シャドーイング練習: Why is English so confusing? - Arika Okrent - YouTubeで英語スピーキングを学ぶ
C1
It was June 2010.
⏸ 一時停止中
再生速度:
すべての文38 文
文が短すぎたり長すぎる場合は、Editをタップして調整してください。
1
It was June 2010.
2
Inside the Scripps National Spelling Bee, contestants between 8- and 15-years-old wrestled words like brachydactylous and leguleian.
3
Outside, a crowd protested the complexity of English spelling conventions.
4
Indeed, spelling reformers have been around for centuries, advocating for overarching changes to make English spelling more intuitive.
5
The English language is chock-full of irregularities.
6
One commonly used example of this: take the “g-h” sound from “enough,” the “o” sound from “women,” and the “t-i” sound from “action,” and you could argue that “g-h-o-t-i” spells “fish.” So, how did English get like this?
7
English arose from old Germanic tribes that invaded the British Isles more than 1,500 years ago.
8
Their languages coalesced and evolved into Old English.
9
When Roman missionaries arrived around 600 CE, they devised ways to write it down using the Latin alphabet, supplementing it with some Germanic runes for sounds they didn’t have letters for.
10
Then came the Norman invasion of 1066 when French speakers conquered England.
11
French became the language of authority and high society.
12
But English remained the dominant spoken language.
13
Over time, those descended from French speakers also became English speakers, but some French words snuck into the language.
14
Some English speakers were also familiar with Latin through the church and formal education.
15
By the mid-1400s, people were writing in English again— but it was unstandardized.
16
They used a mix of influences to determine word choice and spelling, including the French they knew, the Latin they studied, and the English they spoke.
17
So, things were already pretty messy.
18
Then, in 1476, the printing press arrived in England.
19
Some of the people working the presses may have mainly spoken Flemish— not English.
20
And they were given manuscripts that varied widely in their spelling.
21
Without standardization, different writers went with various spellings based in part on what they happened to encounter while reading.
22
Many words had a multitude of spellings.
23
The word “dough,” for instance, used to be spelled in all these ways and was originally pronounced “dach.” The guttural Germanic sound it ended with was one the Latin alphabet didn’t cover.
24
It eventually came to be represented with “g-h.” But, for some “g-h” words, English speakers eventually dropped the guttural sound altogether; for others, they ended up pronouncing it as “f” instead, as exemplified in “dough” versus “tough.” Printing presses memorialized the spelling even though the pronunciation eventually changed.
25
And this wasn’t just the case with “g-h.” Some letters in other words also fell silent: words like knife, gnat, and wrong all contain the vestiges of past pronunciations.
26
But while the printing press was solidifying spellings, the English language was also undergoing what scholars call the Great Vowel Shift.
27
Between the 14th and 18th centuries, the way English speakers pronounced many vowels changed significantly.
28
For instance, “bawt” became “boat.” This displaced the word for “boot,” which had up until then been pronounced “boat,” and pushed it into the high “u” vowel position it maintains today.
29
Words that already had this high “u” often became diphthongs, with two vowels in a single syllable.
30
So, “hus” became “house.” As with so many linguistic matters, there's no clear reason why this happened.
31
But it did.
32
And how the vowel shift affected a word depended on various things, including the other sounds in the word.
33
The word “tough” was once “tōh,” among other variations.
34
“Through” was once “thruch” and “dough” “dah.” These words all started with different vowel sounds that were then affected differently by the vowel shift.
35
The “o-u” spelling they all adopted was a haphazardly applied French influence.
36
So, eventually they wound up with still distinct vowel sounds, but similar spellings that don’t really make much sense.
37
All this means English can be a difficult language for non-native speakers to learn.
38
And it reveals the many ways history, in all its messiness, acted upon English, making it especially tough.
アプリをダウンロード
話したすべての文をAIが採点
TRENDING
人気動画
App StoreとGoogle Playで4.9/5
Shadowing English
モバイル版
Shadowing Englishアプリでいつでもどこでも英語を学びましょう。 今すぐコミュニケーションスキルを向上させましょう！
学習の進捗を追跡する
AIによる採点とエラー修正
豊富な動画ライブラリ
この動画で話す練習をする理由
「Why is English so confusing?」という動画は、英語の複雑な構造や歴史を理解するための素晴らしいリソースです。このような動画を通じて話す練習をすることで、英語のスピーキングスキルを向上させることができます。英語の発音を良くするために、動画の中で紹介される言葉やフレーズの正しい発音を模倣し、副詞や接続詞の使い方を学ぶことができます。特に、いろいろなアクセントを聴くことで、実際の会話に近い形で英語を学ぶことができるのです。
文法と表現の文脈
この動画では、いくつかの重要な文法構造や表現が使用されています。
- 過去完了形: 英語の歴史を振り返る際に、「had」を用いた過去完了形の使い方が見られます。これにより、過去の出来事の順序を明らかにします。
- 受動態: 英語の変遷を説明する中で、「was」と「been」を含む受動態が使われ、行為の受け手が強調されています。
- 強調構文: 「It was ... that ...」という構文は、特定の情報を強調するために効果的に使われています。
これらの構文を練習することで、日常会話や学術的な文脈でも使えるようになります。
一般的な発音の罠
動画の中には、英語の発音において特に挑戦的な単語もあります。
- enough: /ɪˈnʌf/は「g-h」からの音が含まれており、発音が直感的ではありません。
- women: /ˈwɪmɪn/ という単語は、スペルが示す音とは違った発音が必要で、特に外国人にとって混乱を引き起こしがちです。
- through: /θruː/ の音は、他の類似単語と混同されやすく、正しい発音を練習することが肝心です。
これらの発音を正確にマスターするために、英語シャドーイングやshadow speakの技法を使ってみましょう。言葉の響きを体感しながら練習を行うことで、発音スキルが向上します。
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。