Shadowing Practice: Why You Don't Understand Movies/TV in English - Learn English Speaking with Video

Have you ever been frustrated because you understand people speaking English like me on YouTube, but then you watch TV shows and movies and you don't understand anything?

Yeah, same.

In this video, I'm going to tell you why.

I'm going to tell you how to improve your English listening.

And I'm going to talk a little bit about my personal experience learning Spanish

and give you my tips for improving your language skills.

This is one of the most common comments that I get on my videos where I'm speaking English.

I understand you perfectly.

Why can't I understand other native speakers?

You really want to know?

Let's get into it.

As you probably already know, people talk fast.

Yes, native speakers.

We talk fast but it's more than that.

It's also the fact that we link words.

So a phrase like, what do you want to do actually sounds like, what do you want to do in real life and in movies and TV shows?

What do you want to do?

Instead of saying, I want something to eat, We say, I want something to eat.

Something, something.

Many times we don't even say something.

We say something.

I want something to eat.

I need something to eat.

Yeah, let me just get something to eat.

I've already made multiple videos talking about this.

In these videos, I gave many examples of how we link words in English.

You can find a lot of YouTube videos about this.

If you're curious, you can watch mine, but you can also do this yourself.

When you're consuming content in English, you're going to be paying attention to how people link words when they talk.

native speakers in TV shows and movies.

There are always new words and phrases that even us native speakers have to learn to keep up with the times, to keep up with the natural changes of language, and the new generations.

Then you have the whole topic of idioms, phrases that are not literal, which means they're even harder to understand, because you can't understand them literally.

And we use them all the time.

We're constantly using idioms.

So we're constantly speaking with even meant to be taken word for word, literally.

You have to understand the meanings of the idioms.

That is so hard.

You could spend a lifetime learning idioms in English.

Then we have a sense of humor.

We use a lot of sarcasm in American English.

So if sarcasm is not something that you easily understand, or it's something that's not as common in your culture,

for example, then it's going to be even harder to understand it.

We use a lot of sarcasm, especially in TV I used to watch shows like Family Guy.

Honestly, even as a native speaker from the United States, I did not understand most of the cultural references in those shows,

but I watched them anyways because I thought it was entertaining.

I understood the English from being a native speaker, but I didn't understand when they would talk about certain celebrities or people that I had no idea who they were.

Like they talked about movies that I had never seen.

You know, so if you're not a native speaker, if you're from a different country, then that's going to be even harder.

And on top of all that, we have different accents, especially in movies and TV shows,

which a lot of them take place in the past where accents were very different than now.

Or they take place in specific parts of the country where there are strong accents, maybe in the South.

And then, of course, you have accents and dialects from different countries, which, by the way, I don't recommend consuming content from multiple accents and dialects.

so many Hispanic countries in the Americas.

And I wanted to travel to multiple countries.

So I thought that I should have like a broader mix of influences.

But honestly, I don't recommend that for English.

The vast majority of native English speakers speak United States slash Canadian English.

If you just focused on that, it would make it a lot easier for you to improve your listening and just your English in general.

It would make it a lot easier than if you are trying British, English, and Australian.

If you specifically are going to live in England or Australia or have a lot of contact with people from there, then yeah, maybe you want to consume content from there.

But in general, I just recommend kind of focusing on one specific type.

Like even with my Spanish, I specifically focused on Spanish from the Americas.

So I didn't watch content from Spain because I didn't want certain things to confuse me or get in my head.

Like the vosotros thing, to narrow it down a little bit.

One for now and get that really strong, you know, learn that dialect very well,

and then it will be a lot easier and you will feel more confident to branch out to other dialects.

Another reason why it's hard to understand TV shows and movies is because they use a script, right?

So it's not off the cuff, spontaneous talking.

They don't have to think about what they're going to say while they're saying it.

I mean, they have to remember their lines.

They have remember the script, but they don't have to think about what it is that they're trying to express while they're talking.

Because normally this is all spontaneous.

This is just the thoughts that are in my mind right now.

So as I'm talking, I am thinking about what I want to express, what I want to say.

And this is what real life is.

So in real life, it tends to be a bit slower.

in movies and TV shows, you're not hearing that very much.

So it's not very realistic, honestly.

And people who write scripts are good writers.

Well, hopefully, we hope, right?

