Shadowing Practice: ABSOLUTE Beginner Basics.. Blender For Noobs 2025 - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Two years ago, I made a video on Blender for the absolute beginner basics.
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If you never opened this program, that video was meant to kind of get you to your first model.
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However, with Blender updating quite a bit since then, and that video getting a bit lost in the sauce since it's been two years,
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I wanted to make another one for anyone opening this program in 2025.
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The first thing we need to cover is moving in Blender.
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It's a bit weird and takes a second to get used to, so I'll break it down very, very easily.
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On your mouse, your middle scroll wheel will let you zoom out and zoom in.
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If you click in the middle scroll wheel and drag around, you can go around your object in whatever way you're bringing your mouse.
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If you hold shift and click the middle scroll wheel, you can pan around your scene.
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And if you have a number pad, you can click 1 for front orthographic.
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I hope that's how you say it.
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3 for right orthographic, 7 for top, and 9 for bottom.
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If you don't have a number pad, you can hold Alt on your keyboard
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and click in your middle mouse wheel and drag in the direction you want it to be.
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This way, you can snap to these views without having a number pad.
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That's pretty much all you need to know about moving.
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It's a little weird at first, but once you get used to it, it's not bad at all.
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The next most important thing in Blender, especially when you're starting out, is modes.
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If we click on our object, this cube, and then go up to our modes here, you could see all of these modes.
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And don't get too overwhelmed, because when you're first starting out, sculpt, vertex, weight, and texture matter about 0%.
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All you need to know is object and edit mode.
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In object mode, you're moving your mesh as a whole.
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So let's say we press G to grab it, it's moving the whole thing.
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You cannot independently edit any part of it.
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However, in edit mode, we can choose where we want to drag maybe vertices or lines or faces.
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And that brings us in to the three things we can edit vertices, lines and faces.
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If you click on the vertices selection mode, you can click any vert on your mesh and do anything you want.
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If we press G to grab, we can move this in.
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We can kind of go around and just play with these however we want.
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If we want to grab a line to move it all at once, you could do that.
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And if we want to grab a face, we could do that too.
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Let's press control Z to get back to a basic cube and start talking about how to turn this into something.
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We're going to stay in edit mode.
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I am usually on the face selection and I press a to select everything within this mesh.
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Now in blender, the most daunting thing when you're starting is key binds.
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Everything in this program has a keybind and can be used by pressing some sort of hotkey combination on your keyboard.
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It's super daunting.
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We are going to get into like four or five of them that will turn this cube into your first model.
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So we've already said A to select everything.
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Up next is S.
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If you press S on your keyboard, you can scale your object down.
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Now this doesn't matter if you're selecting everything or selecting one face, it scales whatever your mouse is selecting.
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Up next we have E to extrude.
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Now guys, this one, I wouldn't recommend grabbing everything at once, this works the best on faces in most cases, of course you can do it with lines and vertices as well,
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but if you press E you can extrude that face or whatever you're selecting beforehand.
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Let's do that one more time.
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Now we can press R to rotate and this goes based off whatever direction you're looking at your mesh.
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However, you can also lock this down.
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So if you press R and then Y, for example, you are only rotating on the Y axis.
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You could do this with all of the key binds, by the way.
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So we could do scale in the x-axis, for example.
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Now that we know how to extrude, scale, and select different faces and rotate,
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let's get into some of the cooler ones that are really going to start helping you out.
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Control R adds loop cuts, aka more geometry for you to work with.
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Let's say we wanted to move this in the middle.
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Let's just say we want to make it bigger.
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We could press Control R, and we could scroll on our mouse if we want more, but for now, we're just gonna click to add that one.
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Then we could press scale and we have a bigger section in the middle.
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The last hotkey I really wanna talk about today is Bevel because it is a game changer.
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As you can see here, we have some pretty hard edges and sure, we could right-click and do Shade Smooth, which isn't really that great.
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We could right-click, do Shade Smooth Auto Smooth, which is a little bit better, softening up these edges, but we still have some very hard edges.
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If we hold alt and select this line, now we have all of these, we could do control and B to bevel this.
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We can also use our scroll wheel to add more segments, making that a very smooth side.
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Now be careful with bevels, especially what we call micro bevels, like this, for example.
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We could bevel this whole spot to make it softer, but instead of adding geometry, we could just shade smooth auto smooth.
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And we have no more geometry, but it still looks how we wanted it to look.
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All right.
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So we've been over the basics, edit mode and object mode.
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We know how to move in Blender
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and we know how to make the cube look a little bit different than it looked when we joined into Blender.
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Now, how do we do more?
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What's next?
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Guys, adding in objects to your scene is by far the next step.
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We should turn this into something.
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I'm going to press S to scale it down.
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And let's see.
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Let's just scale this back down.
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I should just get rid of this work.
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We don't need it.
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Delete.
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If you press shift and a on your keyboard, it brings up this add menu.
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90% of the time I am in this mesh subsection.
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We have plane, cube, circle, UV sphere, icosphere, cylinder, cone, torus, a bunch of stuff okay?
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Let's say we wanna make a tree.
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We're gonna bring in this cylinder right here.
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And if this is too many vertices for our game, maybe we're working on mobile or we want super low poly, we could click this arrow down here and just scale that down.
