Shadowing Practice: How to Stop Feeling Nostalgic for an Ex - Learn English Speaking with Video
Les maken...
1
After considerable agony, we've left a relationship.
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We're on our own now, and when we can bear to be honest, it is a little bit harder than we expected.
3
We aren't going on so many dates.
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The central heating broke down last week.
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The shopping is proving a hurdle.
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In idle moments, we find ourselves daydreaming, returning fondly to certain occasions in the recently concluded relationship.
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There was that wintry weekend by the sea.
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They looked adorable walking on the beach in their thick scarf.
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We fed seagulls and drank cheap wine from paper cups on the sea front and felt connected and happy.
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We're newly conscious of the charm of so many things that seemed ordinary at the time.
11
Coming out of the supermarket, putting everything away in the fridge and cupboards, making soup and toasted cheese and watching TV on the sofa.
12
With these thoughts in mind, we feel weepy and tender and at points distinctly tempted to call the ex up again.
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They would, we suspect, allow us back or at least give us a hearing.
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What can we make of our feelings?
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It might be that we have realised a genuine mistake.
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But it is even more likely
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that we are in the grip of a characteristic mental habit of the newly single facing the vertigo of independence.
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Nostalgia.
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In the middle of the 19th century, Britain underwent industrial and scientific revolutions that transformed old, settled ways of life, ripping apart communities,
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throwing people together in large and anonymous cities and dislocating the loyalties and certainties once offered by religion.
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In a search for ways to soften the confusion, artists and thinkers began to imagine what a better world might look like,
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and in certain circles, the search turned towards the past, and more specifically, towards the perceived wisdom,
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coherence and contentment of the Middle Ages.
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While railway lines were being laid down across the land and telegraph cables under the seas, members of the artistic class celebrated the simple,
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innocent communities that they proposed had existed in the 12th and 13th centuries.
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Artworks depicted handsome, uneducated but happy labourers,
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cheerful villagers celebrating harvests and kindly lords and ladies ministering to the deserving poor.
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There seemed to be no violence, alienation, fear or cruelty.
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No one minded not having much heating or subsisting on a meagre diet of oats and the odd piece of lard.
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It had, it was alleged, been very much easier back then in the thatched cottages and pious stone churches.
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At the heart of the nostalgic attitude is a disregard for why things ever changed and might have needed to do so.
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For the nostalgic, the past never required alteration or development history moved on but for no sane reason.
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The complexities of the present moment are in this sense deemed wholly accidental.
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They are not the tricky by-products of a legitimate search for growth and progress, away from what must have been at some level, despite the odd delightful occasion,
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perhaps at harvest time or on a midsummer morning, an intolerable previous arrangement.
36
The nostalgic can't accept that the present, whatever its faults, came about because of inescapable difficulties with the past.
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They insist that we had already once been perfectly happy, then mysteriously changed everything for the worse because we forgot we had been so.
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Relationships can find us reasoning no less selectively.
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Here too, it can feel as if we must once have been content and then grew ungrateful through error and inattention.
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Yet, in locating profound satisfaction in the past, we are crediting our earlier selves with too little acumen.
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The truth about what a relationship is like
42
is best ascertained not when we are feeling low six months or a few years after its conclusion,
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but from what we must have known when we were in its midst,
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when we were most familiar with all the facts upon which we made our slow and deliberate decision to leave.
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The specific grounds for our dissatisfactions tend to evaporate.
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We edit out the rows, the botched trips, the sexual frustrations, the stubborn standoffs.
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The mind is a squeamish organ.
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It doesn't like to entertain bad news unless there is a highly present danger to be attended to.
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But knowing our amnesiac tendencies, we can be certain that profound unpleasantness must have existed,
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for there would otherwise have been no explanation for our decision to rip our relationship apart.
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We would never have needed to act
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if things had ever remotely been as gratifying as we are now nostalgically assuming they were.
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The portrait we are painting of our relationship is emerging not from knowledge but from loneliness and apprehension.
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Furthermore, our sense of ourselves as people who could be satisfied
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with what was on offer is as untrue to our own
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nature as is the fantasy of a modern urban dweller who dreams they might find enduring happiness in a medieval-style wooden hut.
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The solution to the problem of satisfying our needs is not to hallucinate that they don't exist.
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It is to square up to them and use every ingenuity we are capable of to devise workable solutions for them.
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We should trust not what we feel now, in our weepy, disconsolate state, but what we must have known then.
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A simple rule of thumb emerges.
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We must invariably trust the decisions we took when we had the maximal information to hand upon which we made them,
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not when we have emotional incentives to change our minds and mould ourselves into a caricature of an easily gratified creature.
