Pratica di Shadowing: Kenyon College: John Green Commencement Address - Impara a parlare inglese con i video

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136 frasi
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Please join me in welcoming Kenyon College's 188th commencement speaker, John Green.
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Thank you so much.
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President Decatur, faculty, staff, parents, friends, and members of Kenyon's class of 2018,
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2016, congratulations to all of you.
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17 years ago, I was supposed to be graduating from Kenyon.
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It ended up taking me an extra semester.
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But I was in the audience that day with my friends and classmates.
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I remember nothing about the commencement address, except that it lasted for 10,000 years.
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Like empires rose and fell, and still the speaker droned on cicada-like in his monotony.
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So I come to you today with but one solemn promise.
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One way or another, this will be over in 14 minutes.
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I want to spend one of those minutes, if you don't mind, in silence.
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This is a trick I learned from the children's television host, Mr. Rogers.
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If you don't mind, I'd like us all, not just the students, but all of us, to close our eyes and think for one minute,
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just a minute, about the people who loved us up into this moment.
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Family and friends, teachers and kind strangers.
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I'll keep the time.
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Thank you.
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Those people, they're so proud of you right now.
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My thoughts turned inevitably back to my years at Kenyon and to my professors, especially Don Rogan, who died this school year.
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Mr. Rogan was a brilliant teacher, but I've forgotten much of what I learned in his classes about phenomenology and gospel redaction.
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What I remember most is that he loved me, and that he took me seriously.
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He and his wife Sally welcomed me into their home, fed me, laughed with me, cried with me.
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And for many years, I wondered why he loved me.
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Like I wasn't a particularly good or committed student.
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I showed no particular promise.
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And then when he died, I saw the grief-stricken Facebook posts pour in from his old students, and I realized he had loved us all.
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Love is not like mass or energy.
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It is not conserved.
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And in the next 17 years, you will forget a lot.
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But you will not forget the kindness
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and generosity of those on this hilltop who were kinder and more generous than they needed to be.
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So when I was a student here, there was widespread agreement among my peers
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that the so-called real world of proper adulthood was basically a disease you caught and then eventually died from.
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Like, adulthood, with its mortgages and spreadsheets and lawn maintenance,
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seemed to be a thing to be dreaded and resisted until finally it overtook you, like a zombie plague.
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And then, like, once you acquired adulthood, you would start saying things like brand awareness in a fractured media landscape.
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And we need a president who knows how to get things done.
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To be an adult meant engaging in totally unironic conversations about the weather.
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I remember once when I was at Kenyon, my grandmother called me to tell me that she was watching the Weather Channel
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and that it looked like it was raining in Ohio.
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I explained to her that I was reading Ulysses.
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That I wasn't even in Gambier, but in Dublin, Ireland in 1904.
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And that history was a nightmare from which Daedalus was trying to awake.
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And that nothing, literally nothing, mattered less than the current weather.
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And then after a moment she asked, Well, is it raining or isn't it?
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To be an adult was to be a river rock blasted
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by an endless torrent of mundane terrors from resume formatting to electricity bills
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that would inevitably smooth all my hard edges until I looked and felt just like everything else.
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Now this is the part of the commencement address where I'm supposed to tell you
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that in fact adulthood isn't so bad and blah blah blah but no, no, it is so bad.
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If anything, it is worse than I could have imagined.
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I mean, have you ever been to a homeowners association meeting?
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Like each of you in the class of 2016 is a wondrous
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and precious and rare life in a vast and almost entirely dead universe.
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devoting two hours of your bright
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but brief flicker of consciousness to a debate over whether the
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maximum allowable length of grass in your neighborhood's front lawns should be four inches or six.
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But it's true, you will debate grass length or something equally stultifying.
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You will learn, almost against your will, the difference between whole and term life insurance.
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You will test drive a minivan and find yourself surprised by the quality of its handling.
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And along the way, along the way you'll find yourself wondering, why am I doing this?
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Why am I doing any of this?
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And this is, in my experience, where your Kenyan education will come in very handy because whether you've studied economics or anthropology,
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for the last four, or if you're like me, five years, you've been investigating what constitutes a fulfilling, successful human life.
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And I'd argue that actually is adulthood.
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Like maybe adulthood isn't something you've spent your time at Kenyon preparing for.
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Instead, maybe you've been doing it, albeit not on the minivan scale.
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You're probably familiar with the old line that a liberal arts education teaches people how to think.
