Pratique du Shadowing: Why relationships in 2026 carry impossible expectations | Alain de Botton - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo
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141 phrases
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It used to be the case that when people found partners, they would do so according to fairly pragmatic considerations.
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Couples were formed not by the individuals themselves, but by the wider society.
Les couples étaient formés non pas par les individus eux-mêmes, mais par la société au sens large.
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There were, if you like, dynastic marriages.
Il y avait, si l'on veut, des mariages dynastiques.
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There was then a momentous change that occurs towards the end of the 18th century, that we now know as Romanticism.
Il y a ensuite eu un changement majeur qui s'est produit vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle, que nous connaissons aujourd'hui sous le nom de Romantisme.
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And one of the central tenets of Romanticism is that each individual should be left to decide on their partner
Et l'un des principes centraux du Romantisme est que chaque individu devrait être libre de choisir son partenaire.
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by their own, the movements of their own heart.
par eux-mêmes, les mouvements de leur propre cœur.
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It's a beautiful idea, it's a very liberating idea.
C'est une idée magnifique, c'est une idée très libératrice.
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And let's put it plainly, It's been a disaster.
Et pour dire les choses clairement, ça a été un désastre.
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We are not any appreciably happier now in a romantic culture than we were in a dynastic culture. And why?
Nous ne sommes pas sensiblement plus heureux aujourd'hui dans une culture romantique que nous ne l'étions dans une culture dynastique. Et pourquoi ?
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Because we live in a romantic culture that sees something adverse in planning
Parce que nous vivons dans une culture romantique qui perçoit quelque chose d'adverse dans la planification
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and thinking and reflecting too hard on the business of love and it's been a serious problem for humanity.
et réfléchir et méditer trop intensément sur le domaine de l'amour, et cela a été un problème sérieux pour l'humanité.
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My name is Alain de Botton.
Je m'appelle Alain de Botton.
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I'm a philosopher, psychotherapist and founder of the School of Life.
Je suis philosophe, psychothérapeute et fondateur de la School of Life.
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the unique challenge of modern gating.
le défi unique du gating moderne.
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We know in theory that love matters a lot.
Nous savons en théorie que l'amour compte énormément.
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It's in every pop song, it's the center of most religions.
C'est présent dans toutes les chansons pop, c'est le centre de la plupart des religions.
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We sometimes lose sight of what that word actually means.
Nous perdons parfois de vue ce que ce mot signifie réellement.
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It's really about connection.
Il s'agit vraiment de connexion.
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And it is one of the most beautiful and one of the most complicated, of all phenomena Even though we think we've been around on this planet for a long time,
Et c'est l'un des plus beaux et l'un des plus complexes de tous les phénomènes, même si nous pensons que nous existons sur cette planète depuis longtemps.
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trying to figure things out, I'd say we were still at the dawn collectively.
En essayant de comprendre les choses, je dirais que nous en étions encore à l'aube collectivement.
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of making sense of this phenomenon we call love, And it's no surprise that most people will go to their deathbeds thinking,
de donner un sens à ce phénomène que nous appelons l'amour, et il n'est pas surprenant que la plupart des gens iront jusqu'à leur lit de mort en pensant,
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Not quite sure I've figured that side of life out.
Je ne suis pas tout à fait sûr d'avoir compris ce côté de la vie.
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At least many of us will.
Au moins, beaucoup d'entre nous le feront.
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still be grappling with some of the complexities of love by the time time runs out on us.
on sera encore en train de se débattre avec certaines des complexités de l'amour au moment où le temps nous sera compté.
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The most central kind of love that people are obsessed about, concerned about, is romantic love.
Le type d'amour le plus central dont les gens sont obsédés et préoccupés est l'amour romantique.
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That is the intimate connection between two human beings who have a sexual Contact.
C'est le lien intime qui unit deux êtres humains ayant un contact sexuel.
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It's worth saying that there are other forms of love, We can love our children, we can love animals, we can love ideas,
Il vaut la peine de dire qu'il existe d'autres formes d'amour. Nous pouvons aimer nos enfants, nous pouvons aimer les animaux, nous pouvons aimer les idées.
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we can love tables, chairs, clouds, all sorts of things.
nous pouvons aimer les tables, les chaises, les nuages, toutes sortes de choses.
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We are capable of many forms of love.
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But I'd say that when people sing about love, and when they cry about love,
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it tends to be the love of one very special person we tend to call our soulmate, our partner.
32
It used to be the case that when people found partners, they would do so according to fairly pragmatic considerations.
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in most nations, in most parts of the world, for most of history, Couples were formed not by the individuals themselves, but by the wider society,
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families, the village, the court.
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There were, if you like, dynastic marriages.
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You would get together with somebody because they had a plow
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and you had an ox and it seemed like a good match.
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Or you were the Duke of Brabant and they were the Princess of Naples.
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And that was seen as a wonderful union.
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So you got together for reasons that were nothing to do with emotional compatibility.
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There were a lot of tears, there was sadness, there was loneliness, it didn't seem to matter.
