Shadowing Practice: Civil 3D course for beginners - Part 1 of 3 - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Hello and welcome to SourceCAD.

In this 3-part video series, Seth Cohen will take you through the basics of Civil 3D using a project-based approach.

Essentially, this 3-part video series is for you

if you are completely new to Civil 3D and want to get started right from scratch.

In this 3-part video series, you will learn the basics of Civil 3D while working on a road project.

If you want to learn with a project-based approach that explains everything right from scratch, then check the Civil 3D course on SourceCAD by Seth Cohen.

The link to that course is in the description of the video and in the pinned comment as well.

So with that, let's get started.

Hey everybody and welcome to SourceCAD.

In this three-part video series, I will be introducing you to Civil 3D.

These tutorial videos are for true beginners who have no knowledge of Civil 3D.

However, you should have some working knowledge of AutoCAD because Civil 3D runs on the AutoCAD engine.

The synopsis for this three-part series will be as follows.

First, we'll talk about the Civil 3D interface and how it leverages the AutoCAD interface.

We'll talk about settings and styles and how they are used to control everything of Civil 3D.

They control the way it looks and they control when they get created.

We'll also delve into a little bit of project management

so you can have an understanding of how to data reference and see Civil 3D objects in other files, similar to AutoCAD X referencing.

And we'll talk about alignments and profiles, we'll get into corridor modeling and all of that entails, and then we'll plot roadway projects.

Basically what we're going to do is we're going to create

a road by the end of this tutorial from beginning to end.

That's how powerful Civil 3D is.

First let's talk about the Civil 3D interface and how it relates to the AutoCAD interface.

So first of all, just like AutoCAD, you have workspaces.

So if I click on the bottom right here, you'll see that you have the standard AutoCAD drafting annotation,

3D modeling, but then you have these additional workspaces such as Civil 3D.

I'm in my own workspace, which I recommend that you should do the second you start Civil 3D.

That way you don't modify the existing one and you can always go back to it if you need to.

There's also this last one here called planning and analysis.

So with Civil 3D you get AutoCAD and you get Map3D pretty much full functionality which is really cool.

Civil 3D of course leverages the AutoCAD ribbon as you can see up here.

You have ribbon tabs just like AutoCAD.

You have the home tab, the insert tab, the annotate tab,

etc. But then you have panels on the bottom here and of course these are pretty much different than regular AutoCAD.

As you can see, you do have the draw and modify panel just like you do in AutoCAD, but they look a little bit different.

In fact, some of these are specific to Civil 3D type functionality, such as creating a line by deflection angle or bearing and distance,

etc. One of the other things about Civil 3D and the ribbon is that it is context sensitive.

You get some of that functionality with AutoCAD, such as when you have a hatch object that you pick, or when you go to a layout.

Civil 3D leverages the contextual ribbon tremendously.

In other words, if I select this alignment right here,

you'll notice that the ribbon becomes context sensitive and contains all of the tools you would expect to see for an alignment.

What's also really cool is it shows you the name of the object that you have selected.

It even tells you what that object is.

As you can see, this is a Love's Bypass Alignment.

If I press escape here and select a surface now, this is one of the contours of this surface,

you'll see now the context ribbon changes differently because I have a surface selected and it has surface specific tools.

It also tells you this is a tin surface and this is the name of the tin surface.

Again, if you ever want to know what an object actually is, simply select it and it'll tell you what it is.

These are alignment station and label groups.

The main interface into Civil 3D is the tool space palette.

Let me drag this out as you can see here.

All right, so this is just a regular AutoCAD palette but it is Civil 3D specific.

You will not see this in the regular AutoCAD engine.

I like to dock mine to the left and anchor it without auto hide.

That way I can see my Civil 3D objects at all times.

If you right click here, like any AutoCAD palette, you can anchor left.

And then if you hover over it, you can turn auto hide off like so.

This way it stays open and you can see all the data within the drawing.

So the tool space is categorized into many different tabs.

We have the prospector tab, the settings tab, the survey tab, and the toolbox tab.

Let's talk about the prospector tab for a second.

So the prospector tab has two sections.

You have the drawing section, which is right here, and you have the project management or data shortcut section, which is right here.

So if I expand the drawing section, this will show you everything that is inside your drawing.

Now, it may not be in this drawing.

