Shadowing Practice: At North Korea’s Border - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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(birds chirping) (gentle music playing) - I'm looking into North Korea for the first time in my life and it's kind of surreal.
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I'm up here on a rooftop, and I'm seeing two giant flag poles.
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(gentle music playing) I mean, that is a massive flag pole.
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You go over this wall, and you're not actually in North Korea yet.
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You're in a no man's land, a four-mile-thick demilitarized zone that effectively comprises the border.
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I came to this border because I want to understand this in a new way.
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I'm tired of watching this.
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- The intensifying showdown with North Korea.
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- The North Koreans are in no mood to talk.
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They're in the mood of testing and blowing things up.
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- Getting one very specific version fed to me about what this conflict is about.
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- Rogue regime (indistinct) - Nuclear testing is a big deal.
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- Another nuclear test at any time.
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- Who it's between, why it exists.
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- The missile that North Koreans launched is something the US has never seen before.
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- Kim's stockpile of nuclear weapons.
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- Capable of hitting the continental United States.
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- Instead I want to see it for myself, to talk to the people who live in South Korea's capital, a city of 10 million people that is 40 kilometers from this border.
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I hear there's a lot of bomb shelters and so I want to go see what those look like.
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So I want to show you this peculiar border, what it looks like, what it feels like, and most importantly, how it got here.
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(fast music playing) Not fed through western diplomacy, military policy and media coverage, but rather what it actually looks like on the ground.
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(fast music playing) (gentle music playing) I'm drowning in some of the coolest evidence I've ever touched in my life which are original telegrams between Stalin and Kim Il-Sung.
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I've got a ton of this stuff, and frankly, it's very, very useful for understanding this border, this line that divided the Korean Peninsula.
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What I first need to do is thank today's sponsor who made this ambitious video possible.
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I've loved it and I think you will too.
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So with that, let's get back to North Korea.
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This line, this peninsula, we've all heard something about it.
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I studied this line a lot in college and in grad school at the think tank I worked at.
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But for this story, I wanted to throw out all of that training, all of that perspective.
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I wanted to approach it with a new lens, one not steeped in the assumptions and biases of American foreign policy, media and military thinking.
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So let me show you my new perspective on how this line came to be.
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Korea was an independent, unified place until the early 1900s when Japan annexed it as part of their conquest of Asia.
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Then the world responded beating them back and crushing this growing empire.
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That's World War II.
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The winners of the war got together and decided that yes, we just liberated Korea from Japan.
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But no, they are not ready to be independent just yet.
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The two most powerful allies decided that they would each occupy half of the peninsula for up to five years.
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Then Koreans could have one independent country, this whole peninsula.
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Most Koreans, of course, hated this more colonizers using their peninsula as a military base, but the great powers didn't really care.
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So late one night in 1945, right before Japan surrendered, two US military leaders got together here in the Pentagon and pulled out this map.
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This map actually.
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This is a 1942 National Geographic map that these two military leaders used to split Korea.
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They eyeballed this peninsula and they proposed this line here at 38 North.
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It's like a latitude line.
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And surprisingly to them, the Soviets agreed.
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- 38 parallel border of North Korea.
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- With this line the Americans were trying to get Seoul, which was Korea's capital on their side of the line, which they did by just like 40 kilometers.
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Oh, and just to be clear here, this line, the 30th parallel wasn't some natural border.
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It wasn't a linguistic or cultural border.
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But again, the whole idea was that this was just going to be temporary.
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It's going to last five years.
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Two great powers dividing land with maps temporarily.
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What could go wrong?
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Okay, so what's the deal with the Soviet Union, and the United States in this moment?
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You have to remember that they were allies after World War II, because they had fought a common enemy banding together to crush the Nazi empire in Europe.
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And then the Soviets joined in over here in Asia kind of last second to help deal the final blows to the Japanese empire.
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So these two superpowers were friends.
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I mean, I have direct proof of this.
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Check out a picture of my grandpa in the late forties on the Korean peninsula.
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He's standing right up here on the border between the Soviet Union and Korea, and he's hanging out with the Soviet soldier with a big smile on his face.
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The Soviets and Americans were allies, they were friends, they had worked together here.
