Shadowing Practice: O, Death! - Learn English Speaking with Video

Often I think about dying.

Now, I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person.

I am capable of forming coherent thoughts on a number of subjects.

But thoughts of death shatter me entirely.

I am helpless.

I am horrified.

I realize that in the words of Leo Tolstoy, as I live, I am being stuffed into a big, dark sack.

My warmest memories appear and immediately rush back into the past.

the smell of the Atlantic springtime, picking blackberries with my mother, running through the garden and catching fireflies in jars.

These memories I love so much become only reminders that one day I must die.

And suddenly every year is passing more quickly than the last.

This dread comes from the unknowable and unstoppable nature of death.

Why do we die?

What does death mean?

If we die, why do we live?

These questions are perhaps the most well-trodden of all.

History's greatest thinkers have pondered over death.

The wisest, most talented humans our Earth has ever produced have attempted to tackle this subject.

Yet, they have all failed. But why?

Where do I go from here?

As far as I can tell, there are two places we can seek an answer to death.

Man and nature.

Man presents us with science, and in the subject of death, science offers a white flag in a war.

Science can tell us the biomechanical, physiological realities of death.

It can tell us what happens to your body when you die, and how your body then decays.

While academically interesting, this does little to bring clarity to death.

It does nothing to help a person make peace with dying.

So I find the world's greatest scientists rendered somehow into uselessness.

Moving past science, we can look elsewhere.

Spiritualists, philosophers, whoever, they've all examined death.

I've read many of them.

The might of all of this intellectual force has been hurled at death time and time again.

I still find no answers.

Lots of questions, but no answers.

Surely I can expect nothing more.

People are writing about things they know nothing about.

When they so beautifully theorized about death, they had not died.

They were as ignorant then as I am now.

These writings are window dressing.

Beautiful, but ultimately without function in the face of death.

I'm being shoved into a sack.

Do I want it to have spots or stripes?

Of course, there's also God, religion, man's greatest shield against the reality of death.

I have a deep admiration for the religious, to have such faith, such conviction, in a storm of arguments to the contrary.

I believe this requires a tremendous and unique strength of character.

But like so many, I cannot bring myself to believe in God.

I'd like to believe in God, but I'm not strong enough.

I cannot look at the world around us, even with all of its beauty, and take seriously the idea of God.

What God gives a child cancer?

What God sends hurricanes to the poor?

No God of mine.

Religion can have no place in my conversation with death.

Without other solutions, I often look to nature.

Here we have vultures, hyenas, insects.

These creatures all thrive off the deaths of others.

In nature, animals die and leave opportunities for the other members of their ecosystem.

I do find beauty in this phenomenon.

How could a person not?

I wish this could provide me with some great comfort.

But I still find myself running into that same concrete wall.

The conclusion of nature does nothing to abate the paralyzing feeling I get when I think about death.

You see, reason and hope become grotesquely meaningless when posed with these questions.

The truth, the truth that I know with all of my body, is that there can be no answer.

In fact, the only answer is the hopelessness I feel when I think about death.

And so all I can do is live.

The only thing I can find that is an approximation of an answer to this dilemma is just that, life.

How can a person really live with death looming over everything at the end of every day?

Many philosophers and authors have discussed this question.

Unlike their conversations of death, their conversations of life in the face of death can provide some earnest direction.

In 1879, Leo Tolstoy had published War and Peace as well as Anna Karenina.

He had earned his place among world literature, hailed as a genius.

After being born into wealth, Tolstoy had become famous for doing what he loved the most, and yet he felt entirely unfulfilled.

The promise of achievement had been broken.

Tolstoy was spiritually, emotionally lost, despite a life that should have produced the opposite.

It was in this state that he wrote the Confession.

This roughly 100-page essay outlined his quest to find the meaning of life, and specifically the deep depression that he fell into upon concluding that life was meaningless.

Discusses melancholy, suicide, depression, and misery.

It is one of the most heartbreaking, arresting essays ever put to paper.

And in these pages, I have found my only comfort.

Tolstoy begins with his decreasing interest and belief in religion.

He says that he only believed in God because his elders had instructed him to, and even then, the belief had been shaky.

Throughout Tolstoy's early years, perhaps his truer religion had been art.

He sought fulfillment in his art, poetry, writing, and in the circles of geniuses that he associated with.

Tolstoy had once held a great faith in the arts, but it was one that began to wane.

The people in his circle, including himself, were paid and praised highly for their work.

The public said they were arbiters of profound, ultimate truths, that these artists were enlightening the world.

The artists themselves believed it.

How could they not?

But Tolstoy eventually realized that for every great writer's idea, there would be another who wholly disagreed with it.

So he wondered how any of these people could really be arbiters of truth

if they themselves didn't even agree on this truth.

