Pratica di Shadowing: The Love of My Life (and Why I Need to Share It with You) | Ann Patchett | TED - Impara a parlare inglese con YouTube

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I had just turned 22 when I finished my first semester of graduate school at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
⏸ In Pausa
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I had just turned 22 when I finished my first semester of graduate school at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
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I was also taking classes in the printmaking program, ambitious young art-loving thing that I was.
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I had flown from Iowa City to Chicago O'Hare, where I'd change planes and go home to Nashville for Christmas.
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I had my Hermes 3000 typewriter with me, technically portable at 14 pounds, because I wrote stories.
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I also had a shoulder bag of zinc plates, which I planned to engrave over the break.
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Have you ever traveled with a bag of zinc plates?
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They're a lot heavier than a typewriter.
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In O'Hare, I got very, very lost.
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I put my typewriter down, stood there lopsided, looking at my ticket, when a young man walked up and asked me if I needed help.
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Time changes memory, but I remember him clearly.
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He had on khaki pants and a pink Oxford shirt.
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He had straight, sandy blonde hair and wire-rimmed glasses.
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He looked like the young John Denver.
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I gave him my ticket.
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You are really lost, he said.
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And then he took my extraordinarily heavy bag from my shoulder
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and the typewriter from my hand and said he would walk me to my gate.
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Side note, this was 1986.
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I was shy and I was plain.
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I was not the kind of girl whose typewriter was carried by men who look like John Denver.
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And my heart expanded with the wonder.
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Together, we traversed many concourses, and I began to worry about the time.
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I said, he shouldn't risk missing his flight so that I could make mine.
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That's when he told me he didn't have a flight.
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I asked him if he worked in the airport, and he said, yeah, sort of.
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He said he was a Hare Krishna.
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What a beautiful world it was when you could still get lost in an airport,
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when zinc plates sharp as meat cleavers filled your carry-ons, when Hare Krishnas, those dancing,
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chanting members of a religious sect, roamed freely from gate to gate.
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I was terrified. But of what?
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That he'd kidnap me and make me a vegetarian?
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I was already a vegetarian.
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I had to keep walking with him because he had my typewriter, and I was in love with my typewriter.
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In those days, there were no screens updating travelers as to departure times,
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So I didn't know that my flight was two hours delayed until I reached the gate.
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The Hare Krishna laid my burdens down and said he'd wait with me.
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Would I have chosen to spend two hours in O'Hare with a Hare Krishna.
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No. But I lacked the courage to bolt.
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I decided that, given the circumstances, the only thing I could do was listen.
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The ability to really listen to another person is an essential skill for a novelist.
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It's an essential skill for all human beings.
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And what the Hare Krishna told me was one of the most remarkable things I had ever heard in my life.
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He said, imagine loving God so much
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that you would be willing to stand in an airport all day so that you could tell people about God's love.
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All day long, people rushed past him,
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even after he had forsaken his traditional saffron robes to mitigate first impressions.
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They buried their faces in their newspapers as soon as he started to speak,
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and still he kept showing up because God's love was the greatest thing he had ever known,
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and he wanted to share it.
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When I finally made it home to Nashville, I told this story to everyone.
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In fact, I told it for years.
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Two hours in an airport with a Hare Krishna.
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But as I got older, I could see myself becoming that Hare Krishna,
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wanting to testify about the greatest love in my life, which is reading.
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So great is my need to share this love that it outweighs my significant need for privacy.
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I gave up printmaking when I left Iowa, but books have been my steadfast companions,
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my solace, my teachers, my joy.
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I can't imagine what life would be without reading.
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And so pretty much every day, in every situation I find myself in, I'm out there sharing the good news.
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For a long time, my love for books was more cloistered, less zealot.
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But in 2011, all of that changed.
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The two major bookstores in Nashville closed, and after waiting around for someone else to open a bookstore, I decided to do it myself.
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This was not the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.
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It was more like irritation.
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People love to tell me that bookstores are dead,
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that books themselves are hobbling towards the dust heap of cultural irrelevance.
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Heresy, I say.
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Books are the rock on which I built my church.
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Like the Hare Krishna, I didn't do this because of what I needed.
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I had books.
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I would always have books.
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I fought for books because you need them.
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The summer before we opened Parnassus Books, I went on tour.
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I've been going on tour regularly since 1992.
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This one for a novel I wrote called State of Wonder was going to be my fact-finding mission.
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I collected information from from all the booksellers I knew,
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but the most valuable came from my friend Daniel Golden at Boswell Books in Milwaukee.
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He told me people were desperate to buy anything that was hanging from the ceiling, which is true.
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More importantly, he told me to put the children's section as far away from the front door as possible
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so that when a child makes a break for it, you have the maximum opportunity to catch her.
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Daniel talked a lot about the children's section, which was not a part of bookstores I knew much about.
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If you want customers, he said, you have to raise them yourself. That made sense.
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Small children coming to storytime, being read to, learning to read themselves, will grow up to be great customers.
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Fifteen years later, I can attest that this is true.
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We have raised up a raft of customers.
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But over time, this charming bit of wisdom has changed.
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I don't think of it as cultivating shoppers anymore.
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I think of it as cultivating readers, and not just for the books I write or the books I sell,
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but for all books.
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I've come to believe that if you're interested in living in a society where people read, it's also your responsibility to cultivate readers.
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What does that even mean?
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Well, reading to children the same way people read to us,
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you can buy books for children who are in Title I schools who might not have books of their own.
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We do a lot of this at Parnassus.
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You can speak out against book banning.
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Because books are not the things endangering our children.
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and speak up for teachers and librarians who are doing the jobs that they've been trained for.
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Also, you can just read a book.
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Do you wish that people read books instead of, say, constantly scrolling on their phones?
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Then read books.
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Do you want your children to be readers?
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then model that behavior.
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Of course you're going to read to them, but they also have to see you read.
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Like all the people who told me not to open a bookstore, you may be wondering if books are even relevant in this golden age of technology.
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Think of it this way.
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Every piece of information coming out of your computer or phone is a single thread.
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At any given moment, you are holding countless threads which range in quality from vital to worthless.
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What a novelist does is takes all of those threads and weaves them into a tapestry.
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Maidens, unicorns, pear trees.
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This is no small job, but when it's done right, the outcome is both beautiful and enduring.
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Novels teach us empathy by putting us into another person's life,
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and they define our history by showing us how we've changed and will continue to change.
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Think of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
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Now, think of John Updike.
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And if this wasn't reason enough to love books, they also help us develop and preserve of what I like to call a long-format brain.
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The problems of the world cannot be seen one thread at a time, nor can they be solved.
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The ability to think with depth and complexity is greatly enhanced by reading more than 280 characters at a time.
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If you haven't read a novel in a while, it may feel strange at first, but stick with it.
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What you put in is what you'll get back.
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What surprised me most about owning a bookstore
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and practically everything about it surprises me is that it's not just books people come in for.
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Reading that solitary endeavor has proven to be a means of connection.
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Our monthly book club at Parnassus is now so large, we've broken it into three sections.
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We also have a classics book club and a romance book club, and once a year, those two groups come together to read a classic romance.
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Most recently, Pride and Prejudice.
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Our author events have ranged from Jeff Kenney to Percival Everett, to Barbara Kingsolver to RF Kuang, to Ina Garten to Bono.
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And whether it's presidential histories or mysteries, What we see is that books give people the means by which to connect.
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The conversations may start with books, but they go everywhere.
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Reading shines the light that disrupts the dark isolation so many people find themselves in.
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Go to your local bookstore and see what I'm talking about.
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Every time I change planes in O'Hare, I think about the Hare Krishna,
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a person I was afraid of, a person I had nothing in common with,
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a person whose only intention was to help me,
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both to find my gate and to find a force in the world greater than myself.
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Through experience, we had both come to see that we were part of the larger human fabric.
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He, through his faith, and me, through a different kind of faith.
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Maybe this time we would sit at the gate a little bit longer, and I would ask him what he was reading.
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I would tell him how much I admired the courage of his convictions.
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I would thank him for helping me find my way.

