Shadowing Practice: LITERATURE - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Learn English Speaking with Video
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A good trick with his name is to say Toy in the middle, Dostoyevsky.
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He was born in 1821 and grew up on the outskirts of Moscow.
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His family were comfortably off.
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His father was a successful doctor, though he happened to work at a charitable hospital that provided medical services for the very poor.
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The family had a house in the hospital complex, so the young Dostoyevsky was from the very beginning powerfully exposed to experiences from which other children of his background were usually carefully sheltered.
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Like almost everyone in Tsarist Russia, his parents were devout Orthodox Christians, and Dostoevsky's own religious faith got deeper and stronger throughout his life.
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At the age of 12, he was sent away to school, first in Moscow and later in the capital, St.
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Petersburg.
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He got a good education, though as a child of the tiny professional middle class, he felt out of place among his more aristocratic classmates.
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While he was away at school, his father died, possibly murdered by his own serfs.
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After graduating, Dostoyevsky worked as an engineer for a while.
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He started gambling and losing money, something that was to plague him all his life.
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In his late twenties, he became friends with a group of radical writers and intellectuals.
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He wasn't deeply involved, but when the government decided to crack down on dissent, Dostoyevsky was rounded up to, sentenced to be shot by a firing squad.
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However, at the last moment, just when the soldiers were ready to fire, a message of reprieve arrived.
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Dostoevsky was sent instead to Siberia for four years of forced labour in horrific conditions.
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It was only after his return from Siberia that Dostoevsky established himself as a writer.
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Starting in middle-aged, he produced a series of major books – Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, demons and the brothers Karamazov.
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They are dark, violent and tragic and usually very long and complicated.
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He wrote them to preach five important lessons to the world.
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Incidentally, the discussion of Dostoevsky's ideas does involve revealing the plots of some of his novels.
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It's not something that would have worried him because his books are written to be read more than once.
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But if it bothers you, this is the place to break off.
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Dostoevsky's His first big book, Notes from the Underground, is an extended rant against life and the world delivered by a retired civil servant.
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This civil servant is deeply unreasonable, inconsistent and furious with everyone, including himself.
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He's always getting into rows, he goes to a reunion of some former colleagues and tells them all how much he has always hated them, he wants to puncture everyone's illusions and make them as unhappy as he is.
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He seems like a grotesque character to build a book around.
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But he's doing something important.
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He's insisting, with a peculiar kind of intensity, on a very strange fact about the human condition.
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We want happiness, but we have a special talent for making ourselves miserable.
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Man is sometimes extraordinarily passionately in love with suffering.
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That is a fact he asserts.
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In the novel, Dostoevsky is taking aim at philosophies of progress and improvement, which were highly popular in his age as they continue to be in ours.
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He is attacking our habit of telling ourselves that if only this or that thing were different we could leave suffering behind.
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If we got that great job, changed the government, could afford that great house, invented a machine to fly fast around the world, could get together with or divorce from a particular person, then all would go well.
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This, Dostoyevsky argues, is a delusion.
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Suffering will always pursue us.
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Schemes for improving the world always contain a flaw.
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They won't eliminate suffering, they will only change the things that cause us pain.
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Life can only ever be a process of changing the focus of pain, never of removing pain itself.
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There will always be something to agonise us.
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Stop people starving, says Dostoevsky, with calculated wickedness, and you will soon find there's a new range of agonies.
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People will start to suffer from boredom, greed or intense melancholy that they haven't been invited to the right party.
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In this spirit, Notes from the Underground launches an attack on all ideologies of technical or social progress which aspire to the elimination of suffering.
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They won't succeed because as soon as they solve one problem, they'll direct our nature to become unhappy in new ways.
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Dostoevsky is fascinated by the secret way in which we actually don't want what we theoretically seem to seek.
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He discusses the pleasure a lot of people get from feelings of superiority and for whom, consequently, an egalitarian society would be a nightmare, the disavowed but real thrill we get from hearing about violent crimes on the news, in which case we'd actually feel thwarted in a truly peaceful world.
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Notes from the Underground is a dark, awkwardly insightful counterpoint to well-intentioned modern liberalism.
