren't incompetent.
161
They were following the best-established medical consensus of their era.
162
The families bathing last to first in one tub of water were conserving an enormous amount of labor, and had no reason to think it caused any harm.
163
They were all doing their best with what they knew.
164
They just knew considerably less than we do.
165
And the gap between what they knew and what we know is why the baby always ended up in brown water.
📺 Mismo canal
✨ Recomendar Video
B21
193 oraciones
What Did Ancient Humans Actually Do All Day?
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
166 oraciones
Come si vive a Roma? | La Roma che i turisti non vedono
Travel EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B212
98 oraciones
How To See Germs Spread Experiment (Coronavirus)
American AccentBusiness EnglishDaily ConversationHigh School Students
B21
160 oraciones
Can One Course Of Antibiotics Change Your Gut for 8 Years? Here's What Doctors Found
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
52 oraciones
Food in my life! Eating habits in different countries. You are what you eat - agree?
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B21
596 oraciones
Eco-burial - Would you consider being composted? | DW Documentary
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B24
510 oraciones
The hygiene habits that changed everything for me | Tips every woman should know
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B23
51 oraciones
Great Moments in Unintended Consequences: Yosemite Permits, Italy Superbonus, Salary Caps (Vol. 22)
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B21
288 oraciones
The Best of Philomena Cunk on Britain | Part Two
British AccentDaily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C117
112 oraciones
Why you can't quit social media (and the Romans knew it)
British AccentDaily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B25
46 oraciones
What is Public Health? Episode 1 of "That's Public Health"
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
256 oraciones
Medical Memes Doctors Actually Like
American AccentDaily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
Vocabulario y notas de pronunciación para esta lección
Esta lección de conversación de nivel B2 se basa en el vídeo “How Gross Was the Past, Really?”. Las palabras que más se repiten: blood, Roman, pot. Este vídeo tiene 165 frases y 2344 palabras para practicar shadowing. La parte hablada dura 12:40. El hablante habla rápido, unas 185 palabras por minuto, así que espera sonidos enlazados y reducidos. Solo el 78 % de las palabras está entre las 3.000 más comunes del inglés, por lo que el vocabulario es exigente.
Vocabulario clave de este vídeo
Las 15 palabras más avanzadas del vídeo, con su pronunciación y significado:
| Palabra | Pronunciación | Significado |
|---|---|---|
| urine sustantivo | /ˈjʊɹɪn/ | orina, micción |
| worm sustantivo | /wɝm/ | gusano, lombriz |
| sponge sustantivo | /spʌnd͡ʒ/ | esponja |
| medieval adjetivo | /mɪdˈi.vəl/ | medieval |
| surgeon sustantivo | /ˈsɝd͡ʒən/ | cirujano, cirujana |
| sewer sustantivo | /ˈsuɚ/ | alcantarilla, cloaca |
| ammonia sustantivo | /əˈmoʊn.jə/ | amoníaco |
| antiseptic adjetivo | /ˌæntiˈsɛptɪk/ | antiséptico |
| stain sustantivo | /steɪn/ | mancha, lamparón |
| wipe verbo | /waɪp/ | enjugar, trapear |
| bucket sustantivo | /ˈbʌkɪt/ | balde, cubeta |
| genuinely adverbio | /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/ | auténticamente, genuinamente |
| amputate verbo | /ˈæmpjʊteɪt/ | amputar |
| bloodletting sustantivo | sangría, sangradura | |
| empirically adverbio | empíricamente |
Phrasal verbs que vas a escuchar
| Palabra | Significado |
|---|---|
| break down verbo | descomponerse, averiarse |
| figure out verbo | averiguar, captar |
| get back to verbo | responder / contestar (en un rato), volver / tornar a contactar |
| get off verbo | bajarse |
| go along with verbo | ir junto con |
| go through verbo | atravesar |
Gramática en este vídeo
Las estructuras que más usa el hablante, con las palabras exactas del vídeo:
| Estructura | En el vídeo |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — una acción que empezó antes y continúa | I've been using · have been mixing · have been bathing |
| Voz pasiva be + participio pasado — importa lo que ocurre, no quién lo hace | was called · were finished · was printed |
| Oraciones de relativo who / which + oración — información extra sobre una persona o cosa | someone who enjoys · water, which is · man who cut |
| Present perfect have/has + participio pasado — una acción pasada que sigue importando ahora | has been · have recovered |
Pronunciación a tener en cuenta
El hablante usa 15 contracciones y formas reducidas, como didn't, you're, weren't. Dilas en su forma corta, tal como las oyes.
- Los sonidos de “sh” y “zh”: civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, complication /ˌkɑm.pləˈkeɪ.ʃən/, unusually /ʌnˈjuːʒuəli/, decoration /ˌdɛkəˈɹeɪʃən/, shout /ʃaʊt/
- Palabras largas — cuida el acento: antiseptic /ˌæntiˈsɛptɪk/, genuinely /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/, intestinal /ɪnˈtɛs.tɪ.nəl/, mortality /mɔɹˈtælɪti/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/
Sonidos difíciles para hispanohablantes:
- s + consonante al inicio — sin añadir una “e” delante: sponge /spʌnd͡ʒ/, stain /steɪn/, scum /skʌm/, skeleton /ˈskɛlətən/
- /v/ — no es /b/: los dientes tocan el labio inferior: medieval /mɪdˈi.vəl/, excavate /ˈɛk.skə.veɪt/, vinegar /ˈvɪnəɡɚ/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, vein /veɪn/
- /z/ — sonora, no /s/: civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, examine /ɪɡˈzæmɪn/, unpleasant /ʌnˈplɛzn̩t/, browser /ˈbɹaʊ.zəɹ/, seasonal /ˈsiːzənəl/
Cómo practicar con este vídeo
- Escucha el vídeo entero una vez sin hablar y anota las palabras que no conoces.
- Empieza a velocidad 0,75×, haz shadowing frase por frase y vuelve a la velocidad normal cuando te resulte fácil.
- Grábate y compara con el original, prestando atención a palabras como urine, worm, sponge.
¿Qué es la Técnica de Shadowing?
Shadowing es una técnica de aprendizaje de idiomas respaldada por la ciencia, desarrollada originalmente para la formación de intérpretes profesionales y popularizada por el políglota Dr. Alexander Arguelles. El método es simple pero poderoso: escuchas audio en inglés nativo y lo repites en voz alta de inmediato, como una sombra que sigue al hablante con solo 1-2 segundos de retraso. A diferencia de la escucha pasiva o los ejercicios de gramática, el shadowing obliga a tu cerebro y músculos de la boca a procesar y reproducir simultáneamente patrones de habla reales. Las investigaciones muestran que mejora significativamente la precisión de la pronunciación, la entonación, el ritmo, el habla conectada, la comprensión auditiva y la fluidez al hablar, convirtiéndola en una de las metodologías más efectivas para la preparación del IELTS Speaking y la comunicación en inglés en el mundo real.