Pratique du Shadowing: how language shapes the way we think - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo
Création de la leçon...
1
Hi, sweet beans.
2
Welcome back to Wild Geese.
3
I'm your host, Anna.
4
And today we're talking about how the limits of our language are the limits of our world.
5
And I have to say, I had kind of a hard time with this one because a lot of this is like linguistics.
6
I don't know anything about linguistics.
7
I never took a linguistics class in college, but there were a couple of little curiosities that were making me interested in how language might change our worldview.
8
So I had had a couple of conversations in a row
9
with friends where we were talking about how the English language often feels like it's trying to
10
compartmentalize us into these like static identities the way
11
that we talk about even our emotions we say I am sad versus saying something like I am experiencing sadness
12
or like when we think of attachment theory we say I am avoidant I am anxious versus I am exhibiting anxious behaviors.
13
I am exhibiting avoidant behaviors.
14
And I want to be cognizant of the fact
15
that a good amount of the people that listen to wild geese do not speak English as a first language.
16
So I will be really interested to hear y'all's perspective on all of this.
17
But because I only speak English fluently, I think that that dramatically limits my worldview.
18
I have really been trying to learn Spanish lately and in the spirit of learning something new, thank you to today's sponsor, Craftsy.
19
Craftsy is your online resource for all things creative.
20
You can experience the satisfaction and joy of creating something truly one of a kind with your own two hands.
21
I've personally taken classes like Kawaiyami Gurumi Crochet with Stacey Troc or How to Draw Trees with Ethan Culliton.
22
I recently took Judith Castle Mamet's class, Expressive Pages, Journaling Me Every Day, because I'm becoming really interested in analog archival and getting things off the internet,
23
but I've never quite been happy with the junk journal pages that I've made in the past.
24
But Judith had some really incredible tips for dealing with mixed media.
25
She even has a section on how to do more interactive elements like pop-up pages, which was really cool.
26
And I know that it'll just make it that much more special to look back on old memories.
27
Craftsy classes include step-by-step instruction, plus helpful downloadable resources to make learning easy.
28
So whether you're looking to paint, bake, or write, Craftsy's got you covered
29
and they're always creating new classes to keep you coming back for more and help you stay inspired.
30
The first 1000 of you to click the link in the
31
episode description will get a full year of premium membership to Craftsy for only $1.49 valid for new members only.
32
But anyway, I've been trying to learn Spanish for years.
33
I hope one day that I can really seriously immerse myself in the language in a way
34
that I haven't been able to yet.
35
But another thing that made me curious about all of this is that I started using the app language transfer.
36
And I talked about this a little bit on the vlog that I put out the other day.
37
But language transfer is so cool
38
because it takes what you already know from your language
39
and transfers it over into the language you're trying to learn instead of just teaching you a bunch of vocabulary words.
40
And it also gives you a lot of linguistic background that apps like Duolingo just never do.
41
I'm going to be quick about this because it's kind of a sidebar, but it's very fascinating to me.
42
There's a rule that applies for many, many words in the English language that end in T-I-O-N, that you can just transfer that right over into Spanish by changing it into C-I-O-N.
43
So imagination, for example, would be imaginación.
44
Please forgive my pronunciation.
45
And then from there, you can find thousands of Spanish verbs by just changing the ending from C-I-O-N to A-R.
46
And changing that ending would take imagination and turn it into to imagine.
47
So then it's imaginar.
48
And you can do this with so many words.
49
You can take conversation and it becomes conversación and then that becomes conversar, like on and on and on.
50
And something that was very striking to me as I was listening to my language transfer lessons is
51
that if you take the word experimentation, transfer it over into Spanish into experimentación and then switch it to the verb,
52
which is experimentar, then that means to experiment, but it also means to experience.
53
So the words for to experience and to experiment are the same in Spanish.
54
And the teacher was kind of just talking about how
55
that could be a little bit of a life lesson in and of itself.
56
Like those simple words are a particular way of experiencing the world around you.
57
So those were like the first seeds of curiosity that this episode was born from.
58
And around the same time that I was getting curious about this, my boyfriend was also getting curious about it, but in a very different way.
59
And I just thought it was interesting when I started researching how my curiosities went in a different direction than his did.
60
So like a couple of weeks ago, he went down a rabbit hole about proto-indo-european, which if you haven't heard of proto-indo-european,
61
I will let you do your own research about that because I don't want to get too off topic here.