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It doesn't really show that social improvement is meaningless, but it does remind us that we'll always carry our very complex and difficult selves with us, and that progress will never be as clear and clean as we might like to imagine.
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In Crime and Punishment, we meet an impoverished intellectual, Rodion Raskolnikov.
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Though he's currently a nobody, he's fascinated by power and ruthlessness.
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He thinks of himself as a version of Napoleon.
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Leaders of men such as Napoleon were all without exception criminals, we hear.
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They broke the ancient laws of their people to make new ones that suited them better, and they never feared bloodshed.
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Raskolnikov is also desperate for money and so, aristocratic superiority in mind, he decides to murder an old woman who's a small-time pawnbroker and moneylender and to steal her cash.
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He's tormented by the mad injustice of the fact that this horrible mean old character has drawers full of rubles while he, who is clever, energetic and profound, is starving.
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He doesn't spend much time thinking about options like taking a job as a waiter.
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So Raskolnikov breaks into her apartment and bludgeons her to death, and, surprised in the act by the woman's pregnant half-sister, kills her too.
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But it turns out he's nothing like the cold-blooded, rational hero of his own imagination.
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He is tormented by guilt and horror at what he has done.
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Eventually, he turns himself over to the police in order to face the proper punishment for his crime.
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We're probably never going to do what Raskolnikov did, but we often share a troubling tendency with him.
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We think we know ourselves better than we actually do.
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Raskolnikov thinks he's ruthless, actually he's rather tender-hearted.
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He thinks he won't feel guilt, but he's overwhelmed by remorse.
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Part of our life's journey is to engage in the tricky task of disentangling ourselves from what we think we're like in order to discover our true nature.
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Raskolnikov is especially fascinating because of the direction this self-discovery takes.
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His striking realisation is that he's actually a much nicer person than he takes himself to be.
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Whereas so many novelists delight in showing the sickly reality beneath a glamorous or enticing facade, Dostoyevsky is embarked on a more curious but rewarding mission.
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He wants to reveal that beneath the so-called monster, there can very often be a far more interesting, tender-hearted character lurking.
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A nice but deluded, intelligent but frightened and panicked person.
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Sticking for the moment with crime and punishment, it's very significant the way Dostoyevsky gets us to like his murderous hero.
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Raskolnikov is clearly an attractive person.
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At the very start of the book, we're told, By the way, Raskolnikov is handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with lovely dark eyes and dark brown hair.
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Dostoevsky throughout lessens the imaginative distance between us, who live mainly law-abiding and more or less manageable lives, and them, the ones who do terrible things and wreak havoc with their lives and those of others.
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That person, he is saying, is more like you than you might initially want to think.
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and therefore more accessible to sympathy.
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The idea that you can be a good person, do something very bad, and still deserve some compassion sounds maybe slight and obvious until one has need of this kind of forgiveness in one's own life.
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This is where Dostoevsky wants to enter our inner conversation with ourselves and tell us all about his character Raskolnikov, a serious, thoughtful, good-looking man who did worse than we have and still can be compassionately understood as we can and must all be.
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This is Dostoyevsky's Christianity at work.
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No one is outside the circle of God's love and understanding.
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Dostoyevsky's next great book, The Idiot, takes off from his near-death experience before the firing squad.
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In the novel, he recounts what that was like.
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Three minutes before his expected death, he is able to see life clearly for the first time.
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He notices the gilded spire of a nearby church and how it glitters in the sun.
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He had never before realised how entrancing a glint of sunlight could be.
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He is filled with an immense, deep love of the world.
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You might see a beggar and think how you would love to change places with them so as to be able to continue to breathe the air and feel the wind.
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Merely to exist seems, at that moment of final revelation, infinitely precious.
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And then the revised order comes and it's not over at all.
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What would it be like to go through one's whole life in such a state of gratitude and generosity?
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You wouldn't share any of the normal attitudes.
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You'd love everyone equally.
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You'd be enchanted by the simplest things.
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You'd never feel angry or frightened.
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You would seem to other people to be a kind of idiot.
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Hence the title of Dostoevsky's book.
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It's an extreme version of a very interesting step.
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We're continually surrounded by things which could delight us if only we saw them in the right way, if only we could learn to appreciate them.
