Shadowing Practice: 4 Language Habits That Get You Fluent FAST - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

I'm going to show you four study habits that will get you fluent fast in your new language,

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I'm going to show you four study habits that will get you fluent fast in your new language,

because most people are building the wrong study habits entirely,

and that's why they stay stuck as a beginner,

no matter how long they've been learning a language.

After learning eight languages myself and writing a whole bunch of books on language learning,

I've realized that fluency really comes down to four very specific things that you should be doing every single day.

So I'm going to show you those four things in this video,

along with why you're probably not doing them right now

and how much time you should be setting aside for them each day.

So let's look at those four habits and why they work better than almost anything else.

But first, why don't language habits stick in the first place?

Well, you know Viggo Mortensen, right?

Aragon, Lord of the Rings.

He speaks around 10 languages and I just love his story.

His dad was Danish.

So as a teenager, Viggo tried desperately to learn Danish and he really wanted this.

It was personal.

He sat there week after week trying to figure out the sounds and the grammar.

He didn't get very far,

and years later he actually said that Danish was harder than Arabic.

Huh.

Danish is not harder than Arabic.

Look at this.

Arabic is one of the most notoriously difficult languages on earth for English speakers,

and Danish is one of the easiest.

It just has some tricky pronunciations.

So what on earth went wrong for Vigo?

Well, years later he moved to Denmark,

only this time he didn't bother trying to study Danish at all.

He was a free spirit,

obsessed with flowers and plants.

So he started selling them on the street,

chatting with farmers and customers,

buying his sweet peas and roses,

just living a cool life with Danish in his ears all day long.

No textbooks, no studying, and somehow it all just started to click.

Oh, fun.

So are you?

Musky.

Now you might be thinking,

yeah, but he moved to Denmark.

That's not the point.

It wasn't Denmark that did the work.

It was how he spent his day,

because what Vigo stumbled onto is the difference between studying a language and acquiring a language.

In other words, not studying it,

just picking it up without even realizing.

And the four habits I'm going to show you now are built around that process,

which means your brain won't even try to resist them or fight them.

And the first one costs you precisely zero extra minutes of your day,

not five minutes, not 15,

nothing, because you're not going to find a new time in your day,

you're going to swap time that you've already got.

And I call it the daily immersion anchor.

And you're going to love this because you don't even need any willpower.

And you might want to keep track of all of these four tips as we go along,

by the way, otherwise you're going to get all fired up and then come back tomorrow and forget everything I've said.

So to help with that,

I'm giving you my free language goal planner.

It's very simple, it's just two pages that you can print out at home

and then write out your goals as we go along,

and exactly how you're going to tackle these four habits each day.

This helps to keep you organized,

and when you're organized and have a plan that's when you tend to succeed.

If you'd like a copy of this just scan the QR code on the screen

or grab the link in the description below.

Now here's how that daily immersion actually works.

Pick one moment that already exists in your day.

For example, after I record this video I'm going to drive to the club and play tennis.

That is a moment that already exists,

it could be a coffee break,

it could be gym, whatever,

and then swap whatever you're listening to for something in the language.

A podcast, a story, a radio station,

the key is to make sure it's something you actually enjoy.

Just like Vigo selling his roses.

So it naturally becomes part of your day.

So when I drive to play tennis right now rather than listen to whatever's going wrong in the world,

I'm going to put on a Japanese podcast and listen to people speaking Japanese.

Because when you tie it to something that already happens every day,

you don't need willpower, it just rides along with your routine.

I did my own version of this when I was learning Cantonese many years ago.

I was living in Qatar at the time,

working really hard, I had no spare time,

and last time I checked they don't speak Cantonese in Qatar.

So what to do?

Well, I took the hour of TV that I was already watching each night

and just swapped it for a Cantonese series

and I swear 96 episodes later it was a very long

series 96 episodes later it had completely transformed the way

that I understood the sounds of Cantonese and the way

that I sounded when I spoke Cantonese as well and

that was the whole trick language tends to stick

when it piggybacks on something that you're already doing

but even with the immersion running there's something very specific your brain needs to do with all of

that input or none of this will work

and this is where most people go wrong if you've ever spent an hour trying to memorize a list of words,

and I mean really going at it,

proper discipline, and then woken up the next morning and remembered absolutely nothing,

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well you know exactly what I mean.