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But very quickly they started to realize how much they actually weren't friends and that they thought very differently about how the world should work.
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And in fact, now that other big empires were out of the way, the entire world was now a chessboard open for them to make their moves to ensure that their ideology would become the new way of the world.
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Yes, we want to give Korea back to the Koreans said, the Soviet Union and the United States, but will it be an American friendly capitalist society or a Soviet friendly communist society?
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Meanwhile, the local Koreans, at least most of them were hating all of this.
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But there was one Korean who was not hating it, the new leader of the Soviet backed North Kim Il-Sung, who was a war guy, he rose up as a fighter in China's communist revolution and was picked to then lead the communist part of Korea.
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Kim wanted to unite the peninsula under communism with force, but he couldn't do that without the blessing of his Soviet supporters, mainly this guy Joseph Stalin.
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And this is where the evidence we found gets pretty juicy.
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- Among communists.
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Kim is the last to maintain a personality cult.
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- Okay, check these out.
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These are telegrams and conversations between Joseph Stalin and Kim Il-Sung.
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I mean, this is like when you are looking at original conversations in the original text from these great leaders, which have since been declassified by the presidential archives in Moscow.
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You learn more from this than you do from any textbook or any master's degree because this is like the horse's mouth.
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This is what they were actually saying.
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You start to get the first insights into how the Cold War would start to play out.
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The logic, the calculations, the fears, the goals.
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Okay, so it's 1949.
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Kim Il-Sung immediately goes to Stalin asking for support and weapons to invade the south, to unite the peninsula under the communist flag.
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Not surprisingly Stalin is very interested in communism winning out on the Korean peninsula.
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But you read these conversations and you see that he's also kind of freaked out.
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The Americans are there, and a direct conflict with these two superpowers is a recipe for another global war.
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Plus China, which is another communist ally, is currently in a big civil war.
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They're not going to be able to help Kim out in his efforts.
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So Stalin basically says no.
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But then the next year, 1950 three big things change.
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(suspense music playing) Stalin sends a note to Kim saying he's quote, "ready to help him in this matter," tells him to come to Moscow.
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Thing number one, Stalin got intel from one of his spies in Washington that South Korea wasn't that important to the Americans.
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And if that there was an invasion, the Americans probably wouldn't do anything.
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US troops were leaving the peninsula.
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Thing number two, and this is a big freaking deal.
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Stalin says it right here, that quote, "the USSR now has the atomic bomb" ending, the US' atomic monopoly.
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That changes everything.
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And thing number three, and again, we see this in another conversation.
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Stalin says to Kim, in one of these meetings, the communist in China had just won their civil war.
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They control China now.
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They're not busy with the Civil War, and they'll be able to help with an invasion of South Korea.
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With these three major developments, Stalin now feels secure that the US won't come to "challenge the communists in Asia." It would be an easy victory.
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Oh, and at the end of all these conversations, Stalin is like, side note, we will support you, we will give you weapons, but we're not going to send troops.
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Go ask Mao for those, which is exactly what he did.
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So do you see what's happening here?
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This is like Cold War like crash course.
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It is spies.
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Prevailing mood is not to interfere in the US.
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It is global ideological alliances.
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China's victory is also important psychologically.
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And it is nuclear deterrence.
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The USSR now has the atomic bomb.
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The seeds of the Cold War are sprouting.
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- After three years of preparation, the Soviet Union and its North Korean propers were ready.
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Troops and military equipment poured down from the north.
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- So then early one morning in June of 1950, it happened some 75,000 soldiers from the north blast across this line, a line that two American military guys had drawn five years earlier.
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- June 25th, 1950, the communist strike.
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- And as Kim Il-Sung predicted, his troops quickly took over nearly the entire peninsula.
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But Stalin's calculation was wrong.
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Back in Washington, President Truman wasn't going to let the communist take over the Korean peninsula.
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- The future of civilization depends on what we do, on what we do now.
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- He got ready for war, bypassing Congress to prepare to get a bunch of UN nations together to come to Korea's rescue.
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- Like obstacles, United Nations forces drive on to the 38th parallel border of North Korea.
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- The details of what happened next are astounding, and frankly, I have no idea why I didn't learn these details in school.
