Pratica di Shadowing: HISTORY OF IDEAS - Loneliness - Impara a parlare inglese con i video

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What is difficult in the modern world?
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When we think about what's difficult in the modern world, we're liable to think about meal times.
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How seldom they now take place communally.
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How rare it is for whole families to gather.
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How much technology can intrude.
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In paintings of communal meals from the olden days,
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we can appreciate how all ages used to come together around one table and how welcoming the atmosphere seems to have been.
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Even the family horse might have been invited to join in.
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The modern condition appears so bleak by comparison.
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Rather than a family around the hearth, the emblematic image is of a single person with a tray on their knees in front of the television.
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It was the Swanson Corporation, originally a poultry producer in Omaha, Nebraska, that launched the frozen TV dinner in 1954,
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the same year coloured television was introduced in the US.
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It is a short distance in time, but a long way in spirit,
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from Norman Rockwell's laughter-filled family Thanksgiving celebration to Swanson's industrially produced Turkey Meal for One.
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The modern world is surely a lonelier place than the one that preceded it.
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The question is why.
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It isn't ultimately technology that has made us lonely.
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It's an identifiable set of ideas.
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We've rendered ourselves lonely first and foremost because of certain stories we've started to tell about what loneliness means.
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Most eras before our own knew that solitude did not, per se, have to be a sign of wretchedness.
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In the fourth century, the The greatest saint of early Christianity, Saint Anthony, was said to have spent more than 40 years by himself in Egypt's western desert,
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not saying a word, eating only bread and salt, and communing with God.
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So impressed were some with Anthony's life, they came to join him in the desert and became collectively known as the Desert Fathers.
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Their philosophy of solitary piety would go on to have a decisive influence on the founding of monasteries.
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At the height of monasticism in the Middle Ages, a million people across Europe
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and North Africa chose to forego the bustle of family in order to dwell in some of the most rugged
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and remote to reign in the world in silent contemplation of God.
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However, in the wake of the reformation and the destruction of the monasteries, solitary piety began to lose its prestige and receded as a practical option.
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Those who had previously lived alone at the tops of mountains were now encouraged to serve God by remaining in the community, finding a spouse and starting a family.
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To this newly social religious impetus was added the influence of Romanticism, a movement of ideas that, with different ends in view,
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similarly encouraged people to give up on commitments to their own company.
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For the Romantics, happiness lay in identifying one exceptional soulmate,
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to whom one could surrender one's independence and with whom one might fuse mind and body.
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The Romantic movement turned solitude from a respectable choice to evidence of pathology.
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When the Beatles released Eleanor Rigby in 1966, the song that more than any other defined what loneliness meant for the modern age,
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it was at once clear why Eleanor was a pitiful figure.
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The famous face that she kept in a jar by the door had been intended for an enchanting partner that,
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like all single people, she must surely have longed to find.
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Only with romantic love could there be a decent life.
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So ran the philosophy of the song, of all the Beatles' works and, in fact, of pretty much every pop song ever written.
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Failed to fall completely in love and, romanticism warned, one would soon enough be picking up rice in the church where a wedding had been or,
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rivalling for strangeness, the very odd Father Mackenzie, around whom there seemed to be so little of the glamour that had once attended the Desert Fathers.
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The modern world not only made it mandatory to have a partner,
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it's also made it feel essential to have a vibrant gang of friends and to enjoy seeing them regularly at parties.
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An empty diary has become an emblem of deformity.
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But there is not the slightest admission that it might, all things considered, be a bit of a curious thing to stand in a crowded room full of status-panicked,
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often socially anxious people, every one of them terrified of honesty or failure.
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In 1921, Carl Jung, in his book Psychological Types, introduced the terms extroverted and introverted to divide humanity.
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The former referred to a sort of person who could best realise their potential in the company of others.
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The latter were those who needed to move away from crowds in order to regain their integrity.
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Everyone possesses both mechanisms, wrote Jung, but it was evident where the spirit of the modern age has resided.
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It has been the achievement of a few, often ignored artists of the modern period, to make a case for introversion,
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to try to coat solitude in glamour.
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In a painting by the German artist Caspar David Friedrich, we are invited to trust that the lonely figure in the landscape is privy to insights
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that might be lost in the crowd down in the lowlands.
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The man is needed to travel up to the mountains in order to put the bluster and envy of humans in perspective.
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should dare to follow him in his trajectory.
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Separated by many decades, Gwen John's young woman doesn't seem to belong to an official religion,
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but if there was one dedicated to the appreciation of solitude, then she would be one of its saintly and legendary figures.
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Her expression – kind, gentle,
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melancholy – is an advertisement for all that the modern world has neglected in its promotion of active, cheery lives.
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Isolation isn't a particular curse.
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It's just where good people tend to end up.
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We should dare to believe that we are in solitude not because we are mentally ill, but because we are noble of spirit.
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We don't hate company, it's just
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that we would prefer to stay home rather than accept the counterfeit tokens of community that are too often on offer.
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The way to make people feel less alone isn't to pull them out of their musings in the forest
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or in the diner, in the library or the desert and force them to go bowling.
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It's to reassure them that being alone is no sign of failure.
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To lessen modernity's crisis of loneliness, we need for solitude to be rehabilitated and for singlehood to regain its dignity.
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There is nothing catastrophic about eating dinner, many dinners, on our own.
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Those Swanson TV dinners might have been capable of improvement, but it is ultimately far better to be eating a basic
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meal in peace than to be in a ballroom surrounded by false smiles and oppressive judgements.
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When we do so, we aren't in fact on our own at all.
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We are, as the modern world fails to remind us, dining with some of the finest, most elevated spirits who have ever lived.
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We are, though ostensibly by ourselves, in the very best company.
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One of the trickiest tasks we ever have to face is that of working out who we really are.
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This book is designed to help us create a psychological portrait of ourselves, with the use of some unusual, oblique, entertaining and playful prompts.
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Click the link on screen now to find out more.

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Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?

Shadowing è una tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue supportata da studi scientifici, originariamente sviluppata per la formazione dei traduttori professionisti e resa popolare dal poliglotta Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Il metodo è semplice ma potente: ascolti un audio in inglese di madrelingua e lo ripeti immediatamente ad alta voce — come un'ombra che segue il parlante con un ritardo di solo 1–2 secondi. A differenza dell'ascolto passivo o degli esercizi di grammatica, lo shadowing costringe il tuo cervello e i muscoli della bocca a elaborare e riprodurre simultaneamente i modelli di discorso reale. La ricerca dimostra che migliora significativamente la precisione della pronuncia, l'intonazione, il ritmo, il discorso connesso, la comprensione dell'ascolto e la fluidità del parlato — rendendolo uno dei metodi più efficaci per la preparazione alla prova di speaking dell'IELTS e per la comunicazione reale in inglese.

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