Shadowing Practice: How to Overcome Accent Anxiety & the Fear of Speaking English - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Hi everybody, welcome back to my channel.

Today we're going to talk about accent anxiety and the fear of speaking English.

Now I got over the fear of speaking English the hard way.

I took a restaurant job in the U .S where I had to talk to people non -stop every day.

And being from Moldova, that was not only my first job

but also had to be in the US surrounded only by native speakers

and the fact that I was working in the kitchen didn't help either because it was very noisy,

everybody was shouting, they were using different terms I didn't know.

It was pretty chaotic but I had no choice.

I had to listen and I had to speak

and I had to respond and I had to react

and I had to do my job but nowadays it's a lot easier to practice English, to work on your pronunciation and your accent

because you have a smartphone with all of these apps on it that help you do just that.

It took months of very very uncomfortable shifts

and specific situations where I was freezing up

and I didn't know what to say and I was just mumbling some things

and I wasn't really prepared for what the job really was.

So if If you're learning English or any other foreign language and you freeze every time you have to speak it,

then this video is for you because we're going to talk about what's actually happening in our brains as language learners.

And I'm going to show you that you are not alone.

Everything in this video is going to be things that I tested on myself and that my students also went through.

So it's not just theory.

Okay, so first let's look at the science what's actually happening in our brain.

Okay, so that fear of speaking that you're feeling has an actual name in linguistics.

It's called foreign language anxiety or FLA.

And it's not just the general shyness or social anxiety.

It's a situation -based anxiety that only shows up when you have to perform in a second language,

even though you might be very comfortable in your native language.

And researchers who studied this found that there are three things happening in our brains at the same time.

Number one, fear of negative evaluation.

You're afraid that people are going to judge your grammar, your accent, your vocabulary when you talk.

Number two, communication apprehension.

You're afraid you're not going to be understood or you're afraid you're not going to understand someone.

And three, test anxiety.

That feeling that every single conversation is secretly being graded.

There's also a concept from linguist Stephen Krashen called the affective filter.

Basically when you're embarrassed or under pressure or anxious, your brain puts up a wall that blocks language from coming out smoothly.

That's why you can nail a sentence while you're alone in the shower, but you will freeze anytime you have to say it in front of a person.

And that is not a knowledge problem, it's a nervous system problem.

And this isn't a small thing or a rare thing.

Studies on foreign language anxiety show that this affects a huge share of language learners at every level.

So if you're sitting here thinking that everyone else finds it easy and you're the exception, you're not.

You're actually the norm.

Once I learned about that, I realized that I'm not bad at English.

It's just that my effective filter goes up and I need to work on that.

So if the problem is that that filter goes up in front of real people, it must mean that the solution comes from being in front of real people too.

But it has to be in a low -stake setting so your brain doesn't panic.

See, when I went through this, my only option was to be thrown in front of strangers with no way out.

I didn't know any easy way to just ease myself into a conversation or practice in a much more comfortable environment.

That's why I want to genuinely recommend today's sponsor, italki.

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and it's actual spoken conversation with a native speaker in a space built for messing up

and getting gentle real -time feedback la mesa that is feminine

that is perfect mesa

so we have an a not exactly in this case doesn't

work yo canto tu cantas el canta do we still have present continuous and present simple in Spanish.

We'll get there.

How can we conjugate it?

Bailas.

Two bailas.

Muy bien.

Ella baila.

Muy bien.

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Okay back to the anxiety piece because now we have to deal with whatever's happening in our head.

Method number one, reframe the accent itself.

Here's something that took me embarrassingly long to realize.

Having an accent is not a flaw.

Having an accent just shows that you can speak another language.

And in my experience, I noticed that people who were supportive

and who were curious about me

and wanted to hear more about where I came from and what's my story didn't actually care about my accent.

If anything they were just asking more questions.

They were so excited to learn about how I moved there

or how I got there and a lot of them were saying

that I had perfect English but to my brain I had terrible accent, terrible vocabulary, very terrible grammar.

So then I started doing this thing where if I said something wrong or I mispronounced a word, I would just kind of make a little joke and say,

let me try that again.

Or English is hard today.

Or that didn't sound right.

Or even is that how you pronounce that word?

So I started letting go of that pressure and of that fear of saying something wrong.

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And I quickly noticed that people weren't judging me or criticizing me but they wanted to help me.

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So if I asked them is that how you pronounce

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that they would be like yeah yeah you're right or they would correct me but in a very gentle way.

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Obviously there's different people out there

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but most of the times native speakers were appreciating the fact

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that I was trying to speak English correctly for them to understand me.