They are creative.

They like to use fun and interesting vocabulary.

They like to use a lot of humor.

In real life, we use the same phrases again and again and again.

We're not as creative.

We're not as funny.

always have a great comeback you know we don't always have a great response to everything

and why do you want to improve your english listening yeah it's nice to understand tv shows

and movies but you know that you can always watch tv shows

and movies with subtitles like you always did before

so the real reason usually that we want to improve our listening skills is

so that we can talk to people

and we can understand what they say to us and i'm telling you right now it's a heck of

conversation with you than it is to watch a movie, watch a TV show.

So maybe you need to search online conversation classes with native speakers

so you can experience if you understand when a native speaker is talking to you.

Please don't base your listening level off TV shows and movies.

They're way too hard and not realistic.

By the way, if you want a discount for conversation classes with native speakers,

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I will put my link in the comments so after you buy your first class.

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So check that out if you'd like to have classes or conversations with native speakers.

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In my own personal experience of learning Spanish, more than half of the content I consumed was YouTube videos.

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I got to a point where I understood most of what I heard in YouTube videos.

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So I was feeling like, oh, my listening ability is pretty good.

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You know, I used to watch or whatever kind of YouTube video.

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I even watched people from different countries and I still understood most of what they said.

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Then I started watching a very simple TV show.

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I can't remember the name and I even tried to search for it and I can't find it.

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But basically it was just a simple TV show comedy sitcom for families and you know children maybe.

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It was just about the everyday a lot, but I could also learn a lot.

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So I just started watching this show and I watched every single episode of the show.

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By the end of that, I was very confident with my Spanish.

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It helped me a lot.

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I used to practice shadowing.

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I used to practice a mix of active and passive listening when watching this show.

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And this is what I recommend for you guys too.

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Active listening is when you're treating the listening session like a study session.

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You're in study mode.

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above the button to press pause.

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You might have the subtitles on in the language you want to learn and you're just studying it.

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You're studying what they say and how they say it.

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And you're often pausing and going back and listening to what they said again and again.

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And you're also trying to imitate them.

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You're trying to copy what they said exactly how they said it.

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You also have your phone or your laptop open with either Google or ChatGPT.

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In any words and phrases that you don't understand, immediately asking Google or ChatGPT, what does this mean?

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And now we have AI, which is so fast at telling you exactly what all of these words or phrases mean.

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It can explain these things very easily to you.

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And now you don't have to search through the internet to find the answer.

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Now you can just type a sentence in ChatGPT or Google, and it will tell you exactly what that means.

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It's so easy now.

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It has never been easier to learn a language.

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And when you're doing the you're going to be analyzing every detail.

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You're going to be looking at how they link words, how what is written in the subtitles sounds differently when they say it fast.

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And you're going to try to imitate that.

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You're basically studying or analyzing the way that native speakers really talk and practicing talking like that yourself.

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So that is one part of the listening experience is the active listening.

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But it's also good to do passive listening, which is another where you're probably not even using the subtitles.

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You're just listening to what they're saying and you're accepting that you're not going to understand everything, but you're just trying to get the general idea of what they're saying.

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You're just trying to listen in a relaxed way and understand as much as possible without overanalyzing it.

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Just listening, observing, and seeing how well you understand what's going on in the show or the movie.

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among TV shows and movies, right?

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There's going to be simple and easier ones, and there's going to be really hard ones, ones that are even hard for native speakers.

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Just to give you an example with my Spanish, I watched every episode of this comedy family show that I am talking about that I can't remember the name.

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Every episode I was watching YouTube videos,

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I was feeling very confident with my Spanish. is a Mexican movie.

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But here's the thing.

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Spanish is not Spanish is not Spanish.

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Mexican Spanish is not Mexican.

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Spanish is not Mexican.

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Spanish is not English is not English.

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There are different kinds.

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So the movie had a couple Mexican guys who I think were speaking very like slang Mexican Spanish, a lot of profanity.

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And I had a hard time understanding them.

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I think if I watch this movie nowadays, I understand this movie fine.

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But back more in the beginning, like, a few like several years ago.

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I remember the first time I watched this, I had a hard time understanding.

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And then there was another character from Spain, couldn't understand her.

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She spoke a little bit more clearly, like a little less slang, but still it was like Spanish that I hadn't practiced a lot.