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I'm gonna put it at eight.
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Now that we have this, we could take what we have already learned.
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So let's go into our edit mode.
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The shortcut for this would be tab on your keyboard to switch back and forth.
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But in edit mode, let's scale this down, grab our top face and drag it up.
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Press S to scale.
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Now we have sort of a tree trunk.
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We could right click and shade smooth auto smooth.
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We can also up this angle so it actually looks a bit smoother.
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Let's do shift A again and let's add in, let's do a circle, cause why not?
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And we'll make this 12 sides.
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Now let's tab into edit mode once again, go to our line select mode since we're on a circle and let's press E to extrude it.
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As you can see, it's going all over the place.
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So we're going to press E and Z to lock it to that axis.
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And then we can press S to scale.
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We can press Control-R to loop cut, S to scale.
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If we press L, we can grab this whole piece, S to scale, R to rotate, Shift-D to duplicate, R to rotate,
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S to scale, Shift-D, S to scale, R to rotate.
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As you can see, we are quickly making a pine tree.
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I could take all of these again if I want to do, Shift-D, S to scale, bring them here.
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Maybe we want to rotate this one along the Z axis, so R and Z, and maybe we want Shade Smooth Auto Smooth.
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Obviously, this is not the best tree ever made, but it does show you
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that you can very easily take a super small set of keybinds
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and super limited knowledge in Blender and make something for your game.
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Hopefully this video made Blender seem a little bit less daunting, and if any of you guys used it to make your first model, join my discord and post your model and creations,
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I would be super excited to see them.
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But that'll wrap it up for today, if you did enjoy and want to see more content like this, please make sure to like, comment, and subscribe.
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Have a great day, later.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “ABSOLUTE Beginner Basics.. Blender For Noobs 2025”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: press, scale, mode, click, smooth. This video has 114 sentences and 1571 words to shadow. The speech runs for 8:26. The speaker talks fast, about 186 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 83% 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 |
|---|---|---|
| smooth adjective | /smuːð/ | Having a texture that lacks friction. Not rough. |
| select verb | /sɪˈlɛkt/ | To choose one or more elements of a set, especially a set of options. |
| edit verb | /ˈɛdɪt/ | To change a text, or a document. |
| rotate verb | /ˈɹoʊ.teɪt/ | To spin, turn, or revolve. |
| mouse noun | /maʊs/ | Any mammal of the many rodent families (especially Muridae) that have a small body and a long tail. |
| shade noun | /ʃeɪd/ | Darkness where light, particularly sunlight, is blocked. |
| keyboard noun | /ˈki.bɔɹd/ | A set of keys laid out in a gridlike pattern, used for typing on a typewriter, computer, etc. |
| scroll noun | /skɹoʊl/ | A roll of paper or parchment; a writing formed into a roll. |
| cube noun | /kjub/ | A regular polyhedron having six identical square faces. |
| mesh noun | /mɛʃ/ | A structure made of connected strands of metal, fiber, or other flexible/ductile material, with evenly spaced openings between them. |
| dragon noun | /ˈdɹæɡən/ | In European mythologies, a gigantic beast, typically reptilian with leathery bat-like wings, lion-like claws, scaly skin and a lizard-like body, often a… |
| axis noun | /ˈæksɪs/ | An imaginary line around which an object spins (an axis of rotation) or is symmetrically arranged (an axis of symmetry). |
| automobile noun | /ˈɔː.tə.məˌbil/ | A type of motor vehicle designed to move on the ground under its own stored power and intended to carry a driver, a small number of additional passengers, and… |
| geometry noun | /d͡ʒiˈɑ.mə.tɹi/ | The branch of mathematics dealing with spatial relationships. |
| loop noun | /luːp/ | A length of thread, line or rope that is doubled over to make an opening. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| go around verb | To move or spread from person to person. | |
| start out verb | To emerge suddenly; to jump out. | |
| back down verb | To take a less aggressive position in a conflict than one previously had, or has planned to have. | |
| bring up verb | To mention. | |
| get back to verb | Return to (an activity) | |
| zoom out verb | /ˌzuːm ˈaʊt/ | To decrease the focal length of a zoom lens in order to obtain a reduced magnification of the image, or a wider-angle view. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- I hope that's how you say it.
- We're going to stay in edit mode.
- Let's do that one more time.
- Let's just say we want to make it bigger.
- Let's just scale this back down.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | we've already said · we've been · have already learned |
| Superlatives the -est / the most … — the top or bottom of a group | the most daunting · the best |
| Advice with “should” should + verb — saying what is a good idea | should turn · should just get |
| Verb + -ing enjoy, keep, stop… + -ing — verbs that are followed by the -ing form | start talking · start helping |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 32 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, we're, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: smooth /smuːð/, orthographic /ˌɔːɹθəˈɡɹæfɪk/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: shade /ʃeɪd/, mesh /mɛʃ/, shortcut /ˈʃɔːtkʌt/
- Long words — get the stress right: automobile /ˈɔː.tə.məˌbil/, geometry /d͡ʒiˈɑ.mə.tɹi/, independently /ˌɪndɪˈpɛndəntli/, orthographic /ˌɔːɹθəˈɡɹæfɪk/
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 smooth, select, edit.
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.