Pratica di Shadowing: How I Learned English with Movies and TV-Shows - Impara a parlare inglese con i video

Hi everybody!

In this video I'm going to share how I improved my English,

my pronunciation, and my fluency with TV shows and movies.

First of all, both as an English learner and as an English teacher,

I highly recommend to focus on pronunciation very early on.

Working on it early makes you like the sound of your speech,

which can be incredibly motivating.

When you like how your English sounds,

you're more likely to keep practicing it more consistently.

So from the very beginning of my English learning journey,

I developed a pretty solid American accent and that was because of the movies and TV shows I started watching early on.

One day I turned the TV on and there was this old American TV show soap opera called Sunset Beach.

So I started watching the actors very carefully.

I was paying attention to every single sound they were making with their mouths.

Their speech patterns, their intonation,

their melody, their rhythm, everything.

And what was really shocking to me was that every single word was connected in a way that you couldn't separate them.

You didn't know where one word ended and the other one started,

which I later found out that that's called connected speech.

But in school, we weren't learning English like that.

And then I started working on the sounds that were very different from Romanian.

For example, the sound r.

I would repeat out loud every single word that the actors were saying that contained the letter r or the sound r.

And the sound r is pretty tricky

because it depends on where exactly it is inside the word and what letter comes before and after it.

So I would walk around the house

and repeat word worry try cry girl work morning row throw 30

so this became part of my daily practice whenever i would

see a word containing the sound r i would say it

many many times until i liked the way it sounded next i focused on the sound both voiced

and voiceless the voiced sound means that you activate your vocal cords

when you say if you touch your throat here you will feel it vibrating

like this that those and the voiceless is when you say it

but you do not activate your vocal cords for example in

thank you you only start vibrating your vocal cords at a from thank you

and not right compared to those there and it was pretty funny

because i was looking at those actors mouths and i could see

when the tip of their tongue was coming out to say thank you

or three or there and then i would just imitate that

and say thank you three there

and obviously i was over exaggerating it you only need a little bit of your tongue to say thank you

but i was doing thank you too much too much tongue

and yeah i'm sure i looked pretty awkward

and ridiculous trying to figure out how to move my lips and my jaw and my tongue and everything,

but that's what needed to be done.

And the more I observed those actors,

the more I repeated and imitated them,

the more natural it started to feel.

And eventually this practice turned into shadowing,

where I would simultaneously repeat after the actors as they were speaking.

And my grammar and vocabulary were far from perfect.

I was just starting to learn English,

but I was developing a good melody and accent,

something that is not really taught in schools.

I liked the way I sounded.

I sounded better than my classmates and that kept me motivated and I wanted to keep doing it.

So I've been wanting to learn Spanish for a while

and I decided that I'm going to do it the same way I learned English through TV shows

and movies and podcasts and books and music and all of that.

And because I talk about shadowing native speakers as the best method to improve your fluency,

a lot of the times people ask me where can I find these shows

or what shows do you recommend to do shadowing with?

So here's the language learning platform I'm going to use.

It's called Lingopi and it combines education and entertainment.

They have TV shows, movies,

audiobooks, music, and even podcasts.

Lingopi is also the sponsor of this video so big shout out to them and a big thanks for their support.

And the reason why I'm excited to use it is because I know for a fact that imitating native speakers works.

And on Lingopi, I can dive into the Spanish culture,

learn common expressions, slang, all those little phrases that you don't typically learn in school.

For example, if I want to shadow and practice my Spanish with the show Closed Rooms.

And now I can click on it.

And then it gives me the pronunciation again.

I can repeat it.

Hasta luego.

A little bit slower.

And then I can record myself.

Hasta luego.

And then I can listen to myself.

Hasta luego.

Pretty good.

And then each word I clicked and pronounced and repeated and learned is added into my personal vocabulary,

which I can then review later.

How cool is that?

And they've got over 14 languages and more than 3,000 shows and movies,

so there's always something new to watch.

I can track my progress,

I can practice with sentences,

and I can also use their new short stories to read and shadow at the same time.

So if you're serious about learning a new language and you don't want to just improve your vocabulary and grammar,

but you want to develop your fluency,

your accent, your pronunciation, and your cultural understanding of the language,

Lingopie is the perfect tool to get you there.

So click the link in the description,

try it out, and see how much faster you can level up your language skills.

Okay, another area that movies and TV shows helped me with was melody, rhythm, and intonation.

My native language, Romanian, has a very different structure and tone compared to English.

If I translated just the words from Romanian into English and keep the Romanian structure and tone,

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my English will sound very unnatural.

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That's why it's so important to match the meaning and the message of your words to the correct tone and melody.

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Native speakers are used to hearing certain word stressing and intonation patterns.