62
But basically what was happening was that he was getting curious about a branch of linguistics called comparative historical linguistics.
63
And I was so impressed with the way his brain worked because basically he fell down this rabbit hole.
64
And then the next day he was able to like pull up a map
65
and like show me the ways that these languages have been tracked through history.
66
Like it was mind blowing to me, But also my brain doesn't latch on to that in the same way that it does for him.
67
The thing about linguistics that ended up really pulling me in is what I learned to be called linguistic relativity.
68
And I think when I first sat down to do the research for this episode, I was kind of trying to force my curiosity to go in a similar direction that his did.
69
And our brains were just pointing us towards different like lines of inquiry, you know, so I kind of had to just drop that for a second.
70
And I actually had a listener who suggested the podcast Lingthusiasm, specifically the Sapir-Whorf episode.
71
And according to the dictionary, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a hypothesis first advanced by Edward Sapir in 1929 and subsequently developed by Benjamin Worf,
72
that the structure of a language determines a native speaker's perception and categorization of experience.
73
And this was kind of the beginning of the linguistic relativity branch of linguistics.
74
Quick correction, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was not the beginning of the branch of linguistics that is linguistic relativity.
75
It was a continuation of a conversation that happened more towards the 19th century.
76
And that's kind of where I want to focus today, because this is really getting me curious about what other linguistic lessons are out there hiding in other languages.
77
So I want to talk about how the language we speak changes our actual sense of morality.
78
I want to talk about how niche internet subcultures is kind of like fracturing the English language
79
and making it harder and harder for two people who still speak the same language to even understand each other.
80
And I just want to out front say, I think the thing that I got out of all of this research
81
that is like the most clear to me is
82
that indigenous wisdom can be found in languages that were systematically and violently disappeared by colonizers.
83
And I genuinely think centering and and listening to Indigenous voices would not only heal
84
that aspect of personhood that I was talking about at the very beginning, but it would also heal our relationship with the earth.
85
You know we're going to talk about braiding sweetgrass today.
86
So let's start with some conceptual metaphors that are really prevalent within the English language specifically.
87
Eleanor Stern has a fantastic sub-stack essay called The Hatred of Metaphor,
88
where she goes into how different writers who use metaphor differently conceptualize the world differently.
89
So she's really staying within the English language in this essay, and she's talking about how there are people who write really flowery prose
90
and there are people who are much more straightforward
91
and conversational in their writing but that doesn't necessarily mean
92
that people who are more straightforward and conversational use less metaphors
93
because metaphors are so prevalent in our language and three of the metaphors
94
that she zeros in on our argument is war time is money
95
and status is height she says we talk about argument through the framework the conceptual metaphor
96
that argument is war among the examples they list he demolished my argument i've never won an argument with him Meanwhile, time is money.
97
You're wasting my time.
98
He's living on borrowed time.
99
We also metaphorically map a huge variety of concepts onto the directions up and down to give an abridged list.
100
Health.
101
His health declined.
102
Rose from the dead.
103
Happiness.
104
Being in high spirits versus being depressed.
105
Consciousness.
106
Waking up.
107
Falling asleep.
108
Status.
109
Upward mobility versus the bottom of the hierarchy.
110
And so many metaphors that we use are so baked into our language
111
that they don't even really register as metaphors anymore
112
but this reminded me of an irish proverb
113
that i'm not going to try to say
114
because i don't know the language and i don't want to butcher it
115
but it translates to time is a good storyteller
116
which is an entirely different way of looking at time
117
and i just wonder how our perception of time must change when we look at it as money versus a storyteller
118
Those two things flow very differently in my mind.
119
Brianna Nielengshag over on Substack actually has a few posts that are really interesting about the Irish language.
120
And the Irish language actually answers that initial piece of discomfort with the English language that I was talking about,
121
about how we talk about our emotions as if they are a piece of our static identity.
122
And she says, in the Irish language, we are not our emotions.
123
We are not sad or anxious.
124
we have sadness or anxiety on us.
125
To say I am sad, we say, and please forgive me, I am sure I'm going to butcher this, tabran orm, there is sadness on me.
126
I am anxious, ta imni orm, there is anxiety on me.
127
The language recognizes these as passing states, not permanent fixtures of who we are.
128
Now put a pin in the fact that the Irish language is nearly extinct, and that's not a coincidence.
129
That's a of something called lingicide, aka language killing.