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Dostoyevsky was desperate to communicate the value of existence before death would overtake him and us.
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In Dostoyevsky's final great work, Brothers Karamazov, which came out when he was nearly 60, one of the central characters tells a long story within a story.
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It's called the Grand Inquisitor and imagines that the greatest event looked forward to by Christian theology, the second coming of Christ, has in fact already happened.
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Jesus did come back several hundred years ago.
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He turned up in Spain during the highest period of power in the Catholic Church.
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The organisation established, in theory at least, entirely in devotion to him.
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Christ is back to fulfil his teachings of forgiveness and universal love.
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But something rather odd happens.
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The most powerful religious leader, the Grand Inquisitor, has Jesus arrested and imprisoned.
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In the middle of the night, the Grand Inquisitor visits Christ in his cell and explains that he cannot allow him to do his work on earth because he is a threat to the stability of society.
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Christ, he says, is just too ambitious, too pure, too perfect.
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Humanity can't live up to the impossible goals he sets before us.
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The fact is, people haven't been able to live according to his teachings and Jesus should admit he failed and that his ideas of redemption were essentially misguided.
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The Grand Inquisitor is not really a monster.
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In fact, Dostoevsky portrays him as quite an admirable figure in the story.
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He is a guide to a crucial idea that human beings cannot live in purity, cannot ever be just truly good, cannot live up to Christ's message, and that this is something we should reconcile ourselves to, with grace rather than fury or self-hatred.
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We have to accept a great deal of unreasonableness, folly, greed, selfishness and short-sightedness as ineradicable parts of the human condition and plan accordingly.
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And it's not just a pessimistic thesis about politics or religion that we're being introduced to.
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The primary relevance of this thesis is as a commentary on our own lives.
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We won't sort them out, we won't stop being a bit mad and wayward, and we shouldn't torment ourselves with a dream that we could, if only we tried hard enough, become the perfect beings that idealistic philosophies like Christianity like to sketch all too readily.
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Dostoevsky died in 1881.
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He had a very hard life, but he succeeded in conveying an idea which perhaps he understood more clearly than anyone.
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In a world that's very keen on upbeat stories, we will always run up against our limitations as deeply flawed and profoundly muddled creatures.
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Dostoevsky's attitude, bleak but compassionate, tragic but kind, is needed more than ever in our naive and sentimental age that so fervently clings to the idea, which this great Russian novelist loathed, that science can save us all and that we may yet be made perfect through technology.
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Dostoevsky guides us to a more humane, darker truth – that, as the great sages have always known, life is and ever will be suffering, and yet that there is great redemption available in articulating this message in brilliant and moving, complex and subtle works of art.
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Thank you.
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Woordenschat en spreektips bij deze les
Deze spreekles op niveau C2 is gebaseerd op de video “LITERATURE - Fyodor Dostoyevsky”. Deze video bevat 125 zinnen en 2236 woorden om na te spreken. Het gesproken deel duurt 13:44. De spreker praat in een natuurlijk tempo van ongeveer 163 woorden per minuut, dicht bij een alledaags gesprek. Slechts 80% van de woorden hoort bij de 3.000 meest gebruikte Engelse woorden, dus de woordenschat is pittig.