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So having an accent means you speak another language.

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The important thing is for you to express yourself clearly

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and have decent pronunciation for people to understand you but not stress too much about a perfect accent.

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Method number two, exposure over avoidance.

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And this comes straight from any anxiety or fear management.

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You just have to expose yourself to that fear in order to be able to fight it.

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The more you avoid something, the stronger the fear grows.

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Every time you avoid taking a phone call or you avoid calling somewhere

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or you let your partner order at a restaurant or a cafe, you're teaching your brain that speaking English out loud is dangerous.

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You're confirming the fear instead of testing it, but the exposure has to be gradual.

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You don't go from being silent to hosting a podcast.

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For me, it was forced all at once because I got thrown into that restaurant job with no other option.

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But I don't actually recommend this sink or swim version if you can avoid it.

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So here are a few gentler methods for you to try.

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Recording voice memos alone first, then sending voice messages to one trusted friend,

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then video calls, then finally speaking with a stranger in a low -stakes setting.

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And that's why the lessons on italki are good

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because it's a controlled environment with training wheels on compared to

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being thrown into a job where you have to speak to strangers non -stop.

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Method three, separate performance from communication.

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This was one of the biggest game changers for me.

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I had to shift my mindset and stop treating every conversation like a performance.

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I could fail grammar test, pronunciation test, vocabulary test.

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all happening live while the person in front of me is secretly grading me.

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Communication research actually shows that successful communication is measured by whether the message was clear

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and not by how correct the delivery was.

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Native speakers make grammar mistakes and mispronounce words constantly but they're not failing any tests they're just talking.

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So what I would suggest is before you have a conversation with someone, think, what do I want this person to understand?

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What do I want them to take away from my message?

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And not, how do I sound perfect in English?

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And method number four, talk to yourself like you would talk to a student.

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So for example, if one of my students made a mistake, I would very gently correct them and just explain why that was a mistake and move on.

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But if I were to make a mistake in a conversation with a stranger, I would think about that mistake all day and think, oh, how stupid I was.

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I know this rule.

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I shouldn't have said that.

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That was so bad.

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And all of these negative things that didn't give me confidence at all.

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Also, if a student made a mistake, that would never make me think less of them.

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I would never judge them.

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I would never criticize them.

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I wouldn't think anything bad about them if they made a mistake.

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So why do we always assume that the person we're talking to is treating us like that?

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Our internal voices are kind of brutal sometimes or a lot of times.

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So we need to fix that because you can't have this double standard.

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You can't tell someone, oh that's okay don't worry

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that that's literally not a big deal

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but then beat yourself up whenever you make

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that mistake speaking is a skill and typically skills need to be practiced

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and you need to be making a lot of mistakes

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and yes it'll be painful and it'll be uncomfortable

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but try learning any new skill literally any new skill you're gonna make

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so many mistakes and you're going to fail so many times, but every time you fail, you learn something new.

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Remember, a calm nervous system won't trigger that effective filter wall going up,

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so you'll be able to speak English or any other language a lot smoother.

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One thing I want you to understand though is that going through these methods, going through little mindset shifts or big mindset shifts,

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it doesn't happen overnight, okay?

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It's just consistent work, something for you to remember, something for you to put into practice.

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Everybody has their own journey.

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And know that whatever you're feeling, the anxiety, the nerves, the stress, the fear, the insecurities, this is normal.

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All of us have gone through it.

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And personally, my goal is to be understood, to be confident, and to be myself in a second language.

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All right, if you liked the video or if you have any suggestions, recommendations, advice, please let me know in the comments.

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Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one.

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Bye!

Wat is de Shadowing-techniek?

Shadowing is een wetenschappelijk onderbouwde taalleermethode die oorspronkelijk is ontwikkeld voor professionele tolkentraining en gepopulariseerd door polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. De methode is eenvoudig maar krachtig: je luistert naar native Engelse audio en herhaalt het onmiddellijk hardop — als een schaduw die de spreker volgt met slechts 1–2 seconden vertraging. In tegenstelling tot passief luisteren of grammaticadrills, dwingt shadowing je hersenen en mondspieren om echte spraakpatronen tegelijkertijd te verwerken en te reproduceren. Onderzoek toont aan dat het de uitspraaknauwkeurigheid, intonatie, ritme, verbonden spraak, luisterbegrip en spreekvaardigheid aanzienlijk verbetert — waardoor het een van de meest effectieve methoden is voor IELTS Speaking-voorbereiding en echte Engelse communicatie.

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