Tolstoy observed that his peers simply hung out with people who praised them and rejected those who didn't, so every artist believed themselves to be correct.

His faith in the arts as a driver of meaning crumbled.

Instead, he began to look at the concept of progress, live to make progress.

Within progress, one could find fulfillment, Tolstoy believed.

He would have a family, create a wondrous life, and just make progress.

But years into this, Tolstoy traveled to Paris.

There, he witnessed a public execution.

As the prisoner's head fell into its box, Tolstoy began to question this concept of progress.

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This disillusionment continued with the death of Tolstoy's brother, Nikolai.

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He was a kind and intelligent man when he fell ill in his mid-twenties.

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Nikolai suffered for over a year, eventually succumbing to an agonizing death from consumption.

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By Tolstoy's estimation, Nikolai never understood why he lived, why he suffered, nor why he died.

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In the face of this reality, what good was progress?

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But still clinging to this idea of progress, Tolstoy began to teach young peasants in Russia.

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However, he quickly realized this was futile.

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Tolstoy himself did not have what they needed to learn.

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Whatever knowledge would have improved their lives, provided them fulfillment, Tolstoy himself could not identify and didn't even have.

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So his teaching became an impossible task.

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These experiences all crystallized in a deep, dark time of depression for Leo Tolstoy.

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In confession, he says this about his pursuit of progress.

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I still had not understood that in answering that one must live according to progress

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was talking just like a person being carried along in a boat by the waves and the wind.

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Such a person replies to the only important question, where do we steer by saying we are being carried somewhere?

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Tolstoy had always thought the meaning of life and death would come to him, and he would find it eventually.

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But now it became clear this wasn't going to happen.

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These questions came up over and over in his mind.

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In the confession, he compares them to tiny black points.

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They were few and far between initially, but were coming together to form a single, unignorable, dark stain.

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They were, he said, like an illness ignored by a patient.

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The symptoms occurred with increasing frequency until they turned into one continuous duration of suffering.

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Suddenly, the patient would discover the truth.

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What was once a mild illness had now become death.

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Tolstoy was a famous intellectual.

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He had access to the greatest knowledge history had ever produced.

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No library would refuse him entry.

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He could sit down and have conversations with the wisest men in the world, and so he did.

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But through all of this, Tolstoy found no answers.

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He was instead overtaken with an intense depression.

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His thoughts turned to suicide, and these suicidal ideations became as normal to him as self-preservation once had been.

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To end his life, he felt as natural as eating or sleeping.

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To prevent himself from taking his own life, Tolstoy removed all the ropes from his room.

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He stopped hunting with a gun.

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In the confession, Tolstoy likened this time to having climbed a mountain.

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He was as successful as he could have ever been.

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He had reached the summit, expecting a wondrous view.

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Instead, he stood there like a fool, having found only an empty wasteland.

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In time, Tolstoy found himself with a new conclusion.

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Not that he didn't have the answers to life and death, but instead that these questions simply didn't have answers.

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In the Confession, Tolstoy concludes that there are four ways to live a life, at least for a man in his class.

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First was ignorance people for whatever reason had never been bothered by these questions.

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Tolstoy's thoughts here were simple.

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Once you start thinking about these things you can't unthink them.

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There's no going back.

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So there wasn't anything he could learn from the ignorant.

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Second he said was Epicureanism.

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He defines this idea as being aware of one's impending death and its consequences, but enjoying life anyways.

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He points to the words of the biblical figure King Solomon, Do whatever you can do by the strength of your hand.

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There is no work in the grave where you are going.

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No reflection, no knowledge, no wisdom.

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Tolstoy writes that most people employ this method, but he points to it as being inherently immoral.

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He says that these people lead lives where they They experience more good things than bad, but through a moral stupidity, they forget that all of their advantages,

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privileges, and allowances are pure luck, just happen to be born into a good situation.

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He says that they forget not everyone can be a King Solomon with his palaces, his women, and his money.

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For every palace, there are a thousand men who built it.

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The same chance that turns a man into a Solomon one day can turn him into one of Solomon's slaves the next.

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Tolstoy says that these people have a dullness of imagination that allows them to forget death, to forget that death will eventually just destroy the things they enjoy so much.

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He claims Epicureans aren't really much different than the ignorant.

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You see, once a person is illuminated to the moral problems with this lifestyle, there's again no going back.

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So ultimately, Tolstoy finds no comfort in Epicureanism.

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The third choice he proposes is suicide.

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If you don't like a room, then leave, Tolstoy declares.

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However, he says he is too emotionally weak to do this.

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The final option is where I find comfort, and it seems Tolstoy found some version of comfort as well.

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That option is simply to live.

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To recognize that everything will be destroyed eventually and that you will die eventually, but to keep moving forward.

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No matter how painful or inane or seemingly pointless death renders things to be, just keep living.

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Now, Tolstoy wrote this essay in the midst of a profound depression.