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because relationships were seen to be about something else.
43
There was then a momentous change that occurs in, towards the end of the 18th century,
44
starting in Britain, France, Germany, parts of Italy, a revolution in feeling, that we now know as Romanticism.
45
And one of the central tenets of Romanticism is that each individual should be left to decide
46
on their partner by the movements of their own heart.
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they should be left to decide for themselves.
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It's a beautiful idea, It's a very...
49
a liberating idea, it should make a lot of sense.
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And we have been in the Romantic age now for you know, 200 years, perhaps shorter, perhaps a little longer, that kind of time period.
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And let's put it plainly: It's been a disaster.
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We are not any appreciably happier now in a romantic culture than we were in a dynastic culture,
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where marriages were made for dynastic reasons.
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Why?
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Because we have failed collectively to focus with enough intent on the difficulties that couples will have when they choose each other,
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according to the movements of their own heart.
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Look, I think a really key...
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prejudice of the romantic worldview is that if love is working well, It should be following instinct.
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There's been an enormous veneration Mr. Worship of instinct.
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Love is described as a special feeling, not in a set of ideas, not a sense of rationally observable principles, but a feeling.
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You either have the feeling or you don't.
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You must be guided, by your feeling.
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There's even a prejudice against language.
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You know, true lovers shouldn't talk too much.
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They should just feel the fluttering of their own hearts.
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That's why music has a huge prestige.
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higher than philosophy.
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When we're in love, we don't want to read philosophical tracks, we want to hear love songs.
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That is to do with our sense that emotion should be guiding us, not reason.
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Reason is the enemy in the romantic worldview.
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of truly happy relationships.
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If you follow reason, that's cold, it may be calculating, it's unromantic.
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And, you know, there are so many things that are considered unromantic.
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and I would love to train our audience.
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That every time something seems unromantic, Question it.
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Is it truly unromantic?
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If we define Romanticism, as the pursuit of a workable relationship.
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On that basis, is it unromantic to talk about money?
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Is it unromantic?
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to think long and hard about childhood patterns of psychological development.
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Is it anti -romantic? to spend a lot of time thinking about families and friends and compatibility at that level.
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All these things, in my view, belong to a truly adequate way of surveying whether a couple should be together.
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But I'm also aware that nowadays these things are considered very unromantic.
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To live in a romantic culture, means to live in a culture that has a set of ideas about how good couples should form.
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They should be formed by instinct, that everybody has a soulmate, that you'll recognize your soulmate by a special, flattery feeling, that you shouldn't be asked to account for that feeling,
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you should simply go for it and marry in Vegas in two weeks
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if that's what seizes you and that you should be able to
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Communicate deeply with your partner without using language through that special medium of the heart, through the silence, Also that you shouldn't criticize your partner,
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that true partners should love each other for who they really are, which means no desire to grow or change.
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You just accept someone.
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Couples in romantic culture will sometimes complain, "You're trying to change me." And this is seen as really offensive.
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It's like, what?
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You know, you complain to your friends.
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My partner's trying to change me.
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Oh, what an awful person.
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This must be awful.
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You must get out immediately.
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If you went to an ancient Greek, if you went to Athens in 400 BC, And you said to an ancient Greek, what is love?
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and where is the role of criticism, they would say, Love is a process of education.
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It's the education of emotion.
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And lovers should of course be able to pick each other up for things that they don't spot in one another.
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And they should be trying to develop into the best version of themselves, rather than simply staying stuck in an admiration for who they are today.
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The whole process should be dynamic.
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become who you could be, not worship who you happen to be right now.
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All of this sounds very strange in Romantic culture, which is why relationships are so difficult in our time.
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Let's remember that a person's life satisfaction is determined by up to around 70 % by the quality of their personal relationships.
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A Martian hearing that statistic visiting planet Earth would think, "Well, clearly earthlings, given the enormous role of love, will be spending 70 % of their money
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and 70 % of their educational time working out how on earth this business of love works." Is that true?
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No. We spend hardly any time rationally thinking about it.
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None of us are made to sit through classes in attachment theory, classes in apology, classes in listening, classes in communication.
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No, we're, you know, Physics is important.
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Geography is important.
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Don't get me wrong.
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But is there no time for this given its role in our lives?
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Do we really want to leave this to chance?
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And the answer is yes. And why?
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because we live in a romantic culture that sees something adverse in planning
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and thinking and reflecting too hard on the business of love.
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It's very deleterious, and it's been a serious problem for humanity.
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One of the most powerful disseminators of romantic culture is art.
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And by art, I mean all the leading artistic media.
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Film, definitely.
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You know, if you were learning about love from films you would be very confused.
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And that's why many of us are confused, because films, and I include that television shows and other narrative forms, these things are hugely misleading.
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They simply Do not show what a real relationship is like.
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I mean, probably you can count on one hand, that the number of films that have accurately shown love.
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I think one of the most accurate representations of love is Richard Linklater's Before Trilogy.
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which ended up with Before Midnight.
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It's a wonderful reckoning, really, with the real complexities of love.
