Shadowing Practice: Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language - Learn English Speaking with Video

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For me, it's a cause of some upset that more anglophones don't enjoy language.

Music is enjoyable, it seems,

so are dance and other athletic forms of movement.

People seem to be able to find sensual and sensuous pleasure in almost anything but words these days.

Words, it seems, belong to other people.

Anyone who expresses themselves with originality,

delight and verbal freshness is more likely to be mocked,

distrusted or disliked than welcomed.

The free and happy use of words appears to be considered elitist or pretentious.

Sadly, desperately sadly,

the only people who seem to bother with language in public today bother with it in quite the wrong way.

They write letters to broadcasters and newspapers in which they are rude and haughty about other people's usage,

and in which they show off their own superior knowledge of how language should be.

I hate that, and I particularly hate the fact that so many of these pedants assume that I'm on their side.

When asked to join in a let's persuade this supermarket chain to get rid of their five items or less sign,

I never join in.

Yes, I am aware of the technical distinction between less

and fewer and between uninterested and disinterested and infer and imply

and all the rest of them but none of these are of importance to me.

None of these are of importance, I said there.

You'll notice the old pedantic me would have insisted on none of them is of importance.

Well, I'm glad to say I've outgrown that silly approach to language.

Oscar Wilde, and there have been few greater and more complete lords of language in the past thousand years,

once included with a manuscript he was delivering to his publishers a compliment slip,

in which he had scribbled the injunction,

I'll leave you to tidy up the woulds and shoulds,

wills and shalls, that's and which's,

etc. Which gives us all encouragement to feel less guilty, don't you think?

There are all kinds of pedants around,

with more time to read and imitate Lynn Truss and John Humphreys than to write poems,

love letters, novels and stories, it seems.

They whip out their sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs,

shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings,

But do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language?

Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their

tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy, euphoric bliss?

Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound sex of it?

Do they use language to seduce,

charm, excite, please, affirm, and tickle those they talk to?

Do they?

I doubt it.

Their two farting busy sneering at a greengrocer's less than perfect use of the apostrophe.

Well, sod them to Hades.

They think they're guardians of language.

They're no more guardians of language than the kennel club is the guardian of dog kind.

And the worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are

those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs.

How dense and deft a language development do you have to be?

If you don't like nouns becoming verbs,

then for heaven's sake avoid Shakespeare,

who made a doing word out of a thing word every chance he got.

He tabled the motion and chaired the meeting in which nouns were made verbs.

I suppose new examples from our time might take some getting used to.

He actioned it that day,

for instance, strike some as a verbing too far,

but we've been sanctioning, envisioning,

propositioning, and stationing for a long time, so why not actioning?

Because it's ugly, whinge the pedants.

Well, it's only ugly because it's new and you don't like it.

Ugly in the way Picasso,

Stravinsky, and Eliot were once thought ugly,

and before them Monet, Mahler, and Baudelaire.

Pedants will also claim, with what I'm sure is eye-popping insincerity and shameless disingenuousness,

that their fight is only for clarity.

Well, this is all very well,

but there's no doubt what,

for example, five items or less means.

Just as only adult can't tell from the context

and from the age

and education of the speaker whether disinterested is used in the proper sense of non-partisan or in the improper sense of uninterested.

No, the claim to be defending language for the sake of

clarity almost never ever holds water nor does the idea

that following grammatical rules in language demonstrates clarity of thought and intelligence of mind.

Having said this, I admit that if you want to communicate well for the sake of passing an exam or job interview,

then it's obvious that wildly original and excessively heterodox language could land you in the soup.

I think what offends examiners and employers when confronted with extremely informal,

unpunctuated and haywire language is the implication of not caring that underlies it.

You slip into a suit for an interview and you dress your language up too.

You can wear what you like linguistically or sartorily when you're at home or with friends,

but most people accept the need to smarten up under some circumstances.

It's only considerate.

But that's an issue of fitness, of suitability.

It has nothing to do with correctness.

There's no right language or wrong language any more than there are right or wrong clothes.

Context, convention and circumstance are all.

I can't deny that a small part of me still clings to a ghastly Radio 4 newspaper letter-writer pedantry,

but I fight against it.

