シャドーイング練習: The Love Lessons We Never Learned - 動画で英語スピーキングを学ぶ

レッスンを作成中...
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It can be easy to feel, as we look back on our lives, that we have been singularly inept in our choices and behaviours.
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Why did we waste so long here?
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Why didn't we see what they were doing there?
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Why didn't we speak up sooner?
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Or hold our nerve?
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In such self-recriminatory moods, it can be more than merely sentimental to remind ourselves of a fundamental fact about relationships
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that we miss when we despair of our conduct.
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They sit in an area of exceptional importance,
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in which we are granted astonishingly few chances to practice before having to make vastly consequential decisions.
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Imagine if we were asked to become great violinists and were given all of six lessons to perfect our craft.
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Or if we were expected to master the javelin after four perfunctory throws.
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We'd know the odds were stacked against us.
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We'd have compassion for our often miserable performances.
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We'd understand what we were up against.
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Without us being aware, much the same level of unpreparedness holds true of relationships.
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Even a highly experienced lover might have only eight partners before getting married.
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Most of us have two or three.
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Someone might have shared a home with just one other person before deciding to place a new human being on the earth.
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None of us has ever been asked to pass an examination in love before going on a date.
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From the other side of failure, we chastise ourselves for how little we've understood.
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We don't appreciate how much there is to understand how infinitely more complicated relationships are than any musical instrument.
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It's entirely to be expected that the sounds we make are frequently terrifying.
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Let's imagine that there are some 30 key lessons to learn about relationships,
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30 things we might have to get the hang of before having any real chance at managing our lives successfully.
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We might begin to summarize these lessons as follows.
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Always speak up when you're feeling undervalued.
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Complain with clarity and kindness not despair or rage.
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You try to persuade anyone to love you.
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Don't set out to fix anyone's childhood.
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An absence of attraction is fateful, but then attraction isn't enough.
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They should be like a best friend, but this isn't just a friendship.
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Resentment at a mother or father has a very long tail.
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Someone who hates therapy doesn't just hate therapy, they're liable to hate introspection and dialogue too.
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Flee from anyone defensive.
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get together with someone just because they are right on paper.
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If something breaks down once, the chances of it ever working a second time are beyond minimal.
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And so on and so forth.
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The challenge is that though we might state these lessons simply enough,
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to get the hang of each one properly requires at least eight months and more usually several years or even decades.
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We need to experience the finer nuances of the issues through summers and winters, through journeys and work crises, in the slow despair of quiet Sunday afternoons.
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We need time, encouragement and the right to fail without tragedy.
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We wouldn't be any less generous after telling a trumpet player to support their notes from the diaphragm.
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In a depressed moment in middle age, we might try to categorize phases of our love lives according to the slow lessons
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that we've taken away from each one of them.
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For example, don't keep making an effort if they're not.
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Caitlin, four and a half years.
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Beware of people who can't articulate their emotions.
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6 months Don't wait around hoping they'll explain why they acted as they did 3 years
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Don't have children before the bond is properly formed 20 years
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We would need to live to at least 500 years old to stand any realistic chance of picking up our craft.
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Instead, we're rushed on stage and have to work out the right way to hold the bow before a live audience.
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Those who haven't generated disaster and mutiny are luckier than they are talented.
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We aren't miserable because we're stupid, but because we weren't ever trained,
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because we exist in a culture morbidly and mysteriously resistant to emotional education.
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We leave things to chance, out of a feeling that it might be cold or unromantic, to apply some of the same basic discipline and foresight
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that we would resort to before operating a lawn mower or floor polisher.
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We teach people to become brain surgeons and pilots, yet leave the roles of partner and parent to intuition.
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A better arranged culture would itemise the key lessons of love for people in their last year of school,
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and then impose a universal intensive training programme with some of the rigour of an architecture or accountancy qualification.
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We would think of novels and films not as entertainment
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but as chances to hone the lessons of love we'd learnt in an analytical form elsewhere.
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We'd use video games to place us in digitised scenarios before we had to face them in reality.
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We'd ask ourselves for patience and be aware, without humiliation, of how blind we necessarily were.
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We've made a mess, no doubt.
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We don't, on top of everything else, need to be surprised that we did so.
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This is a game
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with at least 30 traps in it
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and we began to play long before we'd ever realized that the instruction manual had been tossed aside.

リレーションシップの「未学習のレッスン」という現実

YouTubeで英語学習をする際、このビデオのように人生の深いテーマを扱った内容は、語彙だけでなく思考法も学べる貴重な教材です。私たちは誰でも過去の恋愛や人間関係で「なぜあの時そうしなかったのか」と自責の念に陥りますが、ビデオはそんな私たちに「リレーションシップは練習機会が極めて少ない分野なのだ」と教えてくれます。バイオリンや投擲競技と比べ、恋愛の「技術」を磨く機会は圧倒的に少ないのです。このようなリアルなシナリオを通じて、英語の文章構造や論理的な話し方を学ぶことができます。

覚えておきたい便利なフレーズとコロケーション

英語の発音を良くするためには、自然な語句の組み合わせを覚えることが大切です。以下はビデオから抽出した4つの有用な表現です。

  • hold our nerve:冷静さを保つ(「ナーヴを保つ」と直訳するよりも、「動揺しない」というニュアンス)
  • consequential decisions:重大な決定(「結果的な決定」ではなく、「影響力の大きな決定」)
  • flee from anyone defensive:防御的な人から逃げる(「防御的な誰かから逃げる」という構造)
  • the bond is properly formed:絆がしっかりと形成される(「絆が適切に形成される」よりも、「しっかりとした絆ができる」)

あなたのシャドーイング・チャレンジ

shadowing siteやshadowspeaksを使う前に、まずは簡単なタスクから始めましょう。ビデオの中で「We need time, encouragement and the right to fail without tragedy.」という文があります。この文をshadow speechの技法を使って練習してみてください。具体的には、ビデオを再生し、1秒遅れで同じように発音し、イントネーションやリズムを真似ます。5回繰り返して、自然な発音に近づけてください。このような短いタスクでも、英語のスピーキング力は確実に上がります!

YouTubeで英語学習をする際は、このような実践的な練習を積むことで、より効果的に上達できます。少しずつでも毎日練習して、自分の英語力を高めていきましょう。

シャドーイングとは?英語上達に効果的な理由

シャドーイング(Shadowing)は、もともとプロの通訳者養成プログラムで開発された言語学習法で、多言語習得者として知られるDr. Alexander Arguelles によって広く普及されました。方法はシンプルですが非常に効果的:ネイティブスピーカーの英語を聞きながら、1〜2秒の遅延で声に出してすぐに繰り返す——まるで「影(shadow)」のように話者を追いかけます。文法ドリルや受動的なリスニングと異なり、シャドーイングは脳と口の筋肉が同時にリアルタイムで英語を処理・再現することを強制します。研究により、発音精度、抑揚、リズム、連音、リスニング力、そして会話の流暢さが大幅に向上することが確認されています。IELTSスピーキング対策や自然な英語コミュニケーションを目指す方に特におすすめです。

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