Pratique du Shadowing: Ocean Vuong Shares With Oprah His Writing Secrets - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec YouTube

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I've heard you say writing is about listening rather than making.
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I've heard you say writing is about listening rather than making.
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I think that is so fascinating.
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What is it you're listening for?
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You say writing is about listening rather than making.
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When I was a younger writer,
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I thought you had to fill the page or else nothing happens.
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But the more I work at this,
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the more I realize that writing is about listening to the world.
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You're collaborating with the world.
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You don't shut it away and go into your little desk or your cave and create genius work.
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It doesn't work like that.
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Ultimately, nobody writes a good sentence by accident.
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It comes with care.
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You have to really care for the world.
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And every author's book is multiple drafts.
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It means it comes out of tireless care, obsession, worry.
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and when you hold up anyone's book,
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you're getting their best self.
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And the best self for me comes from really engaging with the world without judgment and really being interested in people.
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At the end of the day,
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all I would say is that as an author,
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I'm just really interested in human beings.
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That's it.
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Everything else is craft.
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You can learn that.
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You'll find a way to get that.
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But what you can't learn is a deep investment in compassionate watching and listening of our species.
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And that's what this whole story is all about.
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It means you've watched and observed.
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And I feel that parts of you are high,
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but then you're not high.
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So you are high and not high, right?
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He's a lot better than me.
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I get one draft at life and I usually mess it up.
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But high got 12 drafts.
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So he's a little more refined.
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Okay, so I will tell you that I read chapter one sometimes just to soothe myself,
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particularly in these times.
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And over Christmas holidays, I was with my chosen family.
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I've raised these girls since they were 12 years old,
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and now they're in their 30s and there were four of us at my house
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and we were sitting around a crackling fire reading out loud chapter one
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i mean when i think of
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that i think about the people as teenagers drinking in their father's trucks
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and i think i think wow all of that's true and then time passes and then they're sitting there
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in the same trucks or different trucks,
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and there they are with the babies in their arms and they don't even know how they got there.
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How were you able to get that?
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I think at the heart of every writer,
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you have to really love the world,
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even when it's difficult to love.
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And I think description is autobiographical in that when you describe something,
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you're giving it a point of view.
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How you describe something, how you see something,
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says a lot about yourself.
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And I think I saw all these people in my life and I never heard anyone write about them.
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And I said, if the sentence can pin life to the page,
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I want to pin these people who never got to get out.
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You know, we fetishize these heroes journey about getting out of this town.
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And it's a very cathartic one.
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We love these stories.
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We want to feel that everyone can get out,
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but the majority of people can't.
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And won't.
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And won't.
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And sometimes by choice.
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Sometimes they have to stay and take care of elders who are ill.
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They have jobs they can't leave.
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And I just didn't see the literary world write about people who had to stay.
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Because that's actually much more interesting to me.
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It's easy to go to the big city and have a different life.
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It's much harder but more interesting to ask yourself,
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how do I make do without escape?
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That becomes an existential question.
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How do I make do in this body if I can't leave it?
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The book starts with a young man deciding to jump off a bridge.
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Yeah.
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And he's stopped by an elderly widow doing laundry.
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And it's a personal crux for me because when I was a teenager,
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one of my best friends took his own life with a gun.
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He was 16.
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My uncle at 28 took his own life.
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And usually when we talk about suicide,
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it's usually like, oh, they struggled,
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but then they didn't do it.
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And that's triumphant.
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Great.
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Well, actually what I'm more interested in is like,
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how do you live and go on in the aftermath of that decision?
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If you decide to end your life and then ultimately decide not to,
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what's day two look like?
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What's day three look like?
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What's the aftermath of living and deciding to live and have the will to live without the hope of living?
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And I wanted to know that of my uncle because I didn't get that from him.
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And so I think I write in order to understand that,
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what if he got to have an aftermath Were he still alive?
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What would that life look like?
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That seemed like a much more interesting place to write a book from rather than to say,
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oh, well, they didn't do it.
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End of story.
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Everyone clap.
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And then life goes on.
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Yeah.
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And you think life goes on just as it was before.
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Right.
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Well, Hai is a 19-year-old who meets Grazina,
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an elderly woman who brings hope into Hai's life against all odds.
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And she and Hai form an unlikely friendship.
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What was your intention in bringing these two characters together?
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Oh, I felt, you know,
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on one hand, they're very different.
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He's 19, she's 84.
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Was there a Grazina in your life?
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Because you dedicate the book to Grazina.
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And you say, in memory of Grazina.
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Yeah, it's a long, convoluted story,
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but Grazina is the grandmother of my partner.
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And when I was in college,
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I dropped out of business school.
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I lost my housing, lost my tuition,
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and I was casually dating my partner,
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Peter, and he was in law school and we were kids.
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And I said, I'm kind of homeless,
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but I want to go to school and study English.
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And he said, one day he called me as I talked to my mom.
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My grandma lives alone.
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She's very independent.
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She wants to stay in the house that she lived in after fleeing Stalin,
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fleeing World War II.
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She's a self-made person, a refugee like myself.
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And you can live with her and go to school.
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And so I lived with her for three years.
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And we had this incredible bond that then led to my partner and I's relationship blooming,
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because it's this kind of strange quintessential American family.
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He would visit from school,
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but I would live with her every day.
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And here we are, two refugees from two different wars,
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two different continents, 20 years apart.
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And we are in Brooklyn,
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living probably the most American life I can think of.
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It's not the white picket fence American life, but it's still true.
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And that reciprocal care, I had to care for her as she looked out for me.
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And I was so inspired by this because I think
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Both the very young and the very old are on the margins of society.
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They're no longer in the center.
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The young are said, oh, you don't know enough.
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You don't have enough.
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You don't own enough to contribute.
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You don't have a degree.
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You don't have the credentials.
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In the old, you're defunct.
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You're out of the market.
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You're in the retirement.
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Push yourself away.
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And so both the young and the very old,
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in my observation in this country,
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live in a perennial loneliness.
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Yeah.
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And when they get together,
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you realize there's actually a lot of common ground.
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When people have been pushed to the center,
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I wanted to write a book where the people who were pushed to the absolute fringes of society
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get to occupy the center and the camera would just not pan away.
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I did not want a plot that solved them.
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I did not want anyone to get a better job,
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to have a better home.
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There's no improvement.
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is just life and it's kindness without hope,
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which is kindness at the highest cost.
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And yet we all know people every day who are kind and gracious and good to each other despite all of that.
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Kindness without any hope of return.
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That's just something I'm so fascinated in.
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Thank you.