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But forgetting all the words is not you being bad at languages,

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that's your brain doing exactly what it's supposed to do.

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Because your brain doesn't latch onto random words very well,

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there's nothing there for it to grab onto,

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but it does pay attention to words that come back over and over again in situations that actually make sense.

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So the habit here is simple,

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you start noticing the words that keep coming back.

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Now check this out, every language runs on a surprisingly small number of words.

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Somewhere between 1000 and 1500 words cover most of what people actually say to each other day to day.

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True story, and those words keep showing up in the same little chunks again and again.

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Phrases like either way, would you mind,

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things that you say all the time but without even thinking.

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Words that go together.

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Now when you're new to a language it all just sounds like noise at first,

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but if you're listening every day to people speaking naturally you suddenly start noticing these little bits standing out.

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You hear the same things again and again and again and again and now your brain's like,

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hang on this is probably important this little bit of language here because I keep hearing it.

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So now you're not really learning or studying anything,

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you're just recognizing something that your brain has already seen before.

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It's not about studying, it's about noticing when things come up.

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You only have the opportunity to do this if you are immersing yourself in the language in the first place.

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And this is not just words,

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it's not just phrases, it's the way sentences are built.

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In other words, grammar, the order that words come in,

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the little endings that get added, it's patterns.

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And patterns are noticeable and memorable once you actually start to tune in.

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One of the biggest problems that people have is they just don't spend enough,

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they don't have enough contact time with the language in the first place,

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and so it's impossible to recognize patterns when you have no contact with the actual language.

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And this kind of immersion

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and pattern recognition is exactly what Viggo Mortensen was doing a little bit later on

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when they asked him to play a Russian mobster in the film Eastern Promises.

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Now Viggo could have just memorized and parroted these lines in Russian,

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but he wanted to fully understand them just like the mob does.

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So what did he do?

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Well he went to Google and he downloaded a list of words from Google.

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No, he didn't do any of that.

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He flew to Moscow.

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He started hanging out in Russian prisons.

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Yep.

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And listened to how those real gangsters actually talked,

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the slang, the rhythm, the attitude over and over, day after day.

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No grammar rules here, but he sure was letting the patterns sink in.

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By the time he actually filmed the movie,

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he was so good at gangster Russian that let's save that bit for later.

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Now, here's what happens when you do this kind of thing for long enough.

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You get so used to the natural way to say things that you start to feel when something's off,

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even before you can explain why.

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Like a native speaker would, just intuition.

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And all because you heard it enough times that your brain filed it under normal.

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So here's your job.

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While you're doing your daily listening,

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your podcast, your short stories,

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whatever it is, stay curious.

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When you hear something a few times,

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write it down, make a note.

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Don't just reach for the grammar book and try to intellectually understand it.

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Just mark it and notice when it comes back again, because it will.

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But noticing on its own of course is not enough,

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which brings us to the part that has just about every language learner running for the hills.

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All that noticing, all that absorbing,

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at some point, but it has to come out of your mouth.

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You know what I mean?

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And it's so hard,

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because this is the moment where you realize you don't actually know how to say anything or speak confidently.

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I had this happen to me with Spanish a long time ago.

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I thought I knew the language well enough to pull off a night out in Madrid,

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only to completely blank in front of everyone that I met.

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Which is pretty humiliating when you're a 22 year old aspiring English language learner.

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And if you're afraid of that happening to you,

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you can be like everyone else and just never speak and avoid any kind of human interaction for the next five years.

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You could, but the thing is,

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you're never going to feel ready.

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It doesn't happen.

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Not a bit more ready,

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not slightly more confident, nothing.

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That feeling is not coming, I'm afraid.

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Now watch what Viggo Mortensen does here.

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One day after filming that Russian gangster movie,

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he walks into this Russian pub in London.

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Still has the fake prison tattoos on,

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because he didn't feel like scrubbing them off just yet.

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Orders a drink, and the only kind of Russian that he knows,

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and well we all know where he picked that up.

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Then he starts eavesdropping on this Russian couple.