In other words, it may be data referenced into the drawing, but it's inside the drawing nevertheless.

So if I expand surfaces, you'll see I have two objects in here.

What's great about the Toolspace Prospector tab is the fact that you interact with it by right clicking.

So if you right click on this object and choose zoom to, it will zoom directly to that object.

If let's say I don't see an object in the drawing, such as this eg or existing ground surface,

and I want to see it or change it or do something about it, I can right click and choose select.

Now it looks like nothing is selected, however it is selected because the ribbon updated up here to show you the surface specific tools.

This is a surface data reference and it's called EG.

So if I need to change this, which I do in this case, to a specific style to see it, right now this style is set to No Display.

One other thing to note about Civil 3D is it does

leverage the AutoCAD Properties palette for the most part with a lot of the properties

that you can change specific to Civil 3D.

So for instance, this is a Civil 3D style drop down.

This is using a style called No Display.

which is a quick little trick to shut something off without having to worry about what layer it's on, etc. If I, however, change this to one that actually shows triangles,

you'll now see that this is now showing the triangles as well as the border of the surface.

If I simply change this back to underscore no display, it shuts it off.

Don't forget to press escape.

It's still selected, as you can see by the ribbon.

So the prospector tab is categorized into the different object types that you can have inside your drawing.

So for instance, if I wanted to see what center lines I have in the drawing, I can expand this and I have all these center line alignments inside the file.

One of the other things that's really cool about the Prospector tab

or the Settings tab for that matter is

that it does show you these nice little icons inside the Prospector tab that tell you something.

So this icon on the bottom left part of the name that shows a little arrow

is telling me it's a data reference from some other drawing.

If I click on the surfaces collection, you'll see it's coming from this location here.

All right.

And that's the other cool thing about it.

This icon right here, this orange triangle is telling you it's being used by something in the drawing.

So if I were to right click on that entity and try and delete it, you'll notice there's no delete option because it's being used by something.

This is the corridor surface and it's being used by the alignments and profiles and everything else.

Now that doesn't mean you can't delete it.

What you can do if you want to do

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that is simply select it

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and then what I would do is press delete on the keyboard or erase and it would delete that.

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Now I'm not going to do that because obviously this is my actual design.

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So the prospector tab contains all of the entities inside your drawing and then this category right here,

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let's minus this one, is the project location.

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These are the available data shortcuts that I can bring into this file.

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To do so, we would simply select it and drag it.

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I already have it in here, so I'll press escape, but that's how you bring it in.

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It doesn't live in this file, it simply is available for you to use for modeling, to look at it in a profile view,

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etc. And that's how this is categorized.

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Let's talk about the settings tab of the tool space.

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The settings tab, as the name implies, is there for settings and styles.

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There are three levels of settings in the world of Civil 3D.

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You have drawing settings, feature settings, and command settings.

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The settings are all hierarchical.

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And what I mean by that is drawing is at the top of the list, then comes feature, and then comes command, and they can all be overridden depending on the level that they're at.

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So the drawing settings are simply here.

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If you right-click on the top part of the drawing name here, this is the drawing settings.

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The drawing settings contain, as the name implies, drawing-specific settings.

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So they start at the top of the list here.

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So the settings start here and then will proliferate throughout the additional settings, but you can override the settings above.

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So the feature settings can override the drawing settings, and the command settings can override both.

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So as you can see here, you define the coordinates, you can do things for transformation, you define what layers entities should go on when you create them.

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You can define the geometric abbreviations, such as the beginning of an alignment, such as the end of the alignment, so PC, PT, etc.

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And of course you have these ambient settings

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which work for things like what decimal place do you want to see for elevations or for coordinates, etc. Notice this arrow over here.

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This is telling you it's being overridden somewhere down the line by the other settings.

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It could be a feature setting or it could be a command setting.

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So feature settings are specific to the feature or the object type.

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In other words, a surface or an alignment or a profile or a profile view.

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So if I right click on the feature itself, I can go to the feature settings settings.

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Notice how this looks just like the ambient settings, except it has these additional categories specific to the feature.

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So if I want to set the default style for a surface when I create it, I would do it right here.

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Notice how this too is being overridden somewhere down the line by a command setting, which we'll get into in a second here.

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But as you can see, you can change, for instance, let's say for a surface, I want to see three decimal places.