In much the same way,

I try to fight against my gluttony,

anger, selfishness, and other vices.

I must confess, for example,

that I find it hard not to wince when someone aspirates the word,

and it is a word, H-A-I-T-C-H.

Thank you.

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Vocabulario y notas de pronunciación para esta lección

Esta lección de conversación de nivel C2 se basa en el vídeo “Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language”. Las palabras que más se repiten: language, word, seem, pedants, ugly. Este vídeo tiene 94 frases y 991 palabras para practicar shadowing. La parte hablada dura 6:16. El hablante habla a un ritmo natural de unas 158 palabras por minuto, cercano a una conversación cotidiana. Solo el 77 % 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
pedant sustantivo	/ˈpɛdənt/	pedante
verb sustantivo	/vɝb/	verbo
noun sustantivo	/naʊn/	nombre, nombre sustantivo
clarity sustantivo	/ˈklæɹ.ɪ.ti/	claridad
apostrophe sustantivo	/əˈpɑs.tɹə.fi/	apóstrofo, apóstrofe
disinterested adjetivo	/dɪsˈɪnt(ə)ɹəstəd/	desinteresado, desinteresal
circumstance sustantivo	/ˈsɝ.kəmˌstæns/	circunstancia, tesitura
affirm verbo	/əˈfɝm/	afirmar
aspirate verbo	/ˈæs.pə.ɹeɪt/	aspirar, chupar
considerate adjetivo	/kənˈsɪdəɹət/	considerado
correctness sustantivo		corrección
disingenuousness sustantivo		desingenuidad
distrust sustantivo	/dɪsˈtɹʌst/	desconfianza, recelo
envision verbo	/ɪnˈvɪʒn̩/	imaginar, visualizar
euphoric adjetivo	/juˈfɔɹɪk/	eufórico, euforizante

Phrasal verbs que vas a escuchar

Palabra	Pronunciación	Significado
show off verbo		chulear, lucir
take away verbo	/ˌteɪk əˈweɪ/	quitar

Gramática en este vídeo

Las estructuras que más usa el hablante, con las palabras exactas del vídeo:

Estructura	En el vídeo
Voz pasiva be + participio pasado — importa lo que ocurre, no quién lo hace	be mocked · be considered · being irritated
Oraciones de relativo who / which + oración — información extra sobre una persona o cosa	Anyone who expresses · people who seem · those who seem

Pronunciación a tener en cuenta

El hablante usa 16 contracciones y formas reducidas, como don't, I'm, can't. Dilas en su forma corta, tal como las oyes.

Los sonidos de “sh” y “zh”: envision /ɪnˈvɪʒn̩/, freshness /ˈfɹɛʃnəs/, injunction /ɪnˈd͡ʒʌŋk.ʃən/, preposition /ˌpɹɛpəˈzɪʃən/, pretentious /pɹɪˈtɛn.ʃəs/
Palabras largas — cuida el acento: apostrophe /əˈpɑs.tɹə.fi/, disinterested /dɪsˈɪnt(ə)ɹəstəd/, considerate /kənˈsɪdəɹət/, excessively /ɪkˈsɛsɪvli/, grammatical /ɡɹəˈmæt.ɪ.kəl/

Sonidos difíciles para hispanohablantes:

s + consonante al inicio — sin añadir una “e” delante: scribble /ˈskɹɪbəl/, slobber /ˈslɒbə(ɹ)/, smarten /ˈsmɑːt(ə)n/
/v/ — no es /b/: los dientes tocan el labio inferior: verb /vɝb/, envision /ɪnˈvɪʒn̩/, excessively /ɪkˈsɛsɪvli/, infinitive /ɪnˈfɪnɪtɪv/, verbal /ˈvɜː.bəl/
/z/ — sonora, no /s/: preposition /ˌpɹɛpəˈzɪʃən/, examiner /əɡˈzæmɪnɚ/, partisan /ˈpɑː.tɪˌzæn/, proposition /ˌpɹɑpəˈzɪʃən/, loser /luzɚ/

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 pedant, verb, noun.

¿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.

Técnica de shadowing: lee la guía completa paso a paso →

Shadowing Practice: Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language - Learn English Speaking with Video

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