Shadowing Practice: Do we need to eat meat? | DW Documentary - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
1
Actually, we really didn't want a dog.
2
We just wanted to take a look, just a quick look.
3
Tessie was the smallest and the youngest and the weakest too.
4
And the breeder said, yes, this little one's always losing out.
5
Then he put her in my arms and she stopped crying.
6
Of course, my heart melted on the spot.
7
When Tessie joined the Neumeiers, she was only a few weeks old.
8
Weeks turned into months and months into years.
9
She grew up with the two children and discovered the world.
10
On special occasions, she wore a bow tie, but no trousers.
11
She went on holiday to the seaside, but never warmed to the water.
12
At night, she slept at the foot of the marital bed, and in the morning she sat at the breakfast table.
13
Over the years, the family photo albums filled up with happy memories.
14
The children grew up, and Tessie grew old.
15
Hey, little dreamer, where are you?
16
On Tessie's 14th birthday, Mrs. Neumeyer saw something was wrong with her.
17
Then the vet said, it's breast cancer.
18
And you're speechless at first.
19
Let's register.
20
Tessie needed an immediate operation.
21
You sense it, don't you?
22
Tessie, hang in there.
23
Every day in the veterinary hospital, Chief Veterinarian Rüdiger and his team fight for the lives of animals.
24
When you get a case where you give it your all, try everything and the animal ends up surviving, it's just a great feeling.
25
Countless lives have been saved in these rooms, but some have had to be terminated.
26
In the drawer there we have a big pack of Kleenex, and sometimes we need it ourselves.
27
The pets we share our homes with are our best friends and family members.
28
Each one is uniquely special, and we do anything to keep them happy.
29
We don't see this uniqueness in the animals we eat.
30
In the supermarket, we think of the meal they will make, not the individuals they once were.
31
We are champions of suppression.
32
How do we do it so well?
33
Imagine that you're eating a hamburger.
34
And as you're biting into this juicy burger, your dining companion says to you, actually, that hamburger is not made from cows.
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It's made from golden retrievers.
36
Chances are, what you just thought of as food, you now think of as a dead animal.
37
What you just felt was delicious, you now feel is disgusting.
38
And chances are, rather than continuing to eat the hamburger, you want to throw it away.
39
This is because carnism has not conditioned you to think of golden retrievers or dogs as edible.
40
Carnism is the term proposed by American psychologist Melanie Joy to describe our contradictory relationship with animals.
41
We tend to assume that only vegans and vegetarians follow a belief system.
42
But the only reason we may learn to eat pigs but not dogs, for example, is because we do follow a belief system when it comes to eating animals.
43
When eating animals is not a necessity for survival, which is true for many people in the world today,
44
people who cannot make their choices freely, who are economically disadvantaged, for example, can't make their choices freely but many people in the world today can make their choices freely.
45
When eating animals is not a necessity for survival, then it's a choice, and choices.. always stem from beliefs.
46
What we view as the truth is actually largely belief.
47
We believe what we read in our textbooks.
48
That doctors know how our bodies work.
49
And that physicists can explain why the moon doesn't fall from the sky.
50
But we've also learned such things as boys don't wear skirts.
51
women can't be astronauts, and that pigs are for eating.
52
We often accept uncritically what society and our parents teach us.
53
The older we get, the fewer naive questions we ask, and the more entrenched our views can become.
54
It started when I was a child, actually.
55
Like many people, I'm from the United States.
56
I grew up with a dog who I loved, like a family member.
57
And I also grew up eating meat, eggs, and dairy.
58
And I was always a person who cared about animals, like most people.
59
Yet I never thought about how strange it was
60
that I could pet my dog with one hand while I ate a pork chop with the other.
61
You know, a pork chop that had once been an animal who was at least as intelligent and sentient as my dog.
62
I just, I didn't make the connection between the meat on my plate and the animal it once was.
63
What happened was that in 1989, when I was 23 years old,
64
I ate a contaminated hamburger and I ended up on intravenous antibiotics in the hospital.
65
I was really, really sick.
66
And after that experience, I stopped eating meat just because I had been so sick that I was really disgusted by meat.
67
So to my knowledge, there wasn't any real ethical driver of that decision.
68
So basically, she became a vegetarian by accident.
69
But her new habits allowed her to open her eyes to the dark side of the meat industry
70
and to our own psychology.