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Why practice speaking with this video?

This enlightening conversation between Ocean Vuong and Oprah is a remarkable opportunity to learn English with YouTube. The dialogue emphasizes the art of listening and observing, which are vital skills for any English language learner. Engaging with real-life discussions not only enhances vocabulary but also improves pronunciation and fluency. By practicing your spoken English in the context of this video, you develop a deeper understanding of the nuances in tone, emotion, and expression. Notably, Vuong stresses that writing and speaking originate from a place of connection with the world, making this an ideal context for practicing speaking skills through the shadowing technique. As you mimic their speech patterns, you benefit enormously from their compassionate and insightful observations.

Grammar & Expressions in Context

The transcript features several key grammatical structures and expressions that are particularly useful for learners:

  • "It comes with care. You have to really care for the world." - This statement illustrates the importance of simple present tense for making general truths. Practicing this structure helps convey importance and sincerity.
  • "It means it comes out of tireless care, obsession, worry." - Here, the use of the present continuous tense emphasizes ongoing actions and emotions, a useful structure for learners wanting to express feelings or ongoing states.
  • "At the end of the day, all I would say is that..." - This transitional phrase is ideal for structuring personal reflections or summaries, techniques useful for public speaking and writing.
  • "When you hold up anyone's book, you're getting their best self." - The phrase "hold up" is an example of phrasal verbs, which are commonly used in spoken English.

By focusing on these structures, learners can enhance both their written and spoken English, making it a highly enriching practice.

Common Pronunciation Traps

As you practice your English speaking practice, be aware of the following pronunciation challenges highlighted in this video:

  • "care" vs. "careful" - The subtle difference in vowel sounds can be tricky; practice emphasizing the "air" sound in "care."
  • "world" - This word may be mispronounced by learners. Focus on the "orl" sound, which can be difficult depending on your native accent.
  • "author" and "obsession" - These terms may have different stress patterns than in other languages, so pay attention to where the emphasis falls in each word.

Listening closely to native speakers and using the shadow speak technique will allow you to overcome these traps effectively. By integrating these pronunciation practices with your shadowing exercises, you can greatly improve your clarity and confidence in spoken English.

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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