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And so he concludes that option four is wholly miserable.

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However, I have to disagree.

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I don't choose to disagree.

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I have to.

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I have no choice.

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I have no interest in suicide.

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I have no way of understanding death.

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This question will be forever unanswered.

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So all that I can do is find fulfillment in life and a meaningful connection to the act of living.

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This house may be destroyed in time, but I must still live in it.

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so I should make it nice.

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And so when I torment myself with imaginations of death, I have to think about this.

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I have to seek fulfillment in the mundane, in the everyday.

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I cannot dwell on the future.

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Friends, family, work, leisure, these are the things that make up my life, however futile they are when pitted against death.

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Indeed, the alternative is horrific, to let death lead one's life entirely astray, to ignore the issues of death and to lead a wholly unexamined life.

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This is an entirely different form of self-destruction.

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Perhaps appropriately, this is a subject Tolstoy examined in other work.

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The Death of Ivan Elych is a fantastic companion piece to the Confession, whether or not it was intended as such.

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It tells the story of Ivan Elych, a court official who falls and injures himself while hanging curtains in his home.

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The pain grows until a physician informs Ivan that the injury is terminal, and he will die.

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The novella tells the story of Ivan's death.

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In fact, it opens with his funeral.

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From the first pages, the reader is assured that nothing will come save Ivan Ilyich, that the book does not end with some miracle.

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Ivan Ilyich spent his life as basically a social climber and a careerist.

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On his deathbed, he learns the consequences of this life.

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As Ivan lies dying, he remembers a passage he studied in school.

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Caius is a man.

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All men are mortal.

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Therefore, Caius is mortal.

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Slowly, Ivan realizes that he has ignored death, and instead he has lived a profound lie, an existence with no examination of death.

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Like a schoolchild who breaks down when faced with punishment, Ivan's lie also crumbles as death becomes imminent.

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He's concealed death from himself, and thereby concealed life as well.

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Ivan, in the early stages of his infliction, wants only to live how he used to, to go back to when things were pleasant before this whole mess.

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So he begins to reflect on these pleasantries.

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But as he lays in his bed dying, Ivan realizes they all feel quite different.

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He says these pleasantries are melting into insignificance, all of them, except for the earliest recollections of his childhood.

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Of course, it was during these years that Ivan was unaffected by formal ideas of pleasantness or societal expectations.

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It occurs to Ivan that perhaps he did not live his life correctly.

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But he asks, how can that be?

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I did everything that was demanded of me.

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And in this question, Ivan is presented with the truth.

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He lived his entire life to fulfill the whims of others, in some cases in the micro sense, his employers or co-workers.

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and others more grand, the expectations and ambitions that culture imposed on him, things that he fell for, wealth, status, adornment.

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As early as his schooling days, Ivan says he committed acts that he found abhorrent that inspired in him a sense of self-hatred.

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But by his colleagues, these acts were considered to be normal and admirable.

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Eventually, Ivan himself became one of those colleagues.

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These abhorrent acts likewise became normal and even aspirational by virtue of other people's expectations.

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So his life met all of these expectations.

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It earned him the approval and admiration of these people and institutions.

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But Tolstoy writes that Ivan's chief agony, one that even the opium could not solve, was this feeling.

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What if his whole life Ivan had not been doing the right thing?

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Eventually Ivan cedes to this question and its inevitable answer.

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Unfortunately, all of his decisions have already inflicted their damage.

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On his deathbed, Ivan is truly alone, profoundly alone, in a way unbeholden to the physical presence of other humans.

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Tolstoy writes that Ivan feels a loneliness among his acquaintances and family, people who he had believed to be his loved ones, but perhaps are not.

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Ivan's loneliness, Tolstoy says, is fuller than any that can exist on earth, from the bottom of the sea or in the ground itself.

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Ivan's death, because of the way he lived, becomes an experience of isolation.

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and so at his deathbed he is surrounded only by the most shallow version of company.

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In one passage, Ivan wants nothing more than to cry, to weep, and for someone to pity him as he lies in his excruciatingly painful death.

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He wants someone to cry with him, to comfort him as if he were a child.

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This is all that he wants with every fiber of his being.

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And then would in come one of his colleagues, asking only for a ruling on a legal matter.

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You see, all around him Ivan saw people who were lying.

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They were basically pretending he wasn't actually dying.

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Tolstoy writes, This lie all around him and inside him, more than anything, poisoned the last days of Ivan Ilich's life.

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When death finally arrives for Ivan, he begs his family for forgiveness.

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He cries and pleads.

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Only in this does he then die in peace.

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But Yvonne's funeral reveals the depravity of his life in one final and horrifically triumphant blow.

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The attendees do not mourn or cry, but rather they express pure selfishness.

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Some think of the promotions they may win now that he's died.