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Of course he just wanted to see if he could understand them,

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but they were absolutely terrified and and thought he was the actual mafia.

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Now, if he'd ordered that drink phrasebook style,

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there's not much chance those prison tattoos would have fooled anyone, especially Russians.

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Pretty gutsy move from Vigo.

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But that moment right there,

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that's what happens when you start using the language early.

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And then every language where I just said,

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dial with it and started talking,

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that was the beginning of kind of jumping ahead like I was in some kind of language jet plane.

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So the habit here is simple.

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You take the patterns you've been hearing and you start using them out loud,

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whether it feels comfortable or not.

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This is where you activate the language.

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Even if it's messy, even if you're unsure,

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just try taking phrases you've heard a few times and using them out loud.

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Swap one word, say it again.

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That's how it starts.

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Now find your version of Vigo's Pop,

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something that you can come back to regularly,

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a speaking partner, a tutor,

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a club where native speakers hang out.

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Maybe something like I did in Japan,

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which was going to take salsa classes in Tokyo

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because it would all be in Japanese and we'd speak Japanese as we were doing the salsa, right?

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It just happened naturally.

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Even just your phone on record is better than nothing talking through something you heard that day, externalizing it.

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Don't wait till you feel ready.

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You will feel ready because you got started and it snowballs from there.

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And if you miss a salsa session or whatever, it doesn't matter.

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No streak broken, no starting over, no guilt.

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Just pick it up again when you can.

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That's exactly why the planner that I've given you here has a monthly tracker

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so you can see the bigger picture instead of panicking over one missed day.

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Again, link in the description if you'd like to print off a copy of

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that to use it in your own language learning.

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But before you go to sleep there is one last thing because guess what?

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Your brain doesn't switch off when you sleep.

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In fact this is where everything actually locks in.

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The words you heard, the patterns you notice,

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the phrases you try to use.

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Your brain starts sorting through all of it.

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Scientists call this memory consolidation,

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which is just a fancy way of saying that your brain is still learning while you are snoozing.

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But here's the catch, it can only work with what you gave it earlier.

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So no input?

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Well there's nothing to work with.

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That's why habit number four is the one that makes the other three work,

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and I call it the bedtime story.

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This is where you reinforce everything from the day.

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Here's what you do.

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When you're winding down at night,

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five minutes, that's all, put something on in your language.

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Nothing heavy, nothing that feels like work,

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just something easy at the same kind of level you've been listening to during the day.

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A short story could be perfect, relaxing podcast episode.

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Just let it play.

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My current go-to at bedtime is conversational podcasts in Japanese.

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That's what I do right now.

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It's going to be different for you,

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but five minutes, something you enjoy,

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then close your eyes and get out of the way.

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Now, if you're sitting there thinking,

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yeah, nice idea, Oli, but how am I going to do four language habits every day?

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And the answer is you're not starting with all four.

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You start with the first one.

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Just get some language into your day every day.

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On your drive, at the gym,

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making coffee,

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walking the dog whatever works then once that's ticking along you

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start noticing what keeps coming back same sounds little phrases they'll

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start jumping out at you then you try using a little bit of

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that out loud in a speaking session

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and then at night maybe you give your brain one last

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easy listen before sleep that's it it's one big loop immerse

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notice activate reinforce you're not trying to do four perfect habits

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you're just building this into your day one step then the next then the next

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and

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if you want to make this easy on yourself grab the

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language goal planner i'm giving you the description use it to lay

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that out plan the stuff that you're going to actually read

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or listen to plan when you're going to do it because

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when you plan something it's a lot more likely to actually

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happen before long you're not thinking about this stuff anymore

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or even watching youtube videos about doing it you're just doing it

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and that's pretty cool now

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if you want to see just how far down the rabbit

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hole vigo mortensen actually goes believe me what he does next

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takes this whole idea to a level most people wouldn't even consider trying.

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Go and watch that right now.

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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.

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Shadowing Practice: 4 Language Habits That Get You Fluent FAST - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing Practice: 4 Language Habits That Get You Fluent FAST - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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About This Lesson

Key Vocabulary & Phrases

Practice Tips

What is the Shadowing Technique?