Pratique du Shadowing: How to Stop Being Awkward in Small Talk (Elevator, Lunch & More) - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo

Création de la leçon...
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Smart talk is a part of English nobody teaches you in the textbooks, but everyone judges you on.
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You can ace a job interview, you can write an email that sounds like a native speaker wrote it.
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But the second someone at the work dinner says, "So, how was your weekend?" Your brain goes blank, right?
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You say, "Good, thank you." And then you both just stare at your plates.
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That's not a vocabulary problem.
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That's a smart talk problem.
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And for a long time, I assumed I was just bad at it until I built myself a system that actually fixed it.
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Here's the thing.
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I used to think Smart Talk was, you know, filler.
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It's useless, the stuff that you have to get through before the real conversation started.
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But after years of working as an interpreter, sitting in the rooms where Smart Talk literally decided whether a door opened or closed.
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I realized something.
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Small talk is the real conversation actually.
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It's how people decide whether they like you before you ever say something important.
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So I decided to build myself a daily practice workflow.
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I use Creel, a no -code platform where we compute our own automation workflows.
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I fed a real scenarios, real settings and set it up to give me real -time feedback on whether my responses were actually moving the conversation forward.
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The first scenario I built into the workflow was a work dinner
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because this is the one I've watched to break the most people.
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You sit down next to someone you barely know, the menus get handed out, and those 30 seconds feel like three hours, right?
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Here's the move.
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Notice what you're both experiencing right now.
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That's it.
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The shared environment, you don't have to be clever, you don't have to be witty, you just have to be present.
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Have you been here before?
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I heard the food is really good.
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I never know what to order at places like this.
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Everything looks too good.
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Is this your first dinner like this?
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Low risk, open -ended, easy to answer.
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Nobody gets put on the spot.
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But here's where most people get stuck.
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They get a response and then they freeze.
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The tactic here is what I call the redirect loop.
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Take your answer add something of your own and toss it back.
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So it looks like this.
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When they say, "Yeah, I've been here once.
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The pasta is amazing." "Oh, good!
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I'm terrible at ordering.
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I always end up halfway through my meal, eyeing someone else's plate." and loves.
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So do you eat out a lot for work?
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You see, one personal detail, one question, that's the whole formula.
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And when I practice this in the workflow, if I skip the personal detail and jump straight to the next question,
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which is the most common mistake and is what makes the whole thing feel like an interrogation.
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It flexed it for me right there.
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And second part, offices are full of small talk opportunities, right?
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The elevator, the coffee machine, the three minutes before a meeting starts.
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The mistake here has been too generic.
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Busy week, dead end.
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"How was your weekend?" gets a polite answer that nobody remembers 10 minutes later.
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The upgrade is to be slightly more specific, not invasive, just one notch more specific than the default.
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Instead of saying "Busy week," you can say "What have you
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been working on lately that's actually interesting?" Instead of saying "How
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was your weekend?" you can say "Did you actually get to unplug this weekend
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or were you working?" There's something powerful about the second version.
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It shows you get what their life looks like without making them explain it.
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It gives the other person permission to be honest and that's where real conversations start.
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The other move, the callback.
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If you've talked to this person before, even briefly, reference something from the earlier conversation, like, "Hey, how'd the pitch go you were prepping for?" That one sentence tells them,
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"I remember too.
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I remember what you have already said.
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You matter.
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People feel that." So the next one is about networking events.
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Networking events are where small talk anxiety peaks because everyone there is specifically there to talk to strangers,
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which somehow make it worse, right?
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The opener is actually the easy part.
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You both know why you're there.
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So the context does the work for you.
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How did you hear about this event?
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What do you do?
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Are you in blah blah industry?
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Is this your first time of this or are you a regular?
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But here's the part nobody talks about, the exit.
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Most people either get trapped into a conversation they want to leave
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or they leave so awkwardly that they undo the good impression they just made.
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A clean exit sounds like this.
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It's been really nice chatting.
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I want to meet a few more people tonight.
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Let's connect on LinkedIn or Snapchat.
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Something like this.
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Or if you want to leave a door open, I'd actually love to hear more about that.
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Could we grab a coffee sometime?
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You're not abandoning them.
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You're closing the loop and both sides walk away feeling good about it.
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The next part is how I view that in the Creole workflow.
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So here's the honest part.
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Knowing all of this and doing the moment are two completely different things.
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Not gonna lie, I still mess this up sometimes.
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I will think of the perfect call back two hours after the conversation already ended.
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Yes, that's the truth.
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So small talk is actually a muscle.
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It lives in your mouth, not your brain.
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You have to repeat it and practice.
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The problem is you can't really manufacture practice out of thin air.
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So let me show you what I mean.
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Here's exactly how I built this into an automatic workflow in Creole.
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First, I just typed this in.
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Hi Creole, I want to build an automatic workflow to make my spoken English more practical.
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So I'll put the whole prompt in the description.
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Once that logic ran, here's the most important step.
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To make this an actual daily habit, I followed up with a second prompt.
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Now I'll turn this into a mini app
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that also generates a smart talk set every morning and reminds me at 9 :00 a .m to practice.
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And here's where a lot of creators get this wrong.
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So when I say mini app, I'm not talking about building an actual app you download from the app store.
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In Creole, a mini app is just your existing workflow, packaged into Creole's own system, wrapped in a clean visual interface.
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So now every morning at 9 :00 a .m., the system pushes me the day's practice.
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This skills the activation energy almost completely.
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I don't have to design a fresh scenario every day.
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I don't have to type that long prompt out again.
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That's what a workflow actually is.
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Taking a good idea and turning to a system that runs alongside your everyday.
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awkward to her.
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She'd been running through the office scenarios every morning.
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And then, one day, she ended up in an elevator with her manager.
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She remembered he'd mentioned a pitch the week before.
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So she asked how it went.
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He lit up.
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They ended up talking three floors past his stop.
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She told me afterwards, like, I didn't even think about it, I just came out.
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That's the redirect loop.
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That's the callback.
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Except this time it wasn't a practice drill, it just happened.
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And her manager walked away feeling like she'd actually been paying attention, which is exactly what fuel seeing means in practice.
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Smart talk isn't just about being charming or witty, it's about making the other people feel seen.
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And now you have a system to actually practice that in the elevator or in the 30 seconds before the appetizers arrive.
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Open on a shared environment, move forward with the redirect loop, be specific instead of general and know how to exit
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cleanly i'm generally curious
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which of the three scenarios is the hardest for you the restaurant the office
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or the networking event tell me in the comments and lindsay
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if you like this video give a like
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and subscribe to my channel see you next time
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if you want to try building this kind of practice workflow
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yourself i've linked grill in this description you can get started for free
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and you don't need to know how to cold the prompts i used are there too
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so you can just plug them in and see