130
And I think when we can start to see these languages that have been systematically killed off
131
as like doors to a different way of seeing the world, versus just like a group of vocabulary words, I can start to understand why forces of colonization
132
that want me to think
133
that my time is something to sell would also find it very important to silence languages that offer a different perspective.
134
And there's a creator on TikTok named Words at Work, and he talks all about linguistics.
135
Highly recommend giving him a follow.
136
But he made a TikTok about how normalized it is to use words like illegal and delinquent.
137
He says, have you ever heard a really bad decision be described as criminal
138
or a kid who's a real jerk be described as a delinquent?
139
Much more blatantly, have you ever heard anyone be described as an illegal?
140
An illegal.
141
Think about that for a second.
142
Someone who's not just a criminal, but whose very personhood is an act of criminality because they dare to exist at the wrong place at the wrong time.
143
He says all of these examples rely on an understanding that legality and morality are the same.
144
And then this was back in 2024.
145
He brought up a proposition in California to bar slavery in any form in the state
146
and six and a half million people voted no. So they voted to keep slavery.
147
And why these people voted no is because slavery was being framed as punishment for a crime.
148
And he went on to say, which I think this kind of has to be the thesis of this episode, but he says, the state has the power of violence, but language has the power to normalize it.
149
And we need to be very conscious of that power.
150
Hi, day two of recording.
151
I got hungry and tired, but we're back now.
152
Anyway, this consciousness that I think is required to use language in a way
153
that doesn't turn violent brings me to the etymology of the word culture, because the word culture is actually an agricultural metaphor.
154
Edward S.
155
Casey wrote, the very word culture meant place tilled in Middle English.
156
And the same word goes back to Latin colere, to inhabit, care for, till, worship.
157
To be cultural, to have a culture is to inhabit a place sufficiently, intensely, to cultivate it, to be responsible for it,
158
to respond to it, to attend to it caringly.
159
And I don't know why when I first heard this, it like really struck me because it's interesting how metaphors are baked into words themselves.
160
And before this, I've never thought about what the actual word culture means, but it makes a lot of sense that it would mean basically to care for yourself and the people around you.
161
But I think the nature aspect of this metaphor opens it up to not just the people around you, but the place around you,
162
which gets us one step closer to what we're going to be talking about in a second, which is Robin Wall Kimmerer's idea of the grammar of animacy.
163
But before we get into that, I want to talk about this essay called The Balkanization and Babelification of the Internet by Ru Yi and Ruby Justice Thalat.
164
And they say, the pace at which we're creating new words, then recontextualizing their meanings in hyperbolic meme
165
and joke formats is moving faster than ever before in our age of relentless online discourse.
166
As we're fed more content, we are pushed deeper into algorithmic niches.
167
In return, we are encouraged to engage with more extreme and polarizing identifiers because it is more labelable, more indexable by the machine,
168
the creation of the quote-unquote island.
169
Babelification is the process by which, after splintering, insular digital groups develop unique languages,
170
which makes reintegration and shared digital spaces difficult, if not impossible.
171
When someone believes their insular language in online echo chambers is commonplace reality, clashes ensue when
172
that same individual is placed in a context where other people aren't privy to their language
173
because they are fundamentally misunderstanding one another.
174
And this is really interesting to think about because I feel like sometimes this happens even in my own comment section.
175
Sometimes people say something and I'm like, yeah, that is technically English, but what you just said is so decontextualized for me.
176
I have no idea what you're talking about.
177
And I think we just got a very clear example of the real life implications of this with the Charlie Kirk case, with the things that were written on the bullet casings.
178
And then everyone in the internet kind of flooding the space to be like, I think this is what it means.
179
I think this is what it means.
180
This is what people are saying in discord servers
181
and trying to trace back these like meme-ified sayings to some sort of semblance of meaning.
182
So you've got people that think that they're saying something intelligible, but they're actually so like up in the clouds that the people on the ground have no idea what they're saying.
183
This is really where the alt-right pipeline gets tricky
184
because you've got dog whistles that are burrowed into these memes that only some people in the group can recognize.
185
The definition of a dog whistle is the use of coded
186
or suggestive language in political messaging to garner support from a particular group.
187
And it's interesting that this is a tactic whose very title is a dehumanizing metaphor.
188
By nature, this is meant to isolate.
189
So I don't think the answer is like beating them at their own game and like making our own exclusionary languaging.
