Pratique du Shadowing: LITERATURE - Charles Darwin - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo

Création de la leçon...
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It's completely understandable that we're often maddened by what might be called normal humanity.
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The way in which emotions so regularly triumph over careful reasoning.
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The power of group loyalty, even when the group doesn't seem to deserve much devotion.
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The vast mechanisms of status-seeking that drive so much excess consumption.
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widespread selfishness and indifference to the greater needs of distant others.
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And we can find ourselves in the privacy of our heads
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or in the occasional late-night outburst railing against the fools and idiots who,
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so unfortunately, seem to occupy so many of the prominent places of power, wealth and influence in our world.
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In such moods, the 19th century naturalist Charles Darwin has much to say to us.
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He was born in England in 1809 into a well-to-do and intellectually distinguished family.
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He was much influenced by visiting in his twenties the Galapagos Islands,
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where he could see first-hand species remarkably different from those that existed elsewhere.
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In later life, he was a quiet, rather withdrawn man.
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He became the world's leading expert on barnacles.
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He achieved worldwide fame for his great work on the origin of species by natural selection.
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But Darwin felt that people had not quite understood the implications of his ideas and in 1871, when he was in his 60s,
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he brought out a title called The Descent of Man.
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Darwin liked to say that he had thought of calling his book The Ascent of Man, but that that would suggest some idea of progress,
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a concept he did not believe in.
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Rather, what Darwin wanted to do was to show that despite the obvious technical advances of past centuries,
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modern people are still fundamentally at exactly the same moral level, or even perhaps a slightly worse level, than their remote ancestors.
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Darwin's big point is that the basic psychological characteristics of human beings evolved to aid survival in the very remote past.
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At the simplest level, we are generally attracted to sweet things because, in the very extended period of early human development,
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that meant eating wild berries, which are great for our health.
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It's only been in very recent times
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that this in-built desire has turned against us and given us a craving for manufactured sugar,
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which by Darwin's time had become a major industrial commodity.
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We also evolved to be highly conscious of our own position within our immediate group,
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since so much of our early survival in the past depended on that.
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So today, being liked feels as if it is a life or death issue, precisely because in the past, it precisely was that.
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It indicated when you would be served when the spoils of the hunt were being distributed.
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Practically everything back then depended on having a mate and reproducing and so our minds are massively preoccupied by questions of reproduction,
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even though today this is not actually central to our own individual survival or even happiness.
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And obviously, emotional behaviour is much earlier and much more deeply rooted than elaborate reasoning,
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which is a very recent and still terribly fragile development in human culture.
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We can put on clothes and drive in cars, but we are still carrying, Charles Darwin insists, our primate heritage.
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And that, though disappointing, is not really our fault, it is simply a fact we need to get used to.
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Charles Darwin teaches us in his great work The Descent of
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Man to feel compassion for the very large primitive part of who we all are and will always be.
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Thank you.

Vocabulaire et conseils d’expression pour cette leçon

Cette vidéo contient 40 phrases et 593 mots à répéter en shadowing. La partie parlée dure 4:10. Le locuteur parle à un rythme régulier d’environ 142 mots par minute, confortable pour le shadowing. Seuls 81 % des mots font partie des 3 000 mots les plus courants en anglais, le vocabulaire est donc exigeant.

Vocabulaire clé de cette vidéo

15 mots de la vidéo à retenir, avec leur prononciation et leur sens :

MotPrononciationSens
survival nom/sɚˈvaɪ.vəl/survie
remote adjectif/ɹəˈməʊt̞/distant, loin
depend verbe/dɪˈpɛnd/dépendre
precisely adverbe/pɹɪˈsaɪs.li/précisément
evolve verbe/ɪˈvɑlv/élaborer
vast adjectif/væst/vaste, immense
elsewhere adverbe/ˈɛlsˌʍɛɹ/ailleurs
moral adjectif/ˈmoɹəl/moral
deeply adverbe/ˈdi(ː)pli/profondément
happiness nom/ˈhæpinɪs/bonheur
mood nom/muːd/humeur, mauvaise humeur
rail nom/ɹeɪ(ə)l/rail
heritage nom/ˈhɛɹ.ɪ.tɪd͡ʒ/héritage
privacy nom/ˈpɹaɪ.və.si/intimité, vie privée
consumption nom/kənˈsʌmp.ʃən/consommation

Prononciation à surveiller

  • Les sons « th »: withdraw /wɪðˈdɹɔ/, cloth /klɒθ/
  • Les sons « sh » et « zh »: consumption /kənˈsʌmp.ʃən/, emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/, conscious /ˈkɑn.ʃəs/, occasional /əˈkeɪʒ(ə)nəl/, compassion /kəmˈpæʃ.ən/
  • Mots longs — placez bien l’accent: humanity /hjuˈmænɪti/, mechanism /ˈmɛk.ə.nɪ.zəm/, psychological /ˌsaɪ.kəˈlɑː.d͡ʒɪ.kl̩/, practically /ˈpɹæk.tɪ.k(ə.)li/, occasional /əˈkeɪʒ(ə)nəl/

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. Répétez phrase par phrase à vitesse normale, en reprenant chacune jusqu’à ce que votre rythme corresponde à celui du locuteur.
  3. Enregistrez-vous et comparez avec l’original, en faisant attention à des mots comme survival, remote, depend.

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.

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