Vocabulaire et conseils d’expression pour cette leçon

Cette leçon d’expression orale de niveau B1 s’appuie sur la vidéo « How to Stop Being Awkward in Small Talk ». Les mots qui reviennent le plus souvent : workflow, practice, conversation, smart. Cette vidéo contient 136 phrases et 1433 mots à répéter en shadowing. La partie parlée dure 8:03. Le locuteur parle à un rythme naturel d’environ 178 mots par minute, proche d’une conversation courante. 84 % 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 :

MotPrononciationSens
workflow nom/ˈwɝkfloʊ/workflow
scenario nom/sɪˈnɛəɹioʊ/scénario
prompt verbe/pɹɑmpt/inciter
loop nom/luːp/boucle
redirect verberéorienter
witty adjectif/ˈwɪti/fin
appetizer nom/ˈæpɪˌtaɪzə/amuse-gueule, garniture d'apéritif
cleanly adjectif/ˈklɛnli/propre sur soi
compute verbe/kəmˈpjuːt/computer, calculer
filler nom/ˈfɪlɚ/filler
unplug verbe/ʌnˈplʌɡ/débrancher
undo verbe/ʌnˈduː/annuler, défaire
invasive adjectif/ɪnˈveɪsɪv/d'invasion
tactic nom/ˈtæktɪk/tactique
flex verbe/flɛks/fléchir, bander

Les verbes à particule que vous entendrez

MotPrononciationSens
end up verbese terminer, se finir
come out verbe/ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/sortir
get through verbe/ɡɛt ˈθɹu/franchir
hand out verbedistribuer
sit down verbes'asseoir

Des phrases à répéter

Des phrases courtes et complètes de la vidéo, à réutiliser dans la conversation de tous les jours :

  • Have you been here before?
  • Is this your first dinner like this?
  • How did you hear about this event?
  • Are you in blah blah industry?
  • Could we grab a coffee sometime?

La grammaire de cette vidéo

Les structures que le locuteur utilise le plus, avec les mots exacts de la vidéo :

StructureDans la vidéo
Present perfect have/has + participe passé — une action passée qui compte encore maintenantI've watched · I've been · has been
Superlatifs the -est / the most … — le plus haut ou le plus bas d’un groupethe most people · the most common · the most important
Passé continu was/were + -ing — une action en cours à un moment du passéwere actually moving · were prepping
Obligation : must / have to / need to dire qu’une chose est nécessairehave to get · have to be · have to repeat

Prononciation à surveiller

Le locuteur utilise 28 contractions et formes réduites, comme don't, you're, I'm. Prononcez-les sous leur forme courte, telles que vous les entendez.

  • Les sons « sh » et « zh »: interrogation /ɪnˌteɹ.əˈɡeɪ.ʃən/, automation /ˌɔ.təˈmeɪ.ʃən/, activation /ˌæktəˈveɪʃən/
  • Mots longs — placez bien l’accent: elevator /ˈɛləˌveɪtɚ/, appetizer /ˈæpɪˌtaɪzə/, interpreter /ɪnˈtɝ.pɹɪ.tɚ/, interrogation /ɪnˌteɹ.əˈɡeɪ.ʃən/, automation /ˌɔ.təˈmeɪ.ʃən/

Les sons difficiles pour les francophones :

  • /h/ — il se souffle, il n’est pas muet: halfway /ˌhæfˈweɪ/, habit /ˈhæb.ɪt/
  • /tʃ/ et /dʒ/ — à ne pas adoucir en « ch » et « j »: notch /nɑtʃ/, generic /dʒɪˈnɛɹ.ɪk/, charm /t͡ʃɑɹm/, generate /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ə.ɹeɪt/, stranger /ˈstɹeɪnd͡ʒɚ/
  • /r/ anglais — langue recourbée, sans frotter la gorge: scenario /sɪˈnɛəɹioʊ/, prompt /pɹɑmpt/, interpreter /ɪnˈtɝ.pɹɪ.tɚ/, interrogation /ɪnˌteɹ.əˈɡeɪ.ʃən/, vocabulary /vəˈkæb.jə.lə.ɹi/

Comment s’entraîner avec cette vidéo

  1. Écoutez la vidéo en entier une fois sans parler et notez les mots que vous ne connaissez pas.
  2. Commencez à la vitesse 0,75×, répétez phrase par phrase, puis revenez à la vitesse normale quand cela devient facile.
  3. Enregistrez-vous et comparez avec l’original, en faisant attention à des mots comme workflow, scenario, prompt.

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.

Technique du shadowing : lire le guide complet étape par étape →