190
Instead, I think the response to dog whistles needs to be running in the opposite direction, which is finding some sort of uniting factor
191
that can bring the English language back to something
192
that helps to humanize people and the land that they live on
193
and all of the living beings that they live in community with instead of doubling down on dog whistles.
194
So that brings me to Braiding Sweetgrass, my favorite part of this entire conversation.
195
I have talked about Braiding Sweetgrass so much.
196
I read it years ago and I still go back and read it like it's my Bible.
197
And as I was researching for this episode, I remembered a chapter in Braiding Sweetgrass where Robin Wall Kimmerer
198
is talking about her experience of trying to learn the Potawatomi language.
199
And Robin is coming from the perspective of a botanist who's also part of the Potawatomi nation.
200
And she talks at the beginning of the chapter about how the language of science kind of falls short
201
because so much of it is based around just labeling things that we can see.
202
And the thing that originally got her interested in learning Potawatomi was one word, and that word was papawi.
203
And this is what she writes.
204
Papawi, she explains, translates as the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.
205
As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed.
206
In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery.
207
You'd think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life.
208
But in scientific language, our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing.
209
What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.
210
And she goes to this convention of speakers, and it's like the first time
211
that all of the native Pottawatomie speakers will be in the same room together and however long.
212
And at the time that this book was written, there were nine native speakers left.
213
Robin says, English is a noun-based language, somehow appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things.
214
Only 30% of English words are verbs, but in Pottawatomie that proportion is 70%.
215
And then she goes on to tell this story about how the first time
216
that she saw Saturday talked about in pottawatomie it actually kind of really annoyed her
217
because you wouldn't say it's saturday you would say to be a saturday
218
and she was like this makes no sense she was like you can't be a saturday
219
or to be a bay she was like you can't be
220
a bay it was hard to wrap her brain around
221
that making grammatical sense but she goes on to say a bay is a noun only
222
if water is dead but the verb wikwagama to be a bay releases the water from bondage
223
and lets it live to be a hill to be a
224
sandy beach to be a saturday all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive
225
water land and even a day the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world the life
226
that pulses throughout all things through pines and nut hatches and mushrooms This is the language I hear in the woods.
227
This is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.
228
In Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family,
229
because they are our family.
230
And I want to come back to the thing
231
that Robin said about English being primarily nouns and how that makes sense for a culture that's so obsessed with things.
232
So much of Robin's work is about rewiring our understanding of the world around us
233
so that we can see our responsibility in everything we touch.
234
We've talked about how language can enable us to dehumanize other people, and that also extends to the quote-unquote things that surround us.
235
Language can also enable us to devalue and denigrate the ground beneath our feet.
236
And I don't want to get too preachy about overconsumption, but the way that we are spending our money can mean the difference between life
237
and death for the living beings that we share this earth with.
238
And that's a huge responsibility on our part.
239
And I'm not just talking about the environment.
240
Like if you have been paying attention, then you just saw what happened with Jimmy Kimmel and Disney
241
and all of the boycotts against Disney and how Jimmy Kimmel came back because of the mass boycotts.
242
Like Disney lost billions of dollars.
243
And I think if we're serious about wanting serious change, we do need to change our thought processes to stop seeing the quote unquote things around us as just things.
244
Robin talks about how in Potawatomi, if, for example, you saw a plant, you wouldn't ask, what is it? you would say, who is that?
245
And I was recently reading another book that Robin wrote called The Service Berry.
246
She says, how we think ripples out to how we behave.
247
If we view these berries or that spring as an object, as property, it can be exploited as a commodity in a market economy.
248
When something moves from the status of gift to the status of commodity, we can become detached from mutual responsibility.
249
And that's kind of getting into the more broad idea of a gift economy that she lays out in The Service Berry.
250
Highly recommend going to check it out.
251
But I want to unpack this idea
252
that how we think ripples out to how we behave
253
and go back to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that I was talking about before.
254
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis goes deeper than just suggesting that the way that we speak changes the way that we think.
255
It goes as far as to say that the way that we speak changes the way that we actually perceive reality.
256
And there's a bit of controversy around this hypothesis that I will admit I'm not totally sure that I completely grasp.
257
So linguists, please sound off in the comments when I inevitably misspeak.
258
But there's an article on ION called Our Language, Our World, which touches on the disagreements about this idea within the world of linguistics.
259
It says, switching between languages, we may feel as if we're stepping from one world into another.
260
But is this just an illusion?