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This was a brutal and long war, incredibly destructive.
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The entire peninsula was ripped apart, but an important detail for this story is what the US Air force did up here in the north.
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- The versatility of Air Forces was proved as never before.
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- With their new jet powered aircraft.
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They quickly established air superiority and dropped an unfathomable amount of explosives onto North Korea.
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Like it's hard to quantify, but to put it into perspective, the US Air Force dropped more bombs on North Korea in this three year period than they did during the entire Pacific Theater of World War II.
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- After identifying their targets, our planes swooped down like avenging, shadows of death and destruction.
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- The US Air Force targeted basically anything that moved, villages, towns, buildings, factories, and very importantly dams.
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- US carrier based planes take off, their target the vital hydroelectric power plants south of the Yalo River.
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- Unleashing a flood of water that washed away villages and killed the water supply to rice and other crops leading to an excruciatingly slow starvation of the people who started living in a network of underground caves to escape the bombardment of their country.
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- An advance whose purpose general Richway states is not to seize ground, but to wipe out the enemy.
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- In the end, 85% of all buildings in North Korea were destroyed.
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85%. - Communists have finally launched they're undeclared, all out war of conflict.
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- Now, wait, I know what you're thinking if you're familiar with this conflict, which is that this entire peninsula got slammed.
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It wasn't just the north, the north and the south.
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Seoul was turned to dust as well.
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This was a horrifying war.
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The reason I'm highlighting the utter destruction, and the aerial bombardment of the north is because what the US Air Force did here, this memory became a foundational memory for these people.
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It would go on to inform the rest of the country's history to this day.
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This memory would not fade.
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This horrific war went on for three years until 1953 when they signed a ceasefire freezing the frontline of the war where it was on the day they signed right here.
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The agreement was to take this line and put a two kilometer buffer on each side, declaring it a zone where no military activity can occur.
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A de-militarized zone.
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So where I'm standing now is the de-militarized zone, the DMZ.
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No military stuff allowed within this four kilometer thick buffer zone up here, North Korea, down here, South Korea, and these borders are some of the most fortified and militarized lines on our planet.
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After the war, the American military never went home, and since then, there have been tens of thousands of troops on this peninsula.
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Oh, and crucially, the US stored nuclear weapons on this peninsula during the Cold War, providing South Korea with the security they needed to turn into a thriving, advanced democracy, helping them build their country to move on from the trauma and pain of this war.
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And like I said earlier, North Korea did the opposite.
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They didn't move on.
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They stayed fixated on what happened during those three years of horror, continuing to build up anti-aircraft defenses, underground bunkers and tunnels.
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And over the course of decades, their Soviet supporters helped them learn the science of nuclear energy that by 2006 turned into nuclear weapons.
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North Korea becoming the eighth country to possess the most destructive weapons in the world.
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And as the Soviet Union collapsed and cut off all of its support, North Korea used this one weapon to stay in the conversation to ensure that they would never find themselves in this situation again.
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(gentle music playing) As one historian from Columbia University said.
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North Korea never forgot the lessons of their vulnerability from American airstrikes, and that the long term psychological effects of the war on the whole of North Korean society cannot be overestimated.
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The war against the United States more than any other single factor, gave North Koreans a collective sense of anxiety, and fear of outside threats that would continue long after the wars end.
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North Korea keeps this memory alive through horrific imagery.
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There's actually a museum just south of Pongy that's dedicated to the atrocities committed by the United States.
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You walk into this place and it is full of horrific imagery like paintings of Americans doing terrible things to North Koreans.
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I'm not going to show you any of this propaganda here because it is gruesome and horrifying.
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Oh and the target audience of this museum, Children.
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Every year young children make a pilgrimage to this museum to witness these images and affirm in their minds their hatred for the United States, and their desire for revenge Keeping alive this memory from the 1950s.
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The regime keeps this memory alive to keep their people scared and oppressed, constantly ready for war.
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Back in Seoul.
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Every few years, North Korea comes out and says that they are ready and willing to turn this city into a sea of fire or a pile of ashes, and frankly, they have the tools to do it.
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Up here on this border, there are over 10,000 big military guns pointed at this city.
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These guns have a range of over 60 kilometers, which put Seoul very much in range.