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If you stress the wrong word,

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the meaning can shift completely and sometimes even mean the opposite of what you were trying to say.

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For example, you're so smart with the wrong facial expression and the wrong tone can sound very sarcastic and passive aggressive.

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But if you say you're so smart,

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this sounds like a genuine compliment.

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Another example, if you say,

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oh really, this is flat intonation,

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no curiosity, no genuine interest.

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But if you say, oh really, then that's genuine curiosity.

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So watching movies gave me access to these very powerful social cues.

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I realized that I wasn't just learning vocabulary and grammar,

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but I was learning how to communicate in a different culture.

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When I repeated after the actors,

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I wasn't just repeating the words.

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I was stepping into their role.

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I was imitating their facial expressions,

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their intonation, even their body language.

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In a way, I was acting too.

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So this trick made me feel the language instead of just memorizing the words.

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And this is especially effective when you're watching shows with regular everyday conversations.

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And by shadowing the actors,

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I learned how fast should I say certain things,

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when should I pause, when should I slow down,

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when should I raise my voice,

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when should I lower my voice.

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And this whole melody of speech is actually called prosody,

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but I obviously had no idea about it back then.

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It's also one of the most overlooked aspects of language learning.

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In school, the focus was mostly on structure,

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grammar, vocabulary, and lots of writing and reading.

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Listening was minimal and intonation was barely even mentioned.

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And I had no idea that speech melody could influence how clearly I express myself

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and how strongly it would affect my ability to connect with native speakers.

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And prosody is really hard to teach,

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especially because usually teachers in traditional school systems have very strict curriculums and they focus a lot on exercises,

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vocabulary, and grammar.

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And that's why a lot of students will graduate with perfect grades,

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but they will sound very unnatural when speaking in real life.

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Okay, now let's talk about vocabulary.

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The way you learn vocabulary through TV shows and movies is very different compared to word banks and vocabulary lists.

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Many times, the words that you're trying to learn are presented to you in isolation,

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just taken out of context.

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But when you learn through movies,

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you get the full package.

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You get the sound of the word,

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you get the visual positioning,

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the situation where it's used,

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and you get the correct articles and prepositions and sentence structure.

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For example, instead of memorizing the phrasal verb look as in look after,

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look into, look out, look away,

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if you're learning them all at once,

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all you're going to remember is just the word look

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and then you're going to be confused about the rest of the prepositions and which is look in,

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which is look into, which one is look out, which ones look after.

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But in a movie, you just learn that one situation where you know that okay here I use look after.

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Imagine a scene that somebody is saying oh I need to go away

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but I need to find someone to look after my dog

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and then later somebody says have you found someone to look after your dog

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and you don't need to think that oh this is a phrasal verb with look and after.

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No you just remember that look after is taking care of someone.

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So this way, I wasn't struggling to memorize multiple phrasal verbs or multiple vocabulary words.

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I was just looking, watching,

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and remembering the situation and how that specific verb or word was used then.

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And every time I would repeat those lines,

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they would come as a full package.

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There's the correct articles, correct prepositions,

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the correct sentence structure, and I would see it visually when and how to use it.

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So subconsciously, I wasn't just learning the verb look after,

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for example, but I was also learning how to use it inside a sentence.

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And this could sound to you as a much slower process than just taking a big chunk of vocabulary words

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and just memorizing them.

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But trust me, memorizing those words won't actually help you speak.

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And most likely, if you don't end up using those words consistently and regularly,

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you will just forget them and you just waste your time.

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So the reason why I started sounding more fluent earlier on than my other classmates was

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because I was speaking in complete phrases already.

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I had these expressions ready to go because I would repeat them consistently,

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I would hear them a lot in these movies or TV shows

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and I didn't have to pull every single word at a

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time from my mind vocabulary every time I wanted to say a sentence.

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I had these phrases and expressions ready to go

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because I've lived through them with these actors and the scenes they were in.

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So the next time you're watching something and you want to do some shadowing,

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don't just repeat the words but try to imagine you're in the scene.

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Jump into the character.

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Repeat the lines, copy the expressions,

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exaggerate the sounds, and basically become that actor for that moment.

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You'll be surprised how much faster you start sounding natural in English

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when you treat it as a performance and not just as homework.

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Because at the end of the day,

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English is not just memorizing words and grammar and rules.

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It's about stepping in a new role,

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finding a new rhythm, and finding a new way of connecting with people.

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So grab some popcorn, pick a show you love,

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and remember you're not just watching Netflix, you're practicing your English.

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Thank you so much for watching.

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I hope you enjoyed this video and I will see you next time.

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Bye!

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.

Pratica di Shadowing: How I Learned English with Movies and TV-Shows - Impara a parlare inglese con i video

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Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?