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Informazioni su questa Lezione

In questa lezione, gli studenti avranno l'opportunità di praticare l'ascolto attivo e la pronuncia in inglese grazie alla trascrizione della conferenza TED di Ann Patchett. Focusandosi sulla narrazione personale dell'autrice e sul suo incontro significativo con un giovane devoto di Hare Krishna, gli studenti apprenderanno non solo nuove parole, ma anche l'importanza dell'ascolto e dell'empatia nelle interazioni umane, elementi essenziali per migliorare la propria fluidità nel parlare inglese.

Vocabolario e Frasi Chiave

  • Typewriter - macchina da scrivere
  • Lost - perso
  • Help - aiuto
  • Remarkable - notevole
  • Experience - esperienza
  • God's love - l'amore di Dio
  • Listen - ascoltare
  • Willing - disposto

Consigli per la Pratica

Per migliorare la tua pronuncia in inglese, prova ad utilizzare la tecnica dello shadowspeak mentre ascolti il video di Ann Patchett. Questo significa che dovresti ripetere immediatamente dopo di lei, cercando di imitare non solo le parole, ma anche il tono e l'emozione nella sua voce. La sua narrazione è calma e riflessiva, il che rende più facile seguire il ritmo. Inoltre, presta attenzione alle pause e alle intonazioni; questo ti aiuterà a comprendere meglio come esprimere le tue idee in modo efficace.

Un altro utile suggerimento è quello di registrare te stesso mentre pratichi. Ascoltare la tua voce ti permetterà di identificare aree in cui puoi migliorare, contribuendo così a migliorare la pronuncia inglese. Ricorda che l'obiettivo è notare i progressi nel tempo. Approfitta di questo video per imparare l'inglese con YouTube e affinare le tue abilità comunicative attraverso l’ascolto attivo e la pratica costante con lo shadowspeaks.

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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