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There were persuasive reasons, even if, in our sadness, we now can't remember a single one.
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Returning to the past wouldn't make us content.
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It would merely, at great cost to all involved, remind us of why change was, in the end, so necessary.
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We need to accept that good things did exist, but that they were no proper solution to certain of our well-founded needs.
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It means accepting that we are as complicated
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and as difficult to satisfy as we are and
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that the way forward is to accept our characters rather than assume a simplicity we could never live up to.
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We should have the courage of, and be ready to pay the full price for, our true complex natures.
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Love is a skill that we can learn.
72
Our Relationships book calmly guides us with calm and charm
73
through the key issues of relationships to ensure that success in love need not be a matter of good luck.
74
For more, click the link now.
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Woordenschat en spreektips bij deze les
Deze video bevat 74 zinnen en 1099 woorden om na te spreken. Het gesproken deel duurt 7:21. De spreker praat in een gelijkmatig tempo van ongeveer 149 woorden per minuut, prettig om te shadowen. Slechts 79% van de woorden hoort bij de 3.000 meest gebruikte Engelse woorden, dus de woordenschat is pittig.
Belangrijke woorden in deze video
15 woorden uit de video die het leren waard zijn, met uitspraak en betekenis:
| Woord | Uitspraak | Betekenis |
|---|---|---|
| satisfy werkwoord | /ˈsætɪsfaɪ/ | voldoen, voldoende zijn |
| occasion zelfstandig naamwoord | /əˈkeɪ̯ʒən/ | gelegenheid |
| charm zelfstandig naamwoord | /t͡ʃɑɹm/ | betovering, bezwering |
| harvest zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈhɑɹ.vəst/ | oogst |
| profound bijvoeglijk naamwoord | /pɹəˈfaʊnd/ | diep, diepgaand |
| emerge werkwoord | /ɪˈmɝd͡ʒ/ | opduiken |
| complicated bijvoeglijk naamwoord | /ˈkɑm.plɪˌkeɪ.tɪd/ | ingewikkeld, gecompliceerd |
| railway zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈɹeɪlˌweɪ/ | spoorwegen |
| thick bijvoeglijk naamwoord | /θɪk/ | dik, dikke |
| innocent bijvoeglijk naamwoord | /ˈɪnəsənt/ | onnozel, onschuldig |
| explanation zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/ | verklaring, toelichting |
| happiness zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈhæpinɪs/ | blijheid, blijdschap |
| ordinary bijvoeglijk naamwoord | /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/ | gewoon, alledaags |
| skill zelfstandig naamwoord | /skɪl/ | bekwaamheid, vaardigheid |
| conclusion zelfstandig naamwoord | /kənˈkluːʒən/ | conclusie, einde |
Phrasal verbs die je zult horen
| Woord | Betekenis |
|---|---|
| break down werkwoord | stukgaan, kapot gaan |
Uitspraak om op te letten
De spreker gebruikt 9 samentrekkingen en verkorte vormen, zoals can't, we're, aren't. Spreek ze kort uit, zoals je ze hoort.
- De “th”-klanken: thick /θɪk/, furthermore /ˈfɜː(ɹ).ðə(ɹ)ˌmɔː(ɹ)/, thumb /ˈθʌm/, thatch /θæt͡ʃ/, thinker /ˈθɪŋ.kɚ/
- De klanken “sh” en “zh”: occasion /əˈkeɪ̯ʒən/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, conclusion /kənˈkluːʒən/, confusion /kənˈfjuːʒən/, conscious /ˈkɑn.ʃəs/
- Lange woorden — let op de klemtoon: complicated /ˈkɑm.plɪˌkeɪ.tɪd/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, ordinary /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/, difficulty /ˈdɪfɪkəlti/, considerable /kənˈsɪdəɹəbl̩/
Zo oefen je met deze video
- Luister de hele video één keer zonder te spreken en noteer de woorden die je niet kent.
- Spreek zin voor zin na op normale snelheid en herhaal elke zin tot je ritme gelijk is aan dat van de spreker.
- Neem jezelf op en vergelijk met het origineel; let daarbij op woorden als satisfy, occasion, charm.
Grammatica in deze video
De structuren die de spreker het meest gebruikt, met de exacte woorden uit de video:
| Structuur | In de video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + voltooid deelwoord — iets uit het verleden dat nu nog telt | we've left · have realised · have been |
| Lijdende vorm be + voltooid deelwoord — het gaat om wat er gebeurt, niet om wie het doet | being laid · was alleged · be attended |
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.