Shadowing Practice: 3 philosophy classics that are better than self-help books - Learn English Speaking with Video
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The most common question I get asked is what books would I recommend to anybody interested in philosophy?
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And the second most common question I get asked is what is the point of philosophy?
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And so to kill two birds with one video, here is my answer.
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So I might annoy some philosophers by saying this, but I've always thought that the best thing about philosophy is when it acts as a kind of therapy.
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I think that philosophy is best when it helps us understand ourselves, our relationships, and gives us the tools by which to make better decisions.
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I have a love -hate relationship with the self -help industry.
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I often write a lot of self -help stuff and I've read a great many books about it as well.
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And some self -help books can be original and they can be fresh, but I've always found that the bulk of it is just philosophy in a set of new clothes.
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It's Aristotle in a podcast form, it's Lao Tzu giving a TED talk.
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There is nothing wrong with this because big ideas wrapped in big words almost always take a lot of chewing.
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For example, I used to teach Friedrich Nietzsche to 16 year olds.
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Often they really took to him and so I told them to go away and read a book.
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I told them to read on the genealogy of morals but they didn't love him then.
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Philosophy is one of the most important disciplines in the world.
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It can change lives and it can define them but it's often difficult.
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So it makes sense that millionaires are made by explaining or condensing complex philosophical ideas for a modern ear.
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But the problem is that any time you simplify you lose a bit of nuance
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and if you simplify it again you lose a bit of meaning.
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When you simplify a thing so many times it becomes so diluted and dumbed down that it becomes worthless.
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So here for you are three examples where I think that philosophy is at its richest at its source.
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Here are three books worth more than a bookshop full of self -help manuals.
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First is Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics.
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One of the hallmarks of genius is to not be thought of as a genius.
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It's to create something so obvious and clear and straightforward that when you first meet it, it feels as if you knew the argument long before you read it.
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An inventor, for example, will become rich thanks to billions of people saying, I cannot believe that anybody hasn't thought of this before.
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And likewise, a novelist, a writer, or an artist will create something so immersive that you often won't see the effort in the planning, the execution, and the edits.
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Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is a genius piece of work, because you do not see the genius behind it.
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When I first read Aristotle as a student, I read it like I would any book or article, and I was swept away by the argument.
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Everything he said just seemed so obvious.
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It felt as if I was being pulled along a path and I could imagine no other route forwards.
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I drew wisdom from his ideas and I followed his conclusions, but I felt as if there was something greater, far greater, lurking beneath the surface.
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Because Aristotle's work is so well crafted, this was not a rushed work of an all -nighter marching to the drum of an angry editor.
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As the philosopher Michael Pakaluck put it,
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So what's Aristotle's book about?
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Well, the ethics in his book is an older version of how we use that word today.
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Today, ethics means right and wrong.
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It's pretty much synonymous with morality.
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But in ancient Greece, ethics was more about a way of life.
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It was how you behaved and your entire character.
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So Aristotle's book is literally a guidebook or an argument about how to behave as a human being.
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It's about how to live well, how to be virtuous, and most importantly of all, how to be happy.
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Because the book starts with the question, what is the ultimate purpose in life? and Aristotle believes it's eudaimonia or profound and existential happiness.
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And so the entire book is a manual about how to be happy.
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It's the work of decades of philosophical study and debate from one of history's greatest minds and it says, okay, if happiness is the destination,
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how can we get to there?
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And the path Aristotle leads us on is an act of genius.
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You'll think you've heard it before and it will change how you view life.
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So yes, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is my first choice.
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Second is Essays by Michel de Montaigne.
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There are only a handful of people in history who you can say literally started an entire genre.
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You could say that Mary Shelley with science fiction, Jane Austen with romance novels, and J .R .R.
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Tolkien with modern fantasy.
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And the 16th century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne is widely considered to be the father of the essay.
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Today, essays are everywhere.
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Almost all long -form non -fiction you read online comes in essay form.
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And while there is no way to easily define a literary essay,
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you could broadly say it's where you explore a theme in a philosophical style while weaving in autobiographical details and fascinating asides.
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And Montaigne was one of the first to do it.
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Essay in 16th century France literally meant a trial, and the idea was that Montaigne's essays would be where he takes a trial, a question, an issue, a problem,
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and then he'd pen his reflections on the topic.
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Of course the art of the essay comes in the degree of reflection and the style in which it's written.
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A good essay requires wit, erudition and relatability.
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And there are two reasons why Montaigne's essays are such a great example of the self -help genre.
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The first is that Montaigne is quite literally taking us through his solutions to common problems.
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Here we have a hugely intelligent human being talking about topics
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that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.
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For example, he talks about feeling lazy, dealing with liars and the best way to apologise.
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He explains the joys of solitude but the dangers of loneliness.
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He even gives advice on how to get a good night's sleep.
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Montaigne explores over a hundred topics with only a few being limited to his time and to his place.
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This relatability is also what makes the essay so helpful
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because reading Montaigne's reflections is like stretching back in time
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and finding somebody with just as many quirks and quandaries as we have now.
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Montaigne doesn't seem to present himself in an especially noble or faultless way.
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He is happy to let it all kind of hang out.
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And so when we read his essays we see a complex whole, a flawed character, but always genial, witty and likeable.
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Montaigne might be saying something trivial as when he says, when I play with my cat who knows whether she is amusing me or whether I am amusing her.
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Or it could be something poignant and profound as in his essay on the death of his best friend.