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But, you know, most films are not that.
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Most films are blithe, are superficial, are...
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not modest enough in showing us what's really going on between couples.
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It's also stimulated through music, and music constantly It gives us little miniature stories about how love works.
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And the music is terrific but it's not accurate to what's going on.
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presses the wrong buttons.
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Poetry, no one really reads poetry nowadays.
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If they did, the problem exists in poetry too.
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So We have so much media around.
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and yet we're still so much strangers to ourselves, I would say that the single greatest, most misleading disseminator of ideas on love is
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culture and art.
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The problem is very heavily located there.
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Vocabulaire et conseils d’expression pour cette leçon
Cette leçon d’expression orale de niveau C1 s’appuie sur la vidéo « Why relationships in 2026 carry impossible expectations ». Les mots qui reviennent le plus souvent : romantic, culture, partner, unromantic, feeling. Cette vidéo contient 141 phrases et 1745 mots à répéter en shadowing. La partie parlée dure 11:07. Le locuteur parle à un rythme naturel d’environ 157 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 :
| Mot | Prononciation | Sens |
|---|---|---|
| dynastic adjectif | /daɪˈnæstɪk/ | dynastique |
| soulmate nom | âme sœur | |
| instinct nom | /ˈɪn.stɪŋkt/ | instinct |
| appreciably adverbe | /əˈpɹiːʃi.əbli/ | appréciablement |
| disseminator nom | disséminateur, disséminatrice | |
| liberate verbe | /ˈlɪbəˌɹeɪt/ | libérer |
| mislead verbe | /mɪsˈliːd/ | égarer |
| momentous adjectif | /moʊˈmɛn.təs/ | capital, considérable |
| plainly adverbe | /ˈpleɪnli/ | simplement |
| pragmatic adjectif | /pɹæɡˈmætɪk/ | pragmatique |
| rationally adverbe | rationnellement | |
| tenet nom | /ˈtɛnɪt/ | principe, croyance |
| worldview nom | vision du monde | |
| compatibility nom | /kəmˌpætəˈbɪlɪti/ | compatibilité |
| prejudice nom | /ˈpɹɛd͡ʒədɪs/ | préjugé |
Les verbes à particule que vous entendrez
| Mot | Prononciation | Sens |
|---|---|---|
| get out verbe | sortir | |
| work out verbe | /ˌwɝk ˈaʊt/ | calculer |
Des phrases à répéter
Des phrases courtes et complètes de la vidéo, à réutiliser dans la conversation de tous les jours :
- You either have the feeling or you don't.
- You know, true lovers shouldn't talk too much.
- My partner's trying to change me.
- Do we really want to leave this to chance?
La grammaire de cette vidéo
Les structures que le locuteur utilise le plus, avec les mots exacts de la vidéo :
| Structure | Dans la vidéo |
|---|---|
| « Used to » used to + verbe — une habitude ou un état passé qui n’est plus vrai | used to be |
| Voix passive be + participe passé — l’accent est mis sur ce qui arrive, pas sur qui le fait | were formed · should be left · was seen |
| Present perfect have/has + participe passé — une action passée qui compte encore maintenant | It's been · we've been · I've figured |
| Propositions relatives who / which + proposition — une précision sur une personne ou une chose | are, which means · culture, which is |
Prononciation à surveiller
Le locuteur utilise 19 contractions et formes réduites, comme don't, shouldn't, we're. Prononcez-les sous leur forme courte, telles que vous les entendez.
- Les sons « th »: blithe /blaɪð/, deathbed /ˈdɛθˌbɛd/, earthling /ˈɝθlɪŋ/
- Les sons « sh » et « zh »: appreciably /əˈpɹiːʃi.əbli/, veneration /ˌvɛnəˈɹeɪʃən/, superficial /ˌsupɚˈfɪʃəl/, admiration /ˌæd.məˈɹeɪ.ʃən/
- Mots longs — placez bien l’accent: appreciably /əˈpɹiːʃi.əbli/, compatibility /kəmˌpætəˈbɪlɪti/, complexity /kəmˈplɛk.sɪ.ti/, deleterious /ˌdɛ.ləˈtɪɹ.i.əs/, observable /əbˈzɜː.və.bəl/
Les sons difficiles pour les francophones :
- /tʃ/ et /dʒ/ — à ne pas adoucir en « ch » et « j »: prejudice /ˈpɹɛd͡ʒədɪs/, hugely /ˈhjuːd͡ʒli/, miniature /ˈmɪn.(i)ə.tʃəɹ/, prestige /pɹɛsˈtiːd͡ʒ/, attachment /əˈtæt͡ʃmənt/
- /r/ anglais — langue recourbée, sans frotter la gorge: appreciably /əˈpɹiːʃi.əbli/, liberate /ˈlɪbəˌɹeɪt/, pragmatic /pɹæɡˈmætɪk/, prejudice /ˈpɹɛd͡ʒədɪs/, adverse /ˈæd.və(ɹ)s/
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 dynastic, soulmate, instinct.
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.