261
Does each language really embody a different worldview or even dictate specific patterns of thought to its speakers?
262
there's a recurring skepticism around linguistic relativity, engendered not only by the difficulties of pinning it down,
263
but by a deep-seated ambivalence about the assumptions and implications of relativistic doctrines.
264
Which, when I read that, I was like, it totally makes sense that the thing
265
that I would be the most curious about is the thing that's the most difficult to pin down in absolutes.
266
But like, of course, questions about the way that people perceive the world are going to be very hard to quantify.
267
So in the 1940s, Benjamin Lee Worf actually did this study with the Hopi people where he concluded
268
that the Hopi have no concept of time because they have, quote, no words, grammatical forms,
269
construction, or expressions that refer directly to what we call time.
270
And basically, there were a lot of flaws about this study that I don't really understand because I am not a scientist.
271
From my understanding, this was pretty quickly disproven.
272
And I guess the sort of like mishandling of that study really helped to fuel the fire of skepticism around linguistic relativity.
273
But in that essay, Our Language, Our World, Sam Dresser says, linguists and psychologists who could not ignore these questions have brought relativity back into academic mainstream and delivered solid results.
274
To name just one example, in ongoing cutting-edge work, researchers have shown
275
that certain languages may allow speakers to unlock senses
276
that are the common possession of all humans but remain unutilized by most people.
277
And the example he uses, this is really interesting, is that in the Gurindji language, which is spoken in northern Australia,
278
they use the cardinal directions not just on a geographical scale but also to locate things on their body.
279
So say a fly landed on your right leg and that was oriented towards the west.
280
The way that they would talk about that is they would say, this is the outer upper west of my leg.
281
The fly landed here on my leg, which just makes my brain hurt because I'm so bad at directions.
282
I can't even conceptualize the cardinal directions when I'm walking down the street, let alone think about where that's placed on my body at any given moment.
283
But Dresser says, we are all, in a sense, compasses.
284
English speakers are, for the most part, not consciously aware of this, even though their brain activity changes when surrounding magnetic fields are manipulated under experimental conditions.
285
Recent experiments by the Australian linguist Felicity Meekins and her collaborators have shown
286
that some Guringi speakers can reliably report on shifts in ambient magnetic fields.
287
Guringi speakers' habit of using cardinal directions would seem to have opened up their powers of perception.
288
At least some Gurungi speakers may be able to consciously feel Earth's magnetic field.
289
So what that means to me is that language can change the way you experience living in your body, not just your thoughts about the world around you.
290
And Berlaine Co on Sevstack has an essay called Babailan Bai Bai Leng, The National Colonial Amnesia.
291
And she writes about the Babailans from the Visayan Islands and the Catalonans in the Tagalong regions.
292
They say these were women, sometimes men or queer individuals too, who embodied spiritual power.
293
They weren't just priestesses.
294
They were feared, respected, and untouchable.
295
Many were women, but many were also effeminate men, and what we might now call transgender women, people who presented femininity in ways that held sacred meaning.
296
In pre-colonial society, they weren't mocked or sidelined.
297
They were central.
298
And this, of course, reminds me of two spirits in Native American culture.
299
Trans people have always existed, and there are multiple indigenous cultures throughout the world that have this deep, innate wisdom that that should be revered and not othered.
300
But this essay says, colonizers didn't understand that.
301
In their world, gender was binary, woman or man, nothing in between.
302
So when they saw the violence leading villages and rituals while dressed in feminine attire, they saw a threat, a disruption to their system.
303
And like so many things they didn't understand, they labeled it unnatural and sought to erase it.
304
Now, I've been thinking about this quote from Kenneth Hale, who's a linguist at MIT.
305
And he says, losing a language is like dropping a bomb on a museum.
306
And when I first read that, it rang as true.
307
But I think talking through all of this, it's clear to me that language is much more than that.
308
Language is a somatic, bodily thing.
309
And when I think about a museum, I think about archival, I think about display.
310
I don't necessarily think about the lived bodily experience.
311
Whether that's the experience of feeling the gravitational pull of the earth on your body,
312
or feeling what it is to be a trans person that's not only accepted by the language that's being used, but is centralized in it.
313
Going back to the article about the Babailans, they say the Babailan carried identity not just in words, but in gesture, song, and ritual.
314
These were embodied truths, not textbooks.
315
Indigenous memory was, and still is, a full-body practice.