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But I think it mostly teaches you how to listen.
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In your classes and in your readings, you've been listening.
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You've listened to your professors and to your peers,
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but also to Toni Morrison and Jane Austen and John Milton as you all together examine the big questions of our species.
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What do we owe ourselves and what do we owe others?
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What is the nature of the universe and what is our role in it?
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How best might we alleviate the suffering within and without?
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You learned about these questions at Kenyon, but you won't leave them here.
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And while making your voice heard on those questions is vital, you've also learned here that your voice gets stronger the more you listen.
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and not just listening to loud voices, but also to those that are hard to hear because they've been systemically silenced.
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I hope that listening will help inoculate you from the seductive lies of our time.
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The lie that strength and toughness are always assets, that selfishness is not just necessary,
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but desirable, that the whole world benefits most when you act in your own narrow self-interest.
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That seductive lie is appealing because it allows us to go on doing what we would have been doing anyway
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because it imagines a world in which I am what I feel myself to be, the exact center of the universe.
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But living for oneself, even very successfully,
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will do absolutely nothing to fill the gasping void inside of you of you.
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In my experience, that void gets filled not through strength but through weakness.
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You must be weak before the world because love and listening weaken you.
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They make you vulnerable.
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They break you open.
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And it is only when you are weak that you can truly see
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and acknowledge and forgive and love the weakness in others.
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Weakness allows you to see other humans not as enemies to defeat, but as collaborators and co-creators.
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In the end, we're making humanness up together as we go along.
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At the homeowners association meeting, where the miserable adults are debating grass length, what they're actually doing is hashing out what kind of neighborhood they want to share.
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When you're deciding between whole and term life insurance, you're actually thinking of a world without you and how you might be helpful to those you leave behind,
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and how lucky you will be to leave people behind, to have been woven so deeply into the interconnected web of the human story.
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All of it, actually, from electricity bills to the job where your coworkers call themselves teammates, even though this isn't football, for God's sakes.
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All of these so-called horrors of adulthood...
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I lost my place.
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There we go.
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All of these so-called horrors of adulthood emerge from living in
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a world where you are inextricably connected to other people to whom you must learn to listen.
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And that turns out to be great news.
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And if you can remember that those conversations about grass length
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and the weather are actually conversations about how we're going to get through and how we're going to get through together, they become not just bearable,
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but almost kind of transcendent.
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One more way that listening will be of use to you.
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Over the next few days, you're going to straggle out of this strange and wonderful place and enter a world where you will be,
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at least for a little while, manifestly weak.
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If you're lucky enough to have a job, it will likely involve fetching coffee for ungrateful bosses, or entering data, or writing press releases that no one reads.
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Some people will probably treat you as less than fully human, imagining you not to be the complex and multitudinous person you are,
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but instead as an easily replaceable cog in the clockworks of their organization.
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And all of that will be easier if you can see yourself not as the protagonist of your own heroic journey,
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but instead as a collaborator in a massive, sprawling human epic.
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I don't remember anything said at my commencement address, but I do remember Wendy McLeod's speech the day before.
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Professor McLeod, I apologize in advance for butchering your quote and for not swearing when you swore, but she said something like, you're about to be a nobody,
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and that's important because when you become a no- and that's important because when you become a somebody, if you can remember what it was like to be a nobody,
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you won't be a jerk.
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This is.. the parents are clapping.
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Looking back, I think that's about the second best piece of advice I've ever received behind only
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that given me by Professor Rogan, who once told me, and this I can quote directly, You're a good kid, but you need to learn when to stop talking.
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So I will shut up momentarily.
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And anyway, I can offer you no real advice on how to live a successful adult life, but I don't need to.
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The people you thought of during that minute of silence, they are who you want to be when you grow up.
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They have been strong for you, but also weak for you.
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They listened to you.
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They were irrationally, impossibly kind to you.
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It's not just that you wouldn't be here without them.
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You wouldn't be without them.
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If they're here today, I hope you'll take a second to thank them.
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And if they aren't, they may call later to ask you how it went.
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They may even ask what the weather was like.
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Tell them it was rainy, inexcusably cold for late May.
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and remember to ask if it is raining in their pocket of the world.
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Thank you.