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Luckily, people in this city are ready.
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There are over 3000 bomb shelters sprinkled throughout Seoul, and that is what I'm looking for today.
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Luckily, the government made an app to show the people of Seoul where all of these bomb shelters are.
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Wait, this is the bomb shelter.
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I mean, I guess we're underground, but like barely.
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I got to talk to one of these shop owners, see what they think.
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Did you know that this was a bomb shelter,?
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I guess is the question.
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(speaking Korean) - That one was just a shopping mall.
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Come on, let's go somewhere else on the map.
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Wait, so the next bomb shelter on this map is a Starbucks.
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What? So did you know that there's a bomb shelter over?
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- I didn't know that. I've never noticed that.
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- So this is it.
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This is the bomb shelter.
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The basement of this apartment complex.
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Let's go visit another one I guess.
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We've reached another shelter.
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Now I'm really in a bomb shelter.
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Oh, actually it's just another parking garage.
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What is this?
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If we had to rush down here, is there water?
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Is there extra food?
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Is there some way to seal it off so that chemical weapons don't get down here? No.
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It's literally an unchanged parking garage.
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Not retrofitted, not special in any way.
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I'm starting to lose faith in the idea that these bomb shelters are anything but just normal city infrastructure that have signs on them that say, these are bomb shelters.
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Do these people not realize they live 40 kilometers from North Korea?
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- I'm making a video about sort of the American perspective, of North Korea, which is like.
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Have you ever thought through like a scenario of like what you would do in case of an attack?
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- Oh. - No.
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- You don't.
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(speaking Korean) - I've actually never thought about it.
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(speaking Korean) (speaking Korean) (speaking Korean) - We just hate the regime and oh my God.
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I can't do this.
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I hate pigeons so much.
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- Are you more afraid of pigeons than North Korea?
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- Yeah. Where were we?
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- We were talking about.
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As I told you, I've lived here for my whole life and I've seen them like testing nuclear weapons, but like we don't really care.
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- Now listen, let me just be frank, I'm slightly playing up my ignorance here.
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I kind of knew that this was the case, but I also kind of didn't, as an American who studied this conflict through an American foreign policy lens, my hunt for bomb shelters and the subsequent conversations with locals drove home just how little the people here actually think about North Korea.
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- I don't think I've ever met anyone in Korea who was like really worried about that.
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(speaking Korean) - Kim Jong-un doesn't do this to threaten South Korea.
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They do this to threaten us, the United States, the military that turned their country into dust in the 1950s, the country that they are technically still at war with.
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Back up here at the border, you can see what the conflict actually looks like today between north and south.
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There's occasional violence, but the conflict today is often more petty.
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Who can build the largest flag pole?
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Who can blast the loudest music at each other?
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North Korea comically building a fake city to look more prosperous and a competition of who can look the scariest.
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You realize that it's not actually scary or threatening to be here.
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If anything, it's just plain sad.
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It's sad to see 70 years of this standoff, this needless standoff that was created by powerful outsiders.
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And once again, what we see is that the people who share the same history, and culture and language, but are divided, continue to be the ones that suffer from this.
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(birds chirping) After my time in the DMZ, I decided to set aside the history, the bluster, the fear, just for a moment to experience this place.
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Not as an American taught to see this region purely in terms of conflict, but to experience it as the people here experience it.
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The people here in this city that is unrecognizable from the devastation of the 50s, a city that has moved on.
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It is a Saturday night here in Seoul South Korea, the sun is going down.
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I spent the night traversing this city, immersing myself in what it has to offer, from the nightclubs to barbecue, to small underground clubs, watching DJ competitions and sipping soju.
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Then to a street party in the middle of the night where a bunch of young people are protesting the forced eviction and planned demolition of this historic pub, One of Seoul's oldest institutions for beer and dried fish.
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They've been doing this every night for months.
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Yes, North Korea is 40 kilometers away.
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I'm very aware of that.
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There's a real threat here, a dangerous oppressive regime with powerful weapons.
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But the threat presents very differently for the people here, much differently than the fear that we feel an ocean away.
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I walked away from Korea with a much clearer understanding of this conflict.