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So, you know, that was hard for me.

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And then there was the voice of a narrator who must have been speaking in a very formal way

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because I didn't understand him either.

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"Do I even know Spanish at all?

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Man, I thought I knew Spanish." Or when I first started dating a guy from Argentina and I had to ask him, "What is he saying?" all the time.

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It takes time.

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Okay?

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It takes time.

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It takes a lot of exposure.

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If you're learning English and you can understand my videos

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and you can understand me talking in English and you watch other native speakers on YouTube making videos like this, talking to the camera, and you can understand them, you're doing fantastic.

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You just got to relax.

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and keep going.

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We need to just accept that learning language is a lifelong process, and there are always going to be things that are hard to understand.

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There's always gonna be moments and people and situations and topics that are hard to understand.

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All right, guys, thanks for watching my video until the end.

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I could talk about this topic all day long, but that's the main stuff that I wanna talk about in this video.

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Love you guys, have a great day, and I'll see you in the next video.

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Bye bye.

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Woordenschat en spreektips bij deze les

Deze video bevat 178 zinnen en 2233 woorden om na te spreken. Het gesproken deel duurt 12:59. De spreker praat in een natuurlijk tempo van ongeveer 172 woorden per minuut, dicht bij een alledaags gesprek. 88% van de woorden hoort bij de 3.000 meest gebruikte Engelse woorden, dus de woordenschat is goed te volgen.

Belangrijke woorden in deze video

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

Woord	Uitspraak	Betekenis
phrase zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈfɹeɪ̯z/	uitspraak
accent zelfstandig naamwoord	/ækˈsɛnt/	accent, klemtoon
consume werkwoord	/kənˈsum/	consumeren, verbruiken
topic zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈtɑpɪk/	onderwerp, thema
script zelfstandig naamwoord	/skɹɪpt/	geschrift
sarcasm zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈsɑːɹˌkæzəm/	sarcasme
skill zelfstandig naamwoord	/skɪl/	bekwaamheid, vaardigheid
relax werkwoord	/ɹɪˈlæks/	losmaken
realistic bijvoeglijk naamwoord	/ˌɹɪəˈlɪs.tɪk/	realistisch
passive bijvoeglijk naamwoord	/ˈpæs.ɪv/	passief
pause zelfstandig naamwoord	/pɔːz/	pauze
analyze werkwoord	/ˈæn.əˌlaɪz/	analyseren
humour zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈhjuːmɚ/	humor
spontaneous bijvoeglijk naamwoord	/spɑnˈteɪ.ni.əs/	spontaan
vast bijvoeglijk naamwoord	/væst/	enorm

Phrasal verbs die je zult horen

Woord	Betekenis
go back werkwoord	teruggaan

Uitspraak om op te letten

De spreker gebruikt 70 samentrekkingen en verkorte vormen, zoals you're, don't, they're. Spreek ze kort uit, zoals je ze hoort.

De klanken “sh” en “zh”: exposure /ɪkˈspəʊ.ʒə(ɹ)/, shadow /ˈʃædəʊ̯/
Lange woorden — let op de klemtoon: spontaneous /spɑnˈteɪ.ni.əs/, celebrity /səˈlɛb.ɹɪ.ɾi/, differently /ˈdɪf.ə.ɹənt.li/, vocabulary /vəˈkæb.jə.lə.ɹi/, profanity /pɹəˈfænɪti/

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 phrase, accent, consume.

Grammatica in deze video

De structuren die de spreker het meest gebruikt, met de exacte woorden uit de video:

Structuur	In de video
“Used to” used to + werkwoord — een vroegere gewoonte of toestand die niet meer klopt	used to watch · used to practice
Betrekkelijke bijzinnen who / which + zin — extra informatie over een persoon of ding	literal, which means · people who write · listening, which is
Lijdende vorm be + voltooid deelwoord — het gaat om wat er gebeurt, niet om wie het doet	been frustrated · be taken · is written
Present perfect have/has + voltooid deelwoord — iets uit het verleden dat nu nog telt	I've already made · has never been

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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Woordenschat en spreektips bij deze les

Belangrijke woorden in deze video

Phrasal verbs die je zult horen

Uitspraak om op te letten

Zo oefen je met deze video

Grammatica in deze video

Wat is de Shadowing-techniek?