Belangrijke woorden in deze video
De 15 moeilijkste woorden uit de video, met uitspraak en betekenis:
| Woord | Uitspraak | Betekenis |
|---|---|---|
| fascinate werkwoord | /ˈfæsɪneɪt/ | fascineren |
| frighten werkwoord | /ˈfɹaɪ.tən/ | bang maken, beangstigen |
| torment zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈtɔː(ɹ)mɛnt/ | kwelling |
| starve werkwoord | /stɑɹv/ | verhongeren, sterven van de honger |
| superiority zelfstandig naamwoord | /sʊˌpɪə(ɹ).iˈɒ.ɹɪ.ti/ | meerderwaardigheid, superioriteit |
| greed zelfstandig naamwoord | /ɡɹiːd/ | hebzucht, gulzigheid |
| redemption zelfstandig naamwoord | /ɹɪˈdɛmpʃən/ | verlossing, zaligmaking |
| forgiveness zelfstandig naamwoord | /fɚˈɡɪvnəs/ | vergeving, vergiffenis |
| delight zelfstandig naamwoord | /dəˈlaɪt/ | vreugde, plezier |
| thesis zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈθisɪs/ | these |
| tragic bijvoeglijk naamwoord | /ˈtɹæd͡ʒɪk/ | tragisch |
| tender bijvoeglijk naamwoord | /ˈtɛn.dɚ/ | gevoelig |
| servant zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈsɝvənt/ | hulp, hulpje |
| admirable zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈæd.məɹ.ə.bəl/ | bewonderenswaardig |
| classmate zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈklæs.meɪt/ | klasgenoot, klasgenote |
Phrasal verbs die je zult horen
| Woord | Uitspraak | Betekenis |
|---|---|---|
| come back werkwoord | terugkomen | |
| come out werkwoord | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | uitkomen |
| look forward to werkwoord | uitkijken naar, zich verheugen op | |
| turn out werkwoord | uitvallen, resulteren |
Zinnen om te herhalen
Korte, volledige zinnen uit de video die je in alledaagse gesprekken kunt gebruiken:
- You wouldn't share any of the normal attitudes.
- You'd be enchanted by the simplest things.
- You'd never feel angry or frightened.
Grammatica in deze video
De structuren die de spreker het meest gebruikt, met de exacte woorden uit de video:
| Structuur | In de video |
|---|---|
| Lijdende vorm be + voltooid deelwoord — het gaat om wat er gebeurt, niet om wie het doet | was born · was sent · was rounded |
| Present perfect have/has + voltooid deelwoord — iets uit het verleden dat nu nog telt | has always hated · haven't been invited · has done |
| Betrekkelijke bijzinnen who / which + zin — extra informatie over een persoon of ding | improvement, which were · ones who do · man who did |
Uitspraak om op te letten
De spreker gebruikt 25 samentrekkingen en verkorte vormen, zoals we're, won't, you'd. Spreek ze kort uit, zoals je ze hoort.
- De “th”-klanken: thesis /ˈθisɪs/, ruthless /ˈɹuːθləs/, thrill /θɹɪl/, thoughtful /ˈθɔːtfəl/, theology /θiˈɒ.lə.d͡ʒi/
- De klanken “sh” en “zh”: redemption /ɹɪˈdɛmpʃən/, compassionate /kəmˈpæʃənət/, limitation /lɪmɪˈteɪʃən/, devotion /dɪˈvoʊʃən/, elimination /ɪlɪmɪˈneɪʃ(ə)n/
- Lange woorden — let op de klemtoon: aristocratic /ˌæɹɪstəˈkɹætɪk/, superiority /sʊˌpɪə(ɹ).iˈɒ.ɹɪ.ti/, admirable /ˈæd.məɹ.ə.bəl/, liberalism /ˈlɪ.b(ə.)ɹə.lɪz.əm/, infinitely /ˈɪnfɪnɪtli/
Klanken die Nederlandstaligen lastig vinden:
- Stemhebbende eindmedeklinker — /b/, /d/, /g/, /z/, /v/ niet verscherpen: starve /stɑɹv/, greed /ɡɹiːd/, revise /ɹɪˈvaɪz/, abide /əˈbaɪd/, flawed /flɔːd/
- /æ/ — opener dan de Nederlandse “e”: fascinate /ˈfæsɪneɪt/, aristocratic /ˌæɹɪstəˈkɹætɪk/, unhappy /ʌnˈhæpi/, tragic /ˈtɹæd͡ʒɪk/, admirable /ˈæd.məɹ.ə.bəl/
- /g/ — een harde plofklank, geen Nederlandse “g”: greed /ɡɹiːd/, forgiveness /fɚˈɡɪvnəs/, glamorous /ˈɡlæ.mə.ɹəs/, plague /plɛɡ/, gratitude /ˈɡɹæ.tɪ.tud/
Zo oefen je met deze video
- Luister de hele video één keer zonder te spreken en noteer de woorden die je niet kent.
- Begin op 0,75× snelheid, spreek zin voor zin na en ga terug naar normale snelheid zodra het makkelijk gaat.
- Neem jezelf op en vergelijk met het origineel; let daarbij op woorden als fascinate, frighten, torment.
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.