71
What shocked me perhaps even more than what I was learning about animal agriculture was
72
that nobody I talked to about what I was learning was willing to hear what I had to say.
73
They would say things like, don't tell me that you'll ruin my meal.
74
Or they would call me a crazy, vegan, hippie propagandist.
75
And these were my friends and family.
76
These were people who were, you know, cared about animals.
77
They were people who certainly cared about justice, social justice.
78
They were people who were rational and compassionate, you know, just like myself.
79
Um, and so I became very curious as to why people just stop thinking
80
and feeling when it came to this issue of eating animals.
81
And this led me to do my doctoral dissertation on the psychology of eating animals.
82
My question wasn't really why people shouldn't eat animals.
83
My question was why do people eat animals?
84
This is where her research led her.
85
She wanted to understand the logic of the slaughter industry and the thinking of the people who work there.
86
People like Geralt Otto.
87
That's a great question.
88
Do I love animals?
89
To me, an animal welfare officer in a slaughterhouse.
90
I like working with animals, so yes, I have an affinity for them.
91
The Goldschmaus slaughterhouse is one of Germany's ten largest pig slaughterhouses.
92
We have hundreds of employees, and we slaughter around 35 ,000 animals here weekly.
93
The last hours in the lives of these hogs follow a clear, sober script.
94
The procedure here is for the animals to be unloaded via two ramps.
95
You can see them here on the left.
96
When they arrive at the slaughterhouse, the pigs weigh around 120 kilograms and are about six months old.
97
We have space for 900 animals animals.
98
That number is more than double the hourly slaughter capacity, so the animals actually have an hour to an hour and a half rest period.
99
That's important for the quality of the meat.
100
Stress has a negative effect on quality, and of course we want to deliver the best product." The pace at
101
which the pigs are killed is set by the assembly line in the neighboring meat -processing plant.
102
We anesthetize the animals with CO2 at a concentration of 92%.
103
It's a common procedure.
104
The animals are transported in a lift, a patanoster with five gondolas.
105
The pig in the gondola goes.. down into the CO2 atmosphere and is stunned.
106
The controversial thing about the CO2 stunning is the animal's defense reaction.
107
CO2, or carbonic acid, irritates the mucous membranes and the pig has difficulty breathing.
108
Footage taken by animal rights activists at another slaughterhouse shows how pigs suffer in a CO2 -stunning plant.
109
The rising CO2 content in the blood produces a feeling of suffocation.
110
That's why research is being done on other procedures,
111
but so far no practical alternative So the pigs will continue to be subjected to this procedure.
112
1 .7 million animals per year in this plant alone.
113
Afterwards, they have a maximum of 70 seconds to live.
114
Their throats are then cut and they bleed out.
115
The living creatures have turned into carcasses.
116
We've learned to believe that a pig is a pig and all pigs are the same.
117
Carnism teaches us to think of farmed animals as abstractions,
118
as lacking any individuality or personality of their own.
119
Yes, we can.
120
It's okay to eat animals.
121
Of course, we have to do it responsibly.
122
But then I believe it's acceptable to eat animals because of their high nutritional value.
123
We think of them as abstractions, and this makes it easier for us to support violence against them.
124
I think that everyone can and should be allowed to eat what they want.
125
It's a myth.
126
This is the belief in a hierarchy of moral worth, that certain individuals or groups are more worthy of moral consideration,
127
of being treated with respect, than others.
128
Of course, it's always difficult when the meat -eater gets lectured on what they should be doing.
129
Carnism is what's called a dominant belief system or ideology.
130
It is so widespread that its tenets, its teachings, are invisible.
131
They're woven through the very fabric of society.
132
They're embraced and maintained by all major social institutions, from the family to the state.
133
When you're born into a dominant belief system, you internalize it.
134
We learn to look at the world through the lens of carnism.
135
In her interviews with meat producers and meat eaters, the same patterns emerge over and over again, says Melanie Joy.
136
The way that we learn to justify eating animals is by learning to believe
137
that the myths of eating animals are the facts of eating animals.
138
And there's a wide mythology surrounding carnism,
139
but all of these carnistic myths fall under what I refer to as the three ends of justification.
140
Eating animals is normal, natural and necessary.
141
But isn't that exactly how it is?
142
Take natural for a start.
143
Aren't we humans carnivorous by nature?