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Others consider what amounts of money they could inherit.

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Still more people seem entirely annoyed by the whole thing, annoyed by the tedium of the tasks they must now perform.

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Broadly, these attendees are filled with a subdued joy, joy that it is Ivan who has died, not them.

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The death of Ivan Ilyich tells us that a life poorly lived only serves to amplify the horrors of death, or perhaps create them entirely.

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And so I believe the answer to death is not found in what happens after or during, or even why we all must die.

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But instead, in how we live.

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I was raised along with my sister by a single mother through early childhood.

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She worked a lot as one must to support two children.

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So my grandmother often took care of me in my mother's absence.

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Most days after school, saw my grandmother, as did weekends and most of the summers.

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2020, my grandmother had a stroke at the age of 93.

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She went to the hospital, largely not herself, physically or mentally.

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That night, she suffered another stroke and a heart attack.

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Having signed a do-not-resuscitate order, my grandmother died that night in the hospital.

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She was accompanied by her husband of some 70 years.

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In my twenties, my relationship with my grandmother had deteriorated some just by virtue of distance.

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I'd moved to a new city a thousand miles away, but we still spoke on the phone here and there.

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The last thing my grandmother ever said to me was this.

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People like to say life is short.

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Don't listen to them.

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Life is long.

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I think death can be a lot of things.

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It can be an enemy, a pair of shackles, a companion, or something else entirely.

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My dread will never go away.

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I'll never have answers to the question of death.

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I will still lie in bed and think about dying, with regularity, likely for the rest of my life.

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I dare not delude myself with ideas of legacy.

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All people die.

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Some just take longer.

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But my hopes are twofold.

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First, that I can be ready for death, somehow, when it comes.

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And second, that in the meantime, I can live.

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That I can find true joy in all that entails.

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Indeed, I believe I have plenty of time to do so.

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66 zinnen

Woordenschat en spreektips bij deze les

Deze video bevat 274 zinnen en 3384 woorden om na te spreken. Het gesproken deel duurt 20:58. De spreker praat in een natuurlijk tempo van ongeveer 161 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

15 woorden uit de video die het leren waard zijn, met uitspraak en betekenis:

Woord	Uitspraak	Betekenis
comfort zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈkʌm.fət/	comfort, gemak
grandmother zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈɡɹæn(d)ˌmʌðɚ/	grootmoeder, oma
confession zelfstandig naamwoord	/kənˈfɛʃən/	bekentenis
expectation zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/	verwachting, afwachting
ignore werkwoord	/ɪɡˈnɔː/	negeren
essay zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈɛs.eɪ/	essay, opstel
ignorant bijvoeglijk naamwoord	/ˈɪɡ.nə.ɹənt/	onwetend, ignorant
colleague zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈkɒliːɡ/	collega, medewerker
profound bijvoeglijk naamwoord	/pɹəˈfaʊnd/	diep, diepgaand
belief zelfstandig naamwoord	/bɪˈliːf/	geloof
moral bijvoeglijk naamwoord	/ˈmoɹəl/	moreel
illness zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈɪl.nəs/	ziekte, aandoening
conclusion zelfstandig naamwoord	/kənˈkluːʒən/	conclusie, einde
funeral zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈfju.nəɹ.əl/	begrafenis
painful bijvoeglijk naamwoord	/ˈpeɪn.fl̩/	moeizaam, smartelijk

Phrasal verbs die je zult horen

Woord	Betekenis
go back werkwoord	teruggaan
break down werkwoord	stukgaan, kapot gaan
go away werkwoord	weggaan
sit down werkwoord	gaan zitten

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	being stuffed · has been hurled · being shoved
Present perfect have/has + voltooid deelwoord — iets uit het verleden dat nu nog telt	have pondered · has ever produced · I've read
Betrekkelijke bijzinnen who / which + zin — extra informatie over een persoon of ding	people who praised · men who built · people who he

Uitspraak om op te letten

De spreker gebruikt 20 samentrekkingen en verkorte vormen, zoals didn't, don't, wasn't. Spreek ze kort uit, zoals je ze hoort.

De “th”-klanken: grandmother /ˈɡɹæn(d)ˌmʌðɚ/, bother /ˈbɑðɚ/, thereby /ðɛɹˈbaɪ/
De klanken “sh” en “zh”: confession /kənˈfɛʃən/, expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/, conclusion /kənˈkluːʒən/, emotionally /ɪˈməʊʃənəli/, admiration /ˌæd.məˈɹeɪ.ʃən/
Lange woorden — let op de klemtoon: expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/, intellectual /ˌɪntəˈlɛkt͡ʃʊəl/, intelligent /ɪnˈtɛlɪd͡ʒənt/, emotionally /ɪˈməʊʃənəli/, philosopher /fəˈlɑsəfɚ/

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 comfort, grandmother, confession.

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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