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Well, as soon as I do that, notice how this toggles on and it tells you, hey, I'm overriding the drawing setting.

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All right, that's how this works.

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Let's cancel out of that.

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Then the last setting, which overrides all settings is the command settings.

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So if I expand down to the command, these are the true commands for the surface type.

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So if I typed in add surface contours, A-D-D-S-U-R-F, this actually would then start the command here.

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Now, of course, you're not going to do that.

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You're going to find the command that you pick in the interface because the commands are rather large.

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So if I want to override a specific command from the feature setting or the drawing setting,

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what I do is I right-click on the command and go to the command settings here.

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You'll notice there are some additional icons right here, which are specific to the command.

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So if I look at the surface creation, here's where I can tell it what the default name template is.

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But if I want to override this specific command style,

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I can by simply clicking on it over here and choosing a different style to use to override the ones above.

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You'll now notice this is now overriding the feature setting.

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And that's kind of how this works.

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Let's press cancel here.

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So as far as the styles and other things that are used by Civil 3D entities, you want to understand them.

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There are two types of styles.

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You have object styles.

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For instance, this surface is using an object style called Contours Major 5 Minor 1.

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Nothing magical happened.

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I created that style.

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So that style is there for me to use.

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However, if I want to see something different about the components within that object type, for instance, let's say I want to see this thing, how it flows.

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I have one here called company underscore arrows.

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Well, what that does is it shuts off the contours of the entity surface

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and turns on other things such as the surface arrows and the border, right?

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So this is a really nice option because it lets me see my surface to make sure that everything is draining properly.

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That's a really awesome feature of Civil 3D.

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Again, this is a dynamic modeling system.

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So the style is controlling how this entity gets displayed.

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So if I change it back to contours, 5 and 1, it is now showing the contours.

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Okay, so that's an object style.

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Now a label style is the other type of style that is used by Civil 3D.

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So this labeling of these contours is being controlled by this label line group here, this surface contour label group.

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If I go to the properties palette, these are the label styles that are being used, proposed major and proposed minor.

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Okay.

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And so this is how it's controlling the way this looks.

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It's the same thing for any entity within Civil 3D.

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For instance, this alignment, it says PT station, whatever.

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And then I have these ticks and this major station and these minor stations.

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These are label styles because this is a group of labels, you will see this is an alignment station label group.

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However, if I wanted to label, let's say, the surface elevation at a specific location, I could select the surface, go to the contextual ribbon,

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and pick the spot elevations.

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And then I'll just zoom in and click here.

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This is the elevation at this location.

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Now, of course, again, the cool thing about Civil 3D is it's a dynamic modeling system.

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If I move this label around, you will see the elevation changes automatically.

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If I copy regular AutoCAD copy command, and if I copy this label around,

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it will update to show the elevation of that location.

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Now, because this is an individual label, I can select it, and this is just one label that I would be editing, compared to this one here,

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which is a group label because it's specific to the group of the alignment.

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Just like this one here is specific to the group of the labeling of the contours.

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If I wanted to change an object or a label style, you have to think about how you would do it.

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It's not that hard.

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It's organized very nicely.

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So for instance, let's say I wanted to change this surface style.

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There are a couple ways to do it you could simply select it

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and then when you right click in space you get a context sensitive menu

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however if you wanted to know where

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that actual surface style is you simply expand the surface category

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and here are your surface styles this shortcut right here is telling you it's being used somewhere in the drawing

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or with another setting somewhere else so i would simply right click on here

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and choose edit and this is the object style dialog box this will be different for an alignment, for a profile, per a profile view,

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etc. So as you can see, I can turn on and off different components of the object itself.

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For instance, I could turn the triangles on for this one, click OK, and now I'm seeing the triangles.

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If I undo that with the undo command, it undoes it just like a regular AutoCAD command.

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Now, label styles are also stored in the settings tab and you just have to think about how they work.

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So I want to change this label style for this contour.

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So if I expand label styles, here's the contour category and this was proposed minor.

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So I'll go ahead and double click it.

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I want to get rid of that decimal place because I don't need the additional decimal.

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I'll click over here in the contents category and I'll click here and notice how it's showing your precision of 0.1.

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So I'll simply click here and change this to that click the arrow, click OK, OK.