144
From a purely biological viewpoint, humans are omnivores.
145
Historian Ilya Steffelbauer is researching the cultural history of meat.
146
But for the majority of our existence, we were primarily meat -eaters.
147
He has traced today's social issue back to the beginnings of humankind.
148
You can see it most clearly in our digestive tract, the construction of our intestines.
149
Unlike gorillas and chimpanzees, we're not really good at breaking down plant food with a low energy content, such as leaves and the like.
150
Our intestines' construction is tailored more to breaking down food that's already been pre -digested in some way.
151
This could be due to the use of fire, but it's even better at directly breaking down proteins and high -fat food.
152
Our ancestors probably had a similar diet to chimpanzees, consisting mainly of fruit, tubers and leaves.
153
But more than two million years ago, the savannah spread across Africa, and our ancestors left the forest.
154
Soon after, they lost their fur, and the naked apes evolved the astonishing ability to sweat more than any other animal.
155
According to the endurance -running hypothesis, sweating and nakedness are the result of our early desire for meat.
156
Imagine you are a large mammal in Africa.
157
It's very hot, it's very dry, there are very few water holes.
158
Your diet consists of grass and such like.
159
You have to eat constantly in order to consume enough grass for your energy needs.
160
Combine that with the water you need to survive in the savannah, and you've no time to spare.
161
That's the life of the big mammal.
162
And they overheat very quickly too.
163
But now these small mammals arrive on the scene, peculiar little monkeys, very energy efficient.
164
They don't overheat quickly, and what's more, they've come up with the idea that they don't have to depend on certain waterholes, but instead they carry their water around with them.
165
And all they have to do is to make sure that you, as a large, easily overheated mammal, don't get to rest.
166
They prevent you from drinking, from resting and from cooling down.
167
In a very short time, you die of dehydration.
168
So all our proto -human ancestors needed to do was to be incredibly annoying.
169
In the mid -20th century, researchers began to look closely at the few remaining hunter -gatherer societies.
170
Such as the Kong, here in the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa.
171
Although they no longer live in the Stone Age, just like the people back then, they eat what nature has to offer.
172
They don't plant anything or keep substantial reserves, but trust with each new day that they will find enough to eat.
173
Anthropologists observe the same phenomena across the world.
174
All these societies eat animals, sometimes covering up to 90 % of their energy needs with meat.
175
The food that was so important in the later diet of our sedentary farming era, all these carbohydrate -rich grains and tubers,
176
from wheat to potatoes if you like, they are virtually absent from the natural diet of these people.
177
For more than a million years, the diet of our ancestors remained largely unchanged.
178
Even when Homo sapiens emerged and spread across the continents, the world remained firmly in the hands of the hunter -gatherers, until around 14 ,000 years ago,
179
when a development in the Middle East changed everything, people became sedentary.
180
And then something very peculiar happened.
181
As long as they were nomadic, they could only carry a limited number of infants on their journeys
182
and a limited number of old people who were no longer fully mobile.
183
Well, practically all hunter -gatherer societies have mechanisms for keeping these ratios in functioning proportions, on the one hand by controlling their reproduction,
184
so not having more children than they can provide for, and in some cases by abandoning the elderly if they became an unmanageable burden.
185
When humans became sedentary, this wasn't necessary.
186
They no longer had a child once every four years, but once every two years.
187
And anyone who has paid attention in Matz knows what that means.
188
In a very short time, the population started to grow exponentially.
189
To feed the rapidly growing population, people started farming.
190
For the first time, they no longer just took from the environment what they happened to find, but intentionally grew their own food.
191
These people developed an incredible arsenal of agricultural technologies.
192
They domesticated all kinds of animals and plants, and they also started developing these plants.
193
They selectively bred crops and livestock, and they spread.
194
Crop farmers had an average dispersal rate of about 20 kilometers per generation.
195
So if you take a settlement of farmers, you'll find the next generation establish their own settlement about a day's walk away, at a distance of about 20 to 30 kilometers.
196
And if you trace this over the millennia, you have an accurate picture of the advance of farming.
197
During the Neolithic Revolution, people's diet also changed radically.
198
In a relatively short time, the 40, 50, 60 percent of meat eaten in the hunter -gatherer diet dropped
199
to 10 -15 percent of animal products consumed in the sedentary diet, if the farmers were lucky.
200
