Shadowing Practice: 3 Books That Will Change Your Life - Learn English Speaking with Video
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There are some books that stick out in my mind that have had a very, very big impact on me.
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And so I like to answer that question by not the three greatest books ever,
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but the three books that have had the most impact on my life.
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I read like thousands over the years, thousands of books for research.
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And so it's kind of like people will all of it ask you, who's your favorite child if you have a lot of children
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and you'll inevitably say it's like the last one etc
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so it'll be like the last books i read are my favorites
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but there are some that stick out in my mind
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that have had a very very big impact on me so i can remember when i was very young
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i must have been 15 or
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so i got a copy of machiavelli's the prince now i can assure you
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that i hardly understood a word of it i had never worked anywhere
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i had no knowledge of power I had never been in like a court -like environment.
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I'd never been around anybody like a prince or anything.
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But I loved that book.
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I thought it was fantastic.
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It had no relevance to my life in high school, obviously.
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But what did I love about it?
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I loved the brutal realism of it.
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I loved the fact that he was looking at human beings as if we are these animals that we are.
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And he was analyzing it without all the usual guilt, all the usual moralism what's going on in the world.
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He was just presenting us as we are.
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I didn't really understand experientially what he was talking about, but the style of it,
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the clarity, the pragmatism, the beautiful language entranced me.
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And so I've probably read that book six or seven times over the years, different formats.
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But that paperback, that really strange little spindly little, tiny little paperback that I had when I was 15.
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Boy, that had a huge impact on me.
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And you can see, obviously, the influence on my books.
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The second book, I studied ancient
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Greek in college.
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And you'll think, God, that has to be the most irrelevant subject anyone could ever study in university.
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And you're probably right.
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But it taught me some great things.
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It's the ultimate mental discipline.
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And I remember when I was in my second year, I believe, we were given Thucydides,
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we call it Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.
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It took me three days to read one paragraph in ancient Greek.
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The language was so difficult, so weird.
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I had to think about each word and sentence, etc. And I thought, I came out of that and I go,
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the style of this is so insane, it's so intricate, it's so brilliant, it's so convoluted yet logical in its own way.
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And I became an incredible fan of Thucydides.
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And obviously I read it later on in English, the whole book, and it's the most beautiful thing you can ever read
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because here you're reading about our history as humans some 2500 years ago in ancient greece
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and you've got this narrator who's
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so modern who someone could be somebody who's not sitting right next to you who has this very clear perspective
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and he's describing these events so far in the past they're so dramatic and they're so exciting and he's analyzing it brilliantly.
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I wish we had a handful of writers to this day who could be like that, who could have that clarity,
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who could have that kind of logic, who could have that kind of analytical ability.
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But it existed 2 ,500 years ago in this great historian Thucydides.
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He wrote one book that I know of, the history of the Peloponnesian War, but it's the most marvelous adventure you could ever go on.
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It's a fantastic book.
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It had a huge influence on me, almost as powerful as the Machiavelli.
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The third book is a very weird one.
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It's not something that most people know about or that I've ever really discussed, but it had a very large impact on me.
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And it's, there's a series of books written in the 60s by a writer named Carlos Castaneda.
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He was talking about the teachings of Don Juan, which is the title of one of his book.
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And he had a book called The Journey to Ixitlan.
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And if you ever pick up a copy of The Jury to Ixitlan, I think it's in the early 70s that it came out,
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1970, 71, you will understand where Robert Greene got a lot of the 48
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Laws of Power and the 33
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Strategies of War.
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These are amazing books.
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You know, sometimes I wonder if they date so well because they come from the drug period.
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And basically what it's about is the author is an anthropology student at UCLA named Carlos Castaneda
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and he goes to study indigenous Indian practices and he comes upon this Yaqui Indian.
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named Don Juan, who kind of initiates him in all of the ways of his indigenous culture.
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And it includes eventually ingesting peyote and learning to become a crow and all of these weird things that you think, wow, that's too weird.
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But a lot of it is this stuff that's all about power.
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It's all about controlling yourself.
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It's all about confronting your mortality.
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It's all about becoming this great warrior in life.
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and you know if I read it now I still love it it's not the same as
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when I read it when I was 16
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and I was getting excited about that stuff
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but it's still very impactful it's still a wonderful book
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and I'm actually using a little bit in the law of sublime
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so those are the three books
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that I think have had the largest impact on me of course
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I'm leaving out Friedrich Nietzsche who had probably the greatest impact on me of all
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but there's not one book I can single out there's like eight books
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and then of course there's my favorite novelist Dostoevsky who had a huge impact on me.
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I can't pick out one novel I have two three
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or four so that's my convoluted long -winded way of answering that question.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “3 Books That Will Change Your Life”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: impact, Thucydides, weird. This video has 83 sentences and 1048 words to shadow. The speech runs for 6:14. The speaker talks at a natural 168 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| indigenous adjective | /ɪnˈdɪd͡ʒənəs/ | Native to a land, especially before colonization. |
| clarity noun | /ˈklæɹ.ɪ.ti/ | The state or measure of being clear, either in appearance, thought or style; lucidity. |
| analyze verb | /ˈæn.əˌlaɪz/ | To subject to analysis. |
| paperback noun | /ˈpeɪ.pɚˌbæk/ | A book with flexible binding. |
| format noun | /ˈfɔːɹ.mæt/ | The layout of a publication or document. |
| adventure noun | /ədˈvɛn.t͡ʃə/ | A feeling of desire for new and exciting things. |
| dramatic adjective | /dɹəˈmætɪk/ | Of or relating to the drama. |
| insane adjective | /ɪnˈseɪn/ | Exhibiting unsoundness or disorder of mind; not sane; utterly mad. |
| entrance noun | /ˈɛn.tɹəns/ | The action of entering, or going in. |
| discipline noun | /ˈdɪsəplɪn/ | A controlled behaviour; self-control. |
| warrior noun | /ˈwɔɹi.ɚ/ | A person who is actively engaged in battle, conflict or warfare; a soldier or combatant. |
| logical adjective | /ˈlɑd͡ʒɪkəl/ | In agreement with the principles of logic. |
| guilt noun | /ɡɪlt/ | Responsibility for wrongdoing. |
| handful noun | /ˈhæn(d)fʊl/ | The amount that a hand will grasp or contain. |
| brutal adjective | /ˈbɹuːtəl/ | Savagely violent, vicious, ruthless, or cruel, often in an unintelligent manner. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| come out verb | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | To be discovered; to be revealed. |
| leave out verb | To omit, to not include, to neglect to mention. | |
| pick out verb | To remove by picking. | |
| pick up verb | To lift; to grasp and raise. |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 15 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, I've, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: assure /əˈʃʊɹ/, initiate /ɪˈnɪʃ.i.eɪt/
- Long words — get the stress right: indigenous /ɪnˈdɪd͡ʒənəs/, irrelevant /ɪˈɹɛləvənt/, historian /hɪˈstɔɹi.ən/, inevitably /ɪˈnɛvɪtəbli/, mortality /mɔɹˈtælɪti/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like indigenous, clarity, analyze.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.