316
And that reminds me of something
317
that was said at the end of the essay about how our internet niche subcultures are fracturing the English language.
318
And the solution that that essay put forward for
319
that problem was basically that we need to get reconnected with human touch in order to bridge
320
that gap being created by all of these internet niche subculture discord languages
321
that are ultimately isolating us from the community right in front of us.
322
And when I first read that conclusion, I was like, hmm, I don't know how convincing that is for me.
323
Like, I don't know.
324
For some reason, I was just like, okay, so we're not understanding each other's use of the English language, so we should all touch each other more?
325
Like, it just wasn't clicking to me.
326
And I'm still not totally sure what the answer to that problem is.
327
But I think something I think I'm hoping to do is listen more to Indigenous wisdom so that I can,
328
like, I don't know, embody a worldview beyond what the English language automatically gives me.
329
And I'm just going to go back to Braiding Sweetgrass for a second
330
and read the end of the chapter on the grammar of animacy.
331
She says, I'm not advocating that we all learn Pottawatomie or Hopi or Seminole, even if we could.
332
Immigrants came to these shores bearing a legacy of languages all to be cherished, but to become native to this place, if we are to survive here and our neighbors too,
333
Our work is to learn to speak the grammar of animacy so
334
that we might truly be at home I remember the words
335
of bill tall bull a cheyenne elder as a young person I spoke to him with a heavy heart lamenting
336
that I had no native language with which to speak to the plants
337
and the places that I love They love to hear the old language.
338
He said it's true
339
But he said with fingers on his lips You don't have to speak it here if you speak it here.
340
He said patting his chest They will hear you
341
and I think that's a good thing to end on because I don't think that my point is you know, all of us need to go and learn a bunch of languages.
342
I mean, if you have the ability and the time to do that right now, that's amazing.
343
But I know a lot of people who are kind of in survival mode
344
and maybe the last thing on your mind is like going and learning languages.
345
But if that is the case for you, I still think even if you don't know a different language or you don't have time to learn one,
346
there's a lot that can be gained from listening to and centering Indigenous wisdom.
347
Not to go back to using the time is money metaphor, but if you are feeling a bit too time poor to pour into learning a new language,
348
maybe you can just start listening for ways
349
that you can use the language that you already speak
350
and ways that bring you back into your own body and back into communion with the place around you.
351
We don't all have to live in the clouds and forget how to talk to each other.
352
Anyways, this was a lot and I am sweating.
353
So glad that I just told you that.
354
that's all I have today.
355
I feel like this topic was maybe a little bit heavier than usual, but I had a lot of fun researching about it.
356
I feel like I learned so much, and I hope you did too, and I will talk to you in two weeks.
357
Bye.
✨ Vidéo recommandée
B2153 phrases
Who Can Make You Speak English Fluently?
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B23
526 phrases
you are constantly changing and that's brilliant!!
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B22
32 phrases
Crash Course Linguistics Preview
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
104 phrases
Why I Quit Learning Languages
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B2142 phrases
#001 Well, hello there engineers
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B21
195 phrases
What Happens to Language When AI Can Speak for Us?
British AccentDaily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B2507 phrases
Modern identity labels | Intermediate-advanced English listening | Chatterbox 331
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B22
484 phrases
English Podcast For Learning English | Real English Conversation Practice |The Power of Not Reacting
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B11
74 phrases
All Ears English Podcast 04 Deep Thoughts Thursday Inspiration to Keep Learning
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B27
63 phrases
How to think in English and speak fluently?（Tips from someone learning English for over 10 years ）
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B21
393 phrases
Chatterbox #311 – The Taylor Swift effect
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
306 phrases
2389 - Everyday English You Should Use Every Day
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
Vocabulaire et conseils d’expression pour cette leçon
Cette leçon d’expression orale de niveau B2 s’appuie sur la vidéo « how language shapes the way we think ». Cette vidéo contient 357 phrases et 5431 mots à répéter en shadowing. La partie parlée dure 27:22. Le locuteur parle vite, environ 198 mots par minute : attendez-vous à des liaisons et à des sons réduits. Seuls 80 % des mots font partie des 3 000 mots les plus courants en anglais, le vocabulaire est donc exigeant.