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This conflict that was started by North Korea, fueled by Cold War dynamics and remains an active war between North Korea and the United States of America.
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(gentle music playing) Thank you for watching this video.
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I'm really looking forward to your thoughts.
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And once again, I want to thank the sponsor of today's video.
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I'm two weeks into my journey with CoPilot, this platform that allows me to have one on one interaction with a fitness coach.
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And I can tell you it is making a giant difference in just accountability.
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And I'm not alone in this, CoPilot clients are nine times more successful at sticking with their goals, and that's not surprising to me.
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So go click link in my description to get 14 days free with your own expert fitness and health coach.
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Thank you CoPilot for supporting this video.
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Thank you all for watching.
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I will see you in the next one.
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Okay. (gentle piano music playing)
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “At North Korea’s Border”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: Korea, Korean, peninsula. This video has 267 sentences and 3954 words to shadow. The speech runs for 25:24. The speaker talks at a natural 156 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 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
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| peninsula noun | /pəˈnɪn.sə.lə/ | A piece of land projecting into water from a larger land mass. |
| gentle adjective | /ˈd͡ʒɛntl̩/ | Tender and amiable; of a considerate or kindly disposition. |
| militarize verb | /ˈmɪ.lɪ.tə.ɹaɪz/ | To give a military character to something, such as government or organization. |
| horrific adjective | /həˈɹɪfɪk/ | Causing horror; horrifying. |
| threaten verb | /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/ | To make a threat against someone; to use threats. |
| atomic adjective | /əˈtɑː.mɪk/ | Of or relating to atoms; composed of atoms; monatomic. |
| workout noun | /ˈwɝk.aʊ̯t/ | An exercise session; a period of physical exercise. |
| frankly adverb | /fɹæŋkli/ | In a frank or candid manner, especially in a way that may seem too open, excessively honest, or slightly blunt. |
| ally noun | /ˈæl.aɪ/ | A person who co-operates with or helps another; an associate; a friend. |
| bombardment noun | /bɑmbɑɹdmənt/ | The act of bombing, especially towns or cities. |
| chirp verb | /t͡ʃɚp/ | To make a short, sharp, cheerful note, as of small birds or crickets; to chitter; to twitter. |
| horrify verb | /ˈhɒɹɪfaɪ/ | To cause to feel extreme apprehension or unease; to cause to experience horror. |
| kilometre noun | /kɪˈlɑmɪtəɹ/ | An SI unit of length equal to 10³ metres. Symbol: km |
| standoff noun | /ˈstændɔf/ | A device which maintains a fixed distance between two objects, especially between a surface and a sign or electrical wiring. |
| superpower noun | A sovereign state with dominant status on the globe and a very advanced military, especially the United States or formerly the Soviet Union. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| get together verb | To meet, to gather together, to congregate. | |
| take over verb | To assume control of something, such as a business or enterprise, and sometimes by force. | |
| back up verb | To move backwards, especially for a vehicle to do so. | |
| build up verb | To erect; to construct. | |
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). | |
| come out verb | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | To be discovered; to be revealed. |
| cut off verb | /ˌkʌt ˈɔf/ [ˌkɐɾ ˈɔf] | To remove by cutting. |
| do up verb | To fasten (a piece of clothing, etc.); to tighten (a nut etc.) |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- I'm tired of watching this.
- It shows me what I'm supposed to do.
- I've loved it and I think you will too.
- So do you see what's happening here?
- Did you know that this was a bomb shelter,?
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 | has never seen · I've ever touched · I've loved |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is focused · being implemented · was picked |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who live · life which are · Seoul, which was |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 61 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, I've, didn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/, eighth /eɪtθ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: crush /kɹʌʃ/, calculation /ˌkælkjuˈleɪʃn̩/, ambitious /æmˈbɪʃ.əs/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, assumption /əˈsʌm(p).ʃ(ə)n/
- Long words — get the stress right: peninsula /pəˈnɪn.sə.lə/, militarize /ˈmɪ.lɪ.tə.ɹaɪz/, kilometre /kɪˈlɑmɪtəɹ/, surprisingly /səˈpɹaɪzɪŋli/, importantly /ɪmˈpɔɹ.tənt.li/
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 peninsula, gentle, militarize.
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.