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Vocabolario e note di pronuncia per questa lezione

Questo video contiene 136 frasi e 1841 parole da ripetere con lo shadowing. Il parlato dura 13:40. Chi parla mantiene un ritmo costante di circa 135 parole al minuto, comodo per lo shadowing. Il 82% delle parole rientra nelle 3.000 più comuni dell’inglese; conviene studiare le altre prima di iniziare.

Vocaboli chiave di questo video

15 parole del video che vale la pena imparare, con pronuncia e significato:

ParolaPronunciaSignificato
grass sostantivo/ɡɹɑːs/erba, graminacea
silence sostantivo/ˈsaɪ̯ləns/silenzio
weakness sostantivo/ˈwik.nɪs/debolezza, cagionevolezza
horror sostantivo/ˈhɒɹ.ə/orrore
peer sostantivo/pɪɹ/pari, uguale
void aggettivo/vɔɪd/vuoto
lawn sostantivo/lɔːn/prato
inevitably avverbio/ɪˈnɛvɪtəbli/inevitabilmente
vast aggettivo/væst/ampio, vasto
pocket sostantivo/ˈpɑ.kɪt/tasca
trick sostantivo/ˈtɹɪk/inbroglio
format sostantivo/ˈfɔːɹ.mæt/formato
argue verbo/ˈɑɹ.ɡju/discutere, dibattere
successfully avverbio/səkˈsɛs.fə.li/con successo
awareness sostantivo/əˈwɛɹ.nəs/coscienza

I phrasal verb che sentirai

ParolaPronunciaSignificato
get through verbo/ɡɛt ˈθɹu/superare, farcela
end up verboandare a finire, finire
grow up verbocrescere
shut up/ʃʌt ʌp/chiudi la bocca, stai zitto

La grammatica di questo video

Le strutture che chi parla usa di più, con le parole esatte del video:

StrutturaNel video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — un’azione iniziata prima e ancora in corsoyou've been investigating · you've been doing · you've been listening
Frasi condizionali if + frase, will/would + verbo — una condizione e il suo risultatoIf you don't mind, I'd like · If they're here today, I hope you'll take
Present perfect have/has + participio passato — un’azione passata che conta ancora adessoI've forgotten · you've studied · you've spent
Forma passiva be + participio passato — conta ciò che accade, non chi lo fais not conserved · be dreaded

Pronuncia a cui fare attenzione

Chi parla usa 45 contrazioni e forme ridotte, come you're, you've, don't. Pronunciale nella forma breve, così come le senti.

  • I suoni “th”: smooth /smuːð/, grandmother /ˈɡɹæn(d)ˌmʌðɚ/, anthropology /ˌænθɹəˈpɑləd͡ʒi/
  • I suoni “sh” e “zh”: congratulations /kənˌɡɹæt͡ʃəˈleɪʃ(ə)nz/, consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/, hash /ˈhæʃ/, irrationally /ɪəˈɹæ.ʃə.nə.li/, redaction /ɹəˈdækʃən/
  • Parole lunghe — attenzione all’accento: electricity /ɪˌlɛkˈtɹɪsɪti/, inevitably /ɪˈnɛvɪtəbli/, successfully /səkˈsɛs.fə.li/, economics /ˌiːkəˈnɒmɪks/, congratulations /kənˌɡɹæt͡ʃəˈleɪʃ(ə)nz/

Come esercitarsi con questo video

  1. Ascolta tutto il video una volta senza parlare e annota le parole che non conosci.
  2. Fai shadowing frase per frase a velocità normale, ripetendo ognuna finché il tuo ritmo coincide con quello di chi parla.
  3. Registrati e confronta con l’originale, facendo attenzione a parole come grass, silence, weakness.

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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