Vocabulaire clé de cette vidéo
Les 15 mots les plus avancés de la vidéo, avec leur prononciation et leur sens :
| Mot | Prononciation | Sens |
|---|---|---|
| metaphor nom | /ˈmɛt.ə.fɚ/ | métaphore |
| linguistics nom | /lɪŋˈɡwɪstɪks/ | linguistique |
| linguistic adjectif | /lɪŋˈɡwɪstɪk/ | linguistique, lingual |
| indigenous adjectif | /ɪnˈdɪd͡ʒənəs/ | inné, congénital |
| relativity nom | /ɹɛl.əˈtɪv.ɪ.ti/ | relativité |
| hypothesis nom | /haɪˈpɒθɪsɪs/ | hypothèse |
| braid nom | /bɹeɪd/ | tresse, natte |
| verb nom | /vɝb/ | verbe |
| animacy nom | animéité, animacité | |
| embody verbe | /ɪmˈbɒdi/ | incarner, personnifier |
| linguist nom | /ˈlɪŋɡwɪst/ | linguiste |
| worldview nom | vision du monde | |
| curiosity nom | /ˌkjʊɹ.iˈɑ.sə.ti/ | curiosité |
| anxious adjectif | /ˈæŋkʃəs/ | inquiet |
| vocabulary nom | /vəˈkæb.jə.lə.ɹi/ | vocabulaire, lexique |
Les verbes à particule que vous entendrez
| Mot | Prononciation | Sens |
|---|---|---|
| bring up verbe | élever | |
| come back verbe | revenir | |
| end up verbe | se terminer, se finir | |
| fall down verbe | /fɔl ˈdaʊn/ | tomber |
| go back verbe | rentrer, retourner | |
| go down verbe | descendre | |
| open up verbe | ouvrir | |
| pop up verbe | se pointer |
Des phrases à répéter
Des phrases courtes et complètes de la vidéo, à réutiliser dans la conversation de tous les jours :
- I don't know anything about linguistics.
- I got hungry and tired, but we're back now.
- I have no idea what you're talking about.
- I don't necessarily think about the lived bodily experience.
La grammaire de cette vidéo
Les structures que le locuteur utilise le plus, avec les mots exacts de la vidéo :
| Structure | Dans la vidéo |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continu have/has been + -ing — une action commencée avant et toujours en cours | have really been trying · I've been trying · have been paying |
| Present perfect have/has + participe passé — une action passée qui compte encore maintenant | I've made · haven't been · haven't heard |
| Voix passive be + participe passé — l’accent est mis sur ce qui arrive, pas sur qui le fait | was born · have been tracked · be called |
| Propositions relatives who / which + proposition — une précision sur une personne ou une chose | pages, which was · people who still · people who write |
Prononciation à surveiller
Le locuteur utilise 77 contractions et formes réduites, comme don't, I'm, we're. Prononcez-les sous leur forme courte, telles que vous les entendez.
- Les sons « sh » et « zh »: anxious /ˈæŋkʃəs/, perception /pɚˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/, emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/, conversational /ˌkɒnvə(ɹ)ˈseɪʃənəl/, implication /ˌɪmpləˈkeɪʃən/
- Mots longs — placez bien l’accent: indigenous /ɪnˈdɪd͡ʒənəs/, relativity /ɹɛl.əˈtɪv.ɪ.ti/, hypothesis /haɪˈpɒθɪsɪs/, curiosity /ˌkjʊɹ.iˈɑ.sə.ti/, vocabulary /vəˈkæb.jə.lə.ɹi/
Les sons difficiles pour les francophones :
- /h/ — il se souffle, il n’est pas muet: hypothesis /haɪˈpɒθɪsɪs/, inhabit /ɪnˈhæbɪt/, personhood /ˈpɝ.sən.hʊd/, behave /bɪˈheɪv/, heal /ˈhiːl/
- /tʃ/ et /dʒ/ — à ne pas adoucir en « ch » et « j »: indigenous /ɪnˈdɪd͡ʒənəs/, niche /nɪt͡ʃ/, subculture /ˈsʌbˌkʌltʃɚ/, fracture /ˈfɹæk.t͡ʃʰəː/, butcher /ˈbʊt͡ʃə/
- /r/ anglais — langue recourbée, sans frotter la gorge: relativity /ɹɛl.əˈtɪv.ɪ.ti/, braid /bɹeɪd/, curiosity /ˌkjʊɹ.iˈɑ.sə.ti/, vocabulary /vəˈkæb.jə.lə.ɹi/, grammar /ˈɡɹæm.ə(ɹ)/
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 metaphor, linguistics, linguistic.
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.