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The great thing about Civil 3D, any label style using that will automatically update with that style.

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That's the cool thing about Civil 3D.

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The entire engine is completely dynamic.

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If we go to the survey tab here, we're not going to talk about this in great detail, but I'll just drag this in here.

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So this opens up a survey database.

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If you deal with survey, there's full-blown survey functionality in Civil 3D.

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If I drag this survey database entry in here, you'll notice that what this automates is points, line work, you name it,

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can be completely automated in the survey tab with the survey tool space.

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As you can see, if I zoom in, all this line work just got created automatically.

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I have utility poles with descriptions automatically.

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So Civil 3D has full-blown survey functionality that could automate pretty much everything.

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Lastly here, the toolbox is used for reporting on entities as well as miscellaneous tools

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that may be added with a service pack and so on.

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For instance, to export to a KML file, you simply expand export KML,

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you double click it, and then you can go through the wizard here to export to KML, which will open up your design in Google Earth, which is fantastic functionality.

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It allows you to see your job in the real world with real context.

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This ends part one.

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I look forward to seeing you in part two.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “Civil 3D course for beginners - Part 1 of 3”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: setting, Civil, style, surface, drawing. This video has 227 sentences and 3265 words to shadow. The speech runs for 18:25. The speaker talks at a natural 177 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 82% 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
alignment noun	/əˈlaɪn.mənt/	An arrangement of items in a line.
override verb	/oʊ.vɚˈɹaɪd/	To ride across or beyond something.
contour noun	/ˈkɒntɔː/	An outline, boundary or border, usually of curved shape.
ribbon noun	/ˈɹɪbən/	A long, narrow strip of material used for decoration of clothing or the hair or gift wrapping.
prospector noun	/ˈpɹɑsˌpɛktɚ/	A person who explores or prospects an area in search of mineral deposits, such as gold.
functionality noun		The ability to do a task, performance, or execution; a set of functions that something is able or equipped to perform.
elevation noun	/ˌɛlɪˈveɪʃn̩/	The act of raising from a lower place, condition, or quality to a higher; said of material things, persons, the mind, the voice, etc.
palette noun	/ˈpælɪt/	A thin board on which a painter lays and mixes colours.
triangle noun	/ˈtɹaɪˌæŋɡəl/	A polygon with three sides and three angles.
decimal noun	/ˈdɛs.ɪ.məl/	A number expressed in the base-ten system, (particularly) a fractional numeral written in this system.
zoom verb	/zuːm/	To move fast with a humming noise.
leverage noun	/ˈlɛv.(ə.)ɹɪd͡ʒ/	A force compounded by means of a lever rotating around a pivot.
automate verb	/ˈɔ.təˌmeɪt/	To replace or enhance human labor with machines.
categorize verb	/ˈkætɪɡəˌɹaɪz/	To assign a category; to divide into classes.
shortcut noun	/ˈʃɔːtkʌt/	A path between two points that is faster than the commonly used paths.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
open up verb		To open.
drop down verb		To sail, move, or row down a coast, or down a river to the sea.
go ahead verb	/ˌɡoʊ əˈhɛd/	To proceed with; to begin.
go back to verb		To stem from; to originate in.
go through verb		To travel from one end of something to the other.
look forward to verb		To anticipate, expect, or wait for, especially with a feeling of approval or pleasure; to be excited or eager to.
shut off verb		To stop or turn off by closing something, such as a valve.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	if I expand surfaces, you'll see
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	is categorized · is selected · is set
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	functionality which is · section, which is · here, which are

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 42 contractions and reduced forms, such as you'll, I'll, we'll. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: elevation /ˌɛlɪˈveɪʃn̩/, shortcut /ˈʃɔːtkʌt/, abbreviation /əˌbɹi.viˈeɪ.ʃn̩/, annotation /ˌæn.əˈteɪ.ʃən/, deflection /dəˈflɛkʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: categorize /ˈkætɪɡəˌɹaɪz/, coordinate /koʊˈɔɹ.dəˌneɪt/, automobile /ˈɔː.tə.məˌbil/, abbreviation /əˌbɹi.viˈeɪ.ʃn̩/, annotation /ˌæn.əˈteɪ.ʃən/

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 alignment, override, contour.

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.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: Civil 3D course for beginners - Part 1 of 3 - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?