Pratica di Shadowing: Listening part four (The impact of digital technology on the Icelandic language) - Impara a parlare inglese con i video

Caricamento...
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Part 4.
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You will hear a lecturer on a languages course talking about the impact of digital technology on Icelandic,
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the native language of Iceland.
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First you have some time to look at questions 31 to 40.
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Now listen carefully and answer questions 31 to 40.
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Right, everyone, let's make a start.
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Over the past few sessions, we've been considering the reasons why some world languages are in decline,
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and today I'm going to introduce another factor that affects languages, and the speakers of those languages,
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and that's technology, and in particular, digital technology.
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In order to illustrate its effect, I'm going to focus on the Icelandic language, which is spoken by around 321,000 people,
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most of whom live in Iceland, an island in the North Atlantic Ocean.
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The problem for this language is not the number of speakers, even though this number is small, nor is it about losing words to other languages, such as English.
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In fact, the vocabulary of Icelandic is continually increasing, because when speakers need a new word for something,
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they tend to create one, rather than borrowing from another language.
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All this makes Icelandic quite a special language.
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It's changed very little in the past millennium, yet it can handle 21st century concepts related to the use of computers and digital technology.
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Take, for example, the word for web browser.
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This is Vafri in Icelandic, which comes from the verb to wander.
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I can't think of a more appropriate term because that's exactly what you do mentally when you browse the internet.
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Then there's an Icelandic word for podcast, which is too hard to pronounce, and so on.
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Icelandic, then, is alive and growing, but, and it's a big but, young Icelanders spend a great deal of time in the digital world,
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and this world is predominantly English.
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Think about smartphones.
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They didn't even exist until comparatively recently, but today, young people use them all the time to read books,
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watch TV or films, play games, listen to music and so on.
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Obviously, this is a good thing in many respects because it promotes their bilingual skills,
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but the extent of the influence of English in the virtual world is staggering, and it's all happening really fast.
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For their parents and grandparents, the change is less concerning because they already have their native speaker skills in Icelandic, but for young speakers, well,
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the outcome is a little troubling.
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For example, teachers have found that playground conversations in Icelandic secondary schools can be conducted entirely in English,
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while teachers of much younger children have reported situations where their
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classes find it easier to say what is in a picture using English rather than Icelandic.
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The very real and worrying consequence of all this is
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that the young generation in Iceland is at risk of losing its mother tongue.
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Of course, this is happening to other European languages too.
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But while internet companies might be willing to offer, say, French options in their systems, it's much harder for them to justify the expense of doing the same for a language
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that has a population the size of a French town, such as Nice.
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The other drawback of Icelandic is the grammar, which is significantly more complex than in most languages.
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At the moment, the tech giants are simply not interested in tackling this.
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So what is the Icelandic government doing about this?
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Well large sums of money are being allocated to a language technology fund
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that it is hoped will lead to the development of Icelandic-sourced apps and other social media and digital systems.
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But clearly this is going to be an uphill struggle.
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On the positive side, they know that Icelandic is still the official language of education and government.
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It has survived for well over a thousand years, and the experts predict that its future in this nation-state is sound and will continue to be so.
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However, there's no doubt that it's becoming an inevitable second choice in young people's lives.
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This raises important questions.
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When you consider how much of the past is tied up in a language, will young Icelanders lose their sense of their own identity?
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Another issue that concerns the government of Iceland is this.
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If children are learning two languages through different routes, neither of which they are fully fluent in.
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Will they be able to express themselves properly?
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That is the end of part four.
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You now have one minute to check your answers to part four.

Cos'è che imparerai

Questo video ti aiuterà a rafforzare due abilità chiave per il parlato inglese: la comprensione di discorsi tecnici su argomenti culturali e la capacità di identificare le sfide linguistiche legate alla globalizzazione. Inoltre, eserciterai la shadowing in inglese, una tecnica efficace per migliorare la pronuncia inglese e l'intonazione, ripetendo in tempo reale frasi e frammenti del discorso.

Ascolta questi suoni

Nell'audio, noterai esempi di connected speech (parola collegata) come "it's a big but" pronunciato quasi come "itsabigbut", dove le vocali si riducono e le consonanti si legano. Anche la riduzione di "them" a "em" in "the speakers of em" è un punto da osservare. Questi dettagli aiutano a capire come il parlato spontaneo si differenzia dalla lingua scritta e sono fondamentali per migliorare la pronuncia inglese.

Parla come un madrelingua

Per imitare il ritmo e l'accento del relatore, focalizzati sulla stress (enfasi) sulle parole chiave: "tecnologia digitale", "lingua islandese", "generazione giovane". Il relatore usa una pausa dopo "but" per sottolineare la contraddizione, una tecnica che dà peso al messaggio. Usa un shadowing site o la tecnica del shadow speech per ripetere frasi come "the extent of the influence is staggering" mantenendo lo stesso flusso e l'intonazione decrescente alla fine. Questo esercizio rafforza la tua capacità di parlare con naturalità e chiarezza, come un madrelingua.

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.