Pratica di Shadowing: J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement - Impara a parlare inglese con i video
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President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of overseers,
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members of the faculty, proud parents, and above all, graduates.
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The first thing I would like to say is thank you.
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Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honor, but the weeks of fear
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and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight.
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A win-win situation.
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Now all I have to do is take deep breaths,
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squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world's largest Gryffindor reunion.
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Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility, or so I thought, until I cast my mind back to my own graduation.
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The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher, Baroness Mary Warnock.
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Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said.
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This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business,
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the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
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You see, if all you remember in years to come is the gay wizard joke, I've come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock.
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Achievable goals, the first step to self-improvement.
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Actually, I have racked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today.
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I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation,
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and what important lessons I have learnt in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.
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I have come up with two answers.
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On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure.
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And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called real life, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
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These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but bear with me.
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Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become.
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Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself
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and what those closest to me expected of me.
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I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was write novels.
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However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college,
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took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.
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I know the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil now.
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So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree.
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I wanted to study English literature.
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A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study modern languages.
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Hardly had my parents' car round of the corner at the end of the road, then I ditched German and scuttled off down the classics corridor.
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I cannot remember telling my parents
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that I was studying classics they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day.
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Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology
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when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
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Now, I would like to make it clear in parenthesis that I do not blame my parents for their point of view.
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There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction.
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The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.
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What is more, I cannot criticize my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty.
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They had been poor themselves and I have since been poor
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and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience.
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Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression.
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It means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships.
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Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticized only by fools.
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What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty but failure.
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At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university where
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I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations and
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that for years had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.
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Now I am not dull enough to suppose that that because you are young,
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gifted, and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartache.
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Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.
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And I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.
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However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well acquainted with failure.
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You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success.
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Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far removed from the average person's idea of success.
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So high have you already flown.
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Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure.
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but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it.
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So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day,
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I had failed on an epic scale.
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An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent,
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and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless.
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The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass.
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And by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
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Now I'm not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun.
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That period of my life was a dark one.
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And I had no idea
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that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairytale resolution.
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I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
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So why do I talk about the benefits of failure?
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Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential.
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I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was,
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and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.
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Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena where I believed I truly belonged.
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I was set free because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored,
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and I had an old typewriter and a big idea.
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And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
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You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable.
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It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live
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so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you fail by default.
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Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations.
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Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way.
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I discovered that I had a strong will and more discipline than I had suspected.
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I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.
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The knowledge that you who have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive.
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You will never truly know yourself or the strength of your relationships until both have been tested by adversity.
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Such knowledge is a true gift for all that it is painfully won
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and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.
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So given a time turner,
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I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a checklist of acquisition or achievement.
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Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two.
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Life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone's total control,
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and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
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Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so.
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Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learnt to value imagination in a much broader sense.
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Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not,
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and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation.
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In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity,
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it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
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One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books.
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This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs.
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Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours,
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I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African Research Department of Amnesty International's headquarters in London.
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There in my little office, I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes
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by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them.
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I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends.
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I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries.
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I opened handwritten, eyewitness accounts of summary trials and executions of kidnappings and rapes.
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Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners,
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people who had been displaced from their homes or fled into exile because they had the temerity to speak against their governments.
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Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information
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or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.
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I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time,
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who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland.
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He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him.
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He was a foot taller than I was and seemed as fragile as a child.
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I was given the job of escorting him back to the underground station afterwards and this man, whose life had been shattered by cruelty,
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took my hand with exquisite courtesy and wished me future happiness.
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And as long as I live, I shall remember walking along an empty corridor
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and suddenly hearing from behind a closed door a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since.
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The door opened and the researcher poked out her head
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and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her.
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She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his outspokenness against his country's regime,
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his mother had been seized and executed.
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Every day of my working week in my early 20s, I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was to live in
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a country with a democratically elected government where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
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Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind would inflict on their fellow humans to gain or maintain power.
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I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.
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And yet, I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.
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Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured
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or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have.
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The power of human empathy leading to collective action saves lives and frees prisoners.
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Ordinary people whose personal well-being
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and security are assured join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know and will never meet.
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My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
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Unlike any other creature on this planet, human beings can learn and understand without having experienced.
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They can think themselves into other people's places.
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Of course, this is a power like my brand of fictional magic that is morally neutral.
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One might use such an ability to manipulate or control just as much as to understand or sympathise.
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And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all.
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They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.
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They can refuse to hear screams or peer inside cages.
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They can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally.
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They can refuse to know.
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I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do.
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Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors.
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I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters.
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They are often more afraid.
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What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters, for without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves,
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we collude with it through our own apathy.
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One of the many things I learned at the end of that classics corridor, down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define,
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was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch.
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What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
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That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives.
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It expresses in part our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.
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But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives?
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Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received,
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give you unique status and unique responsibilities.
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Even your nationality sets you apart.
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The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower.
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The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government has an impact way beyond your borders.
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That is your privilege and your burden.
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If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice,
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voice, if you choose to identify not only with the powerful but with the powerless,
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if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages,
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then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change.
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We do not need magic to transform our world.
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We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already.
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we have the power to imagine better.
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I'm nearly finished.
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I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21.
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The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life.
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They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of real trouble.
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People who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters.
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At our graduation, we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again,
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and of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence
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that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
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So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships.
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And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met
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when I fled down the Classics corridor in retreat from career ladders in search of ancient wisdom.
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As is a tale, so is life.
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Not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
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I wish you all very good lives.
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Thank you very much.
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Vocabolario e note di pronuncia per questa lezione
Questa lezione di conversazione di livello C1 si basa sul video “J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement”. Questo video contiene 186 frasi e 2831 parole da ripetere con lo shadowing. Il parlato dura 20:28. Chi parla mantiene un ritmo costante di circa 138 parole al minuto, comodo per lo shadowing. Solo il 80% delle parole rientra nelle 3.000 più comuni dell’inglese, quindi il lessico è impegnativo.
Vocaboli chiave di questo video
Le 15 parole più avanzate del video, con pronuncia e significato:
| Parola | Pronuncia | Significato |
|---|---|---|
| graduation sostantivo | /ˌɡɹæd͡ʒuˈeɪʃən/ | graduazione |
| corridor sostantivo | /ˈkɒɹɪdɔː/ | corridoio |
| commencement sostantivo | /kəˈmɛnsmənt/ | inizio, cominciamento |
| empathize verbo | /ˈɛmpəˌθaɪz/ | avere empatia, simpatizzare |
| exceptionally avverbio | /ɪkˈsɛp(t)ʃənəli/ | eccezionalmente |
| flee verbo | /ˈfliː/ | fuggire |
| endure verbo | /ɪnˈd͡ʒʊə(ɹ)/ | durare, restare |
| qualification sostantivo | /ˌkwɑlɪfɪˈkeɪʃən/ | certificazione |
| wizard sostantivo | /ˈwɪzɚd/ | mago |
| criterion sostantivo | /kɹaɪˈtɪɹ.i.ən/ | criterio |
| displace verbo | /dɪsˈpleɪs/ | rimpiazzare, sostituire |
| imprison verbo | /ɪmˈpɹɪzən/ | imprigionare, incarcerare |
| expire verbo | /ɪkˈspaɪə(ɹ)/ | scadere |
| steer verbo | /stɪɹ/ | sterzare, guidare |
| cruelty sostantivo | /ˈkɹu(.ə)lti/ | crudeltà |
I phrasal verb che sentirai
| Parola | Significato |
|---|---|
| find out verbo | scoprire |
| come up with verbo | ideare, escogitare |
| turn out verbo | risultare |
La grammatica di questo video
Le strutture che chi parla usa di più, con le parole esatte del video:
| Struttura | Nel video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + participio passato — un’azione passata che conta ancora adesso | have endured · has helped · I've come |
| Forma passiva be + participio passato — conta ciò che accade, non chi lo fa | are gathered · is sometimes called · was reached |
| Frasi relative who / which + frase — un’informazione in più su una persona o una cosa | that which is · women who were · those who had |
Pronuncia a cui fare attenzione
Chi parla usa 5 contrazioni e forme ridotte, come I'm, I've, can't. Pronunciale nella forma breve, così come le senti.
- I suoni “th”: empathize /ˈɛmpəˌθaɪz/, threshold /ˈθɹɛʃ(h)oʊld/
- I suoni “sh” e “zh”: graduation /ˌɡɹæd͡ʒuˈeɪʃən/, exceptionally /ɪkˈsɛp(t)ʃənəli/, qualification /ˌkwɑlɪfɪˈkeɪʃən/, fictional /ˈfɪkʃənəl/, distinguish /dɪˈstɪŋ.ɡwɪʃ/
- Parole lunghe — attenzione all’accento: graduation /ˌɡɹæd͡ʒuˈeɪʃən/, exceptionally /ɪkˈsɛp(t)ʃənəli/, qualification /ˌkwɑlɪfɪˈkeɪʃən/, criterion /kɹaɪˈtɪɹ.i.ən/, revelation /ˌɹɛv.əˈleɪ.ʃən/
I suoni difficili per chi parla italiano:
- /h/ — va soffiata, non è muta: wholly /ˈhoʊ.li/, homeland /ˈhoʊmˌlænd/, threshold /ˈθɹɛʃ(h)oʊld/
- Consonante finale — senza aggiungere una vocale dopo: commencement /kəˈmɛnsmənt/, empathize /ˈɛmpəˌθaɪz/, wizard /ˈwɪzɚd/, displace /dɪsˈpleɪs/, bind /ˈbaɪ̯nd/
- /æ/ — più aperta della “e”: graduation /ˌɡɹæd͡ʒuˈeɪʃən/, fragile /ˈfɹæd͡ʒəl/, ambition /æmˈbɪʃ.ən/, homeland /ˈhoʊmˌlænd/, satisfy /ˈsætɪsfaɪ/
Come esercitarsi con questo video
- Ascolta tutto il video una volta senza parlare e annota le parole che non conosci.
- Fai shadowing frase per frase a velocità normale, ripetendo ognuna finché il tuo ritmo coincide con quello di chi parla.
- Registrati e confronta con l’originale, facendo attenzione a parole come graduation, corridor, commencement.
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.