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But he always comes across as human, as human as you and me.
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The philosopher and writer James Baldwin once put it perfectly when he said, you think that your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,
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but then you read.
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It was books that taught me that the things
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that tormented me the most were the very things
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that connected me with all of the people who were alive and who had ever been alive.
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That's what I get when I read Montaigne.
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Third, the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu.
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There are some people who are quite reluctant to call books like the Tao Te Ching philosophy at all.
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They argue that philosophy is a narrowly defined discipline that involves premises, conclusions and grounding all of your argument in this rational discussion.
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And so if we define philosophy like that then yes the Tao Te Ching is very much not philosophy.
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Because the Tao Te Ching is very different from both Aristotle and Montaigne.
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In fact it's different from almost all academic work written in the Western tradition.
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It's a collection of aphorisms and pithy nuggets that are so vague it's hard to even make sense of them at times.
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Not only do they refuse to give you any straight answers whatsoever
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but they make you question whether there can be any straight answers to be found at all.
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But the reason it's important for self -development is
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because books like the Tao Te Ching appeal to an element of the human condition in a way
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that more rational texts simply cannot.
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In many ways, the Tao Te Ching is closer to poetry than philosophy, but in the way that poetry can also be deeply philosophical.
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Taoist students reading the Tao Te Ching would sometimes spend months reading a single line from Lao Tzu's work.
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They would meditate on what the words revealed, often sharing their interpretations,
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and many copies of the Tao Te Ching handed down to us are crammed with centuries worth of margelania.
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The Tao Te Ching gives us two key insights.
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The first is to accept that some things are beyond our comprehension and likely will remain beyond our comprehension forever.
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There are mystical forces and answers that cannot be labeled, but which are no less important for it.
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Whether you prefer to call that the Tao, fate, the unconscious, socio -economic forces, the will, god or whatever, the central idea is the same.
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Some things exist and cannot be named.
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The second is what the Tao Te Ching is about.
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It's about listening to these nameless forces.
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It's about following the river of your life, waterfalls and rapids too if it comes to that.
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Blaise Pascal once wrote that the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
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I quote Pascal because listen to your heart is a bit too saccharine and cliched even for me.
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I do not know entirely what the Tao Te Ching is about.
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Some of it does appear to be paradoxical nonsense.
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I don't think anybody can entirely make sense of large portions of it but the experience of reading the Tao Te Ching, of reading any of these books in this list come to think of it,
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is an act of meditative mindfulness in itself.
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Because sometimes the best thing about philosophy is not the ideas themselves, but the process of considering them.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “3 philosophy classics that are better than self-help books”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: Tao, essay, philosophy, Ching, Montaigne. This video has 116 sentences and 1792 words to shadow. The speech runs for 10:14. The speaker talks at a natural 175 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 80% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| philosopher noun | /fəˈlɑsəfɚ/ | A lover of wisdom. |
| philosophical adjective | /ˌfɪl.əˈsɑ.fɪ.kl̩/ | Of, or pertaining to, philosophy. |
| simplify verb | /ˈsɪmplɪfaɪ/ | To make simpler, either by reducing in complexity, reducing to component parts, or making easier to understand. |
| amuse verb | /əˈmjuːz/ | To entertain or occupy (someone or something) in a pleasant manner; to stir (someone) with pleasing emotions. |
| relatability noun | The quality of being relatable. | |
| comprehension noun | /ˌkɑmpɹɪˈhɛnʃn̩/ | A thorough understanding. |
| profound adjective | /pɹəˈfaʊnd/ | Descending far below the surface; opening or reaching to great depth; deep. |
| behave verb | /bɪˈheɪv/ | To conduct (oneself) well, or in a given way; to conform. |
| rational adjective | /ˈɹæʃ(ə)nəl/ | Capable of reasoning. |
| aphorism noun | /ˈæfəˌɹɪzəm/ | A concise expression of a principle in an area of knowledge; an axiom, a precept. |
| autobiographical adjective | /ˌɑtoʊˌbaɪəˈɡɹæfəkəl/ | Of or relating to a person's life or an account of a person's life, as told by the subject. |
| bookshop noun | A shop that sells books. | |
| clichéd adjective | Repeated so often that it has become stale or commonplace; hackneyed. | |
| condense verb | /kənˈdɛns/ | To concentrate toward the essence by making more close, compact, or dense, thereby decreasing size or volume. |
| dilute verb | /daɪˈljuːt/ | To make thinner by adding solvent to a solution, especially by adding water. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| come across verb | To change sides; to cross over to work for the opposition. |
| go away verb | To depart or leave a place. |
| sweep away verb | To remove something by, or as if by, sweeping. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | are made · be thought · was swept |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've always thought · I've read · I've always found |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who were · people who are |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 11 contractions and reduced forms, such as I've, didn't, doesn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: comprehension /ˌkɑmpɹɪˈhɛnʃn̩/, rational /ˈɹæʃ(ə)nəl/, erudition /ˌɛɹʊˈdɪʃən/, existential /ˌɛɡzɪˈstɛnʃl̩/, unconscious /ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəs/
- Long words — get the stress right: philosopher /fəˈlɑsəfɚ/, philosophical /ˌfɪl.əˈsɑ.fɪ.kl̩/, aphorism /ˈæfəˌɹɪzəm/, autobiographical /ˌɑtoʊˌbaɪəˈɡɹæfəkəl/, erudition /ˌɛɹʊˈdɪʃən/
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 philosopher, philosophical, simplify.
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.