Pratique du Shadowing: 2.03e Lost Custody Commentary - Effortless Original English - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo
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222 phrases
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Okay, this is the commentary for Lost Custody, the Dear Abby letter.
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This is an interesting letter.
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It reminds me of my old social work days.
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Before I became an English teacher, I was a social worker.
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And I had various jobs.
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I worked with runaway teenagers, homeless teenagers for a while.
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and I also worked for a short time in a government agency that would deal with custody, right?
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We would investigate children who had been abused and decide,
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you know, should the parents have custody or should the government take custody or should someone else have custody?
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To be honest, I hated that job and I quit pretty quickly.
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I did not last very long in that job.
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It was a horrible job.
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But no, I did have some other very nice social work jobs.
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In general, social work was fine, but that job in particular was pretty terrible, as you can imagine.
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A lot of terrible situations for the children, and sometimes I didn't agree.
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I didn't think that, you know, the government should take custody of some of the children.
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Anyway, really kind of a terrible situation.
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But anyway, in this letter, we've got this mother, young mother, and she's worried about losing custody of her child, her son.
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Now, some of the people who write Dear Abby, you will see, they're a little strange.
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Sometimes the letters, you know, they're kind of funny too, actually, sometimes.
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It's a little bit like watching Jerry Springer.
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Jerry Springer is a TV show here in America, and they get all these really crazy Americans with all these horrible,
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terrible problems, and they get on the show and they argue and yell at each other.
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Well, Dear Abby is not that bad, but there's still a little bit of that in some of these letters where you're kind of thinking, you know, wow, these people are strange.
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I thought this was strange, for example, when the woman says in the second paragraph,
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on our honeymoon, Derek told me if I ever divorced him that he'd make sure he would get custody of our son.
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So that seems like a bad sign, doesn't it?
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They're on their honeymoon.
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They just got married.
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And already the husband's threatening her and saying he's going to take the son if they get a divorce.
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Also from that sentence, I think we can realize that they already had a son when they got married.
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So she must have gotten pregnant and had the baby before they got married.
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or else they wouldn't be talking about this on their honeymoon, right?
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So anyway, that's a bad sign, right?
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They're on the honeymoon and they're already, he's threatening her already just on the honeymoon.
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So, uh-oh, bad sign.
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And then his mother, the mother-in-law, also threatened her saying, I'll tell the judge that you're an unfit mother if you ever try to leave my son.
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So, uh-oh, these are warning signs to me, right?
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I think if I'm in a relationship and the mother-in-law is threatening me if I leave, and the husband's threatening me if I leave, maybe that tells you something.
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Maybe this guy's not such a good guy.
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Maybe other women have left him many times in the past.
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Maybe both the husband and the mom realize he's a bad guy, and she probably will want to leave in the future.
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I don't know.
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That's what I understood when I read that second paragraph, that, uh-oh, bad sign, something's wrong already.
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And then, of course, we see that obviously there is something wrong, that the husband belittles her all the time.
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So, you know, when a husband belittles his wife, uh-oh, that's pretty terrible.
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Also a bad sign, right?
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He's saying terrible things, insulting his wife.
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Obviously, this is not a good guy.
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Okay, so in that first paragraph, she says, Derek refuses to support his family,
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meaning to support your family means to make money for your family.
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You know, you buy food for them, you make money, you work.
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We call all of that together, supporting your family.
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So he's obviously, he doesn't have a job, not for a year, and he won't support his family.
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Okay, so strike one, two, three.
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Now when we say that's a little bit of slang, you probably know, but when we say strike one, strike two, strike three, that comes from baseball.
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It's slang in American English.
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And if you get three strikes, it means you're finished, you're out, you're gone.
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So these are three very bad signs, right?
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The mother-in-law's threatening, the husband's threatening and he won't work.
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Okay, anyway, then she says, my son is my world, meaning my son is everything for me.
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He's everything in my life.
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I don't care about anything else.
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I only care about him.
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And the son won't let his father hold him.
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Okay, hold him in his arms.
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That's also a bad sign.
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But then the woman says, because I'm on disability, I don't know if I have a chance to get custody.
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And then she says, what should I do?
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Should I stick it out with my husband or should I take the chance of losing my son?
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Okay, now as a social worker, I've worked in this kind of situation in this field before.
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So this situation, we never know, right?
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With Dear Abby, we don't know the whole truth.
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Only one person's writing and they don't include all the information we need to give good advice.
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Now, Abby doesn't care.
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She gives advice anyway.
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But, you know, most of us would want to know more.
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For example, she's on disability.
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What does that mean?
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Well, because I've worked in social work, I know that disability might be something very serious, but I also know it could be something that's not serious.
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In the United States, some people can get disability if they have a mental problem.
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For example, they're very depressed.
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They're medically depressed.
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They're always depressed.
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Well, sometimes they get a lawyer and they can get disability.
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They can get money from the government because of that.
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Sometimes people who are alcoholics or drug addicts can get disability.
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They can get money from the government because they are alcoholics or drug addicts and they have a hard time working.
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So obviously these are not such serious physical problems.
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So this woman, we don't know.
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We have no idea.
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She might be in a wheelchair and can't walk, or she might be a former alcoholic.
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We really don't know what the disability is.
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And of course, it would be a big important point to know
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if she has disability because she has a mental problem that's very serious, maybe she's not a fit mother.
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Maybe she would be an unfit mother.
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However, if she has some just physical problem, obviously it's no problem at all.
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She could easily get her son.
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So it's hard to know what to tell this woman, right?
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I would say in normal situations in the United States, the mother has an advantage with custody.
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When they go to court, if everything is generally equal, the mother has a better chance to keep custody of the child.
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Now, is this fair?
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I don't know.
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We talked about this in my class in San Francisco.
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Some people said, well, that's not fair.
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And I don't know, is it fair or not?
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But it's true.
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And I don't know, I guess this has historical reasons.
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People just have this idea that, well, you know, mothers take care of children.
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They're better at taking care of children than fathers.
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Of course, that's not always true.
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But that is an idea that's in the United States and that is in the legal system,
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even in the courts, so that a mother often has an advantage against a father
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if they get a divorce and both want custody.
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The mother typically has an advantage.
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Now, many other things are important also, their income, what kind of person they are, that kind of thing.
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So it's complicated.
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But anyway, since this guy sounds quite bad, he hasn't worked for a year.
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He obviously has some problems.
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Probably this mother would get custody unless she has a serious mental problem.
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My guess is that if she went to court, she would get custody of the child.
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But anyway, but it's hard to know.
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We don't know the details.
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Well, okay.
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And then I guess I'll talk now a little bit about my social work background in general.
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When I worked in this field of custody, I worked for a place called the Department of Family and Children's Services in Georgia.
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Georgia is a state in the United States.
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Georgia is in the southeast, next to Florida.
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Atlanta is the big city in Georgia.
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And I got this job because I was desperate for money, to be honest.
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I had decided, in fact, to live in my van, live in my car for a while.
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Now, I did this by choice.
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No one forced me to do it.
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And I could get a job if I wanted to.
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But I just decided I wanted to live very, very simply.
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So I lived in my van for a while.
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And I gave away all my stuff, all my possessions I gave away.
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except for just a few clothes and things.
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And I wanted to see if I could live very, very simply without much money.
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However, at some point, I had no money at all.
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And I decided, oh, I better get a job.
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I better work a little bit, make some money.
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And I had a social work degree.
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I had a master's in social work.
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This was before I got a master's in teaching English.
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So it was very easy for me to get a job in social work.
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And especially the government agencies always need people.
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So I went and I got a job at the Department of Family and Children's Services.
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And the pay was great since I was living so simply.
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The money was nice.
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I needed the money.
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However, I quickly realized it was a very terrible organization.
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And the worst part for me was that the social workers,
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the workers, had such terrible attitudes about the people they were supposed to help.
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They thought they were stupid.
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They thought they were lowlifes, they would call them.
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Lowlife means a very low-status person.
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So they just had terrible, terrible attitudes about these people they were supposed to help.
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And they would insult them and belittle them.
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Not directly to them.
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They wouldn't belittle them directly.
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But talking to each other, the social workers would laugh and tell jokes and belittle the poor people who would come in.
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And indirectly, they would belittle the poor people themselves.
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You know, they didn't give them much respect.
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They did not give them the same respect that they gave people who had money.
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And this bothered me a lot, a lot, a lot.
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because as a social worker and as a teacher, I think that respect and equality are very,
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very important, especially as a social worker, because in a social work situation, these people have some serious problems.
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They might have economic problems.
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They don't have much money.
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They may have physical problems.
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They may have mental problems.
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Anyway, they're in a weak position.
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And because they're in a weak position, it's easy to put yourself above them and treat them badly,
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which is what a lot of these social workers were doing.
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But it's wrong.
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It's wrong to do that.
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And I felt very strongly it was wrong and that we had to try very hard to keep ourselves equal with them,
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treat them with the same exact respect we would treat anybody.
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I feel I give the same respect to my social work clients as I would Bill Gates or the president.
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In fact, for the president, I'd give more respect to the clients.
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Anyway, so I started to have kind of arguments with the social workers.
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I didn't agree with a lot of their approaches, a lot of their attitudes.
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And finally, I decided to quit.
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I decided I cannot work for this kind of organization that treats people so badly, especially people who need help.
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So I quit the job.
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And, you know, eventually I left social work.
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And this is mostly the reason when I tell people I was a social worker, I worked in the emergency room, or I worked with homeless people,
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everybody thinks, and I say, oh, I quit.
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It was too stressful.
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And everybody always thinks, oh, you quit because those people are terrible.
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You quit because it's hard to work with those people.
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But that's not true.
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That's not why I quit.
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I quit because I couldn't work with the other social workers.
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It was not the clients that I had problems with.
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Yes, the clients could be difficult, but I understood them.
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I understood they were having some serious life problems, and I felt respect for them because they were having such trouble and still surviving.
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I know that I could not survive some of those situations myself.
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I'm not that strong.
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So I had respect for my clients, even the very difficult ones, but what I could not respect were the other social workers who were so mean,
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so superior, so arrogant.
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I just found this again and again and again in many different organizations where they would treat their clients so badly.
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They're supposed to be helping them, but instead they're disrespecting them.
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And finally, I just decided, you know, I don't like this.
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I don't like working in these kinds of organizations i want
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to help people i do not want to belittle them
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and at the same time
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that this was happening you know i had gone abroad i lived in japan i lived in korea
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and i realized i love traveling and i loved meeting people from other countries
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and i became more and more interested in teaching
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and i loved it it's so much fun to every day i would go to school
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and go to class and I would meet people from other countries
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and learn from them and they would learn from me and it was just so much fun.
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I really loved it and finally I decided, you know, this is what I really love to do and social work's nice but I love teaching.
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It's my passion and this is what I want to do
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and so I went back to school and I got my master's degree in teaching English and I
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worked in Thailand for a while and started this website, etc. Anyway, so there's my life story in a nutshell in a very quick summary.
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All right, so that's all for today's commentary for the lost custody letter.
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More Dear Abby letters will be coming, and I hope you enjoyed this one.
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See you next time.
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Bye-bye.
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Vocabulaire et conseils d’expression pour cette leçon
Cette leçon d’expression orale de niveau B1 s’appuie sur la vidéo « 2.03e Lost Custody Commentary - Effortless Original English ». Les mots qui reviennent le plus souvent : custody, mother, worker, terrible, anyway. Cette vidéo contient 222 phrases et 2529 mots à répéter en shadowing. La partie parlée dure 15:23. Le locuteur parle à un rythme naturel d’environ 164 mots par minute, proche d’une conversation courante. 86 % des mots font partie des 3 000 mots les plus courants en anglais ; le reste mérite d’être vu avant de commencer.
Vocabulaire clé de cette vidéo
Les 15 mots les plus avancés de la vidéo, avec leur prononciation et leur sens :
| Mot | Prononciation | Sens |
|---|---|---|
| custody nom | /ˈkʌstədiː/ | garde |
| belittle verbe | /bɪˈlɪt.əl/ | déprécier, rabaisser |
| threaten verbe | /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/ | menacer |
| honeymoon nom | /ˈhʌn.iˌmuːn/ | lune de miel |
| litter nom | /ˈlɪt.ɚ/ | litière |
| alcoholic nom | /ˌæl.kəˈhɔ.lɪk/ | alcoolique |
| paragraph nom | /ˈpæɹəɡɹæf/ | paragraphe, alinéa |
| depressed adjectif | /dɪˈpɹɛst/ | déprimé, dépressif |
| sling nom | /ˈslɪŋ/ | fronde, bricole |
| unfit adjectif | /ʌnˈfɪt/ | inapte, incapable |
| addict nom | /ˈæd.ɪkt/ | dépendant, dépendante |
| insult nom | /ɪnˈsʌlt/ | insulte |
| teenager nom | /ˈtiːnˌeɪ̯d͡ʒə/ | adolescent, adolescente |
| nutshell nom | /ˈnʌt.ʃɛl/ | coque, coquille |
| runaway nom | /ˈɹʌnəweɪ/ | fugitif, fugueur |
Les verbes à particule que vous entendrez
| Mot | Sens |
|---|---|
| give away verbe | offrir, donner |
Des phrases à répéter
Des phrases courtes et complètes de la vidéo, à réutiliser dans la conversation de tous les jours :
- He's everything in my life.
- I don't care about anything else.
- We really don't know what the disability is.
- And I don't know, is it fair or not?
- We don't know the details.
La grammaire de cette vidéo
Les structures que le locuteur utilise le plus, avec les mots exacts de la vidéo :
| Structure | Dans la vidéo |
|---|---|
| Phrases conditionnelles if + proposition, will/would + verbe — une condition et son résultat | if I ever divorced him that he'd make · if she went to court, she would get |
| Propositions relatives who / which + proposition — une précision sur une personne ou une chose | children who had · people who write · people who are |
| Present perfect have/has + participe passé — une action passée qui compte encore maintenant | have left · I've worked · hasn't worked |
| Possibilité avec « might / may » might/may + verbe — quelque chose de possible mais pas certain | might be · might have · may have |
Prononciation à surveiller
Le locuteur utilise 57 contractions et formes réduites, comme don't, they're, you're. Prononcez-les sous leur forme courte, telles que vous les entendez.
- Les sons « th »: threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/, cloth /klɒθ/, southeast /sawˈθɪjst/
- Mots longs — placez bien l’accent: disability /dɪsəˈbɪlɪti/, alcoholic /ˌæl.kəˈhɔ.lɪk/, commentary /ˈkɑ.mənˌtɛ.ɹi/, indirectly /ˌɪn.dɪˈɹɛk(t).li/, equality /ɪˈkwɑ.lɪ.ti/
Les sons difficiles pour les francophones :
- /h/ — il se souffle, il n’est pas muet: honeymoon /ˈhʌn.iˌmuːn/, alcoholic /ˌæl.kəˈhɔ.lɪk/, wheelchair /ˈ(h)wilt͡ʃɛɹ/
- /tʃ/ et /dʒ/ — à ne pas adoucir en « ch » et « j »: teenager /ˈtiːnˌeɪ̯d͡ʒə/, wheelchair /ˈ(h)wilt͡ʃɛɹ/
- /r/ anglais — langue recourbée, sans frotter la gorge: threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/, paragraph /ˈpæɹəɡɹæf/, depressed /dɪˈpɹɛst/, commentary /ˈkɑ.mənˌtɛ.ɹi/, runaway /ˈɹʌnəweɪ/
Comment s’entraîner avec cette vidéo
- Écoutez la vidéo en entier une fois sans parler et notez les mots que vous ne connaissez pas.
- Commencez à la vitesse 0,75×, répétez phrase par phrase, puis revenez à la vitesse normale quand cela devient facile.
- Enregistrez-vous et comparez avec l’original, en faisant attention à des mots comme custody, belittle, threaten.
Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?
Le Shadowing est une technique d'apprentissage des langues fondée sur la science, développée à l'origine pour la formation des interprètes professionnels. Le principe est simple mais puissant : vous écoutez de l'anglais natif et le répétez immédiatement à voix haute — comme une ombre suivant le locuteur avec un décalage de 1 à 2 secondes. Les recherches montrent une amélioration significative de la précision de la prononciation, de l'intonation, du rythme, des liaisons, de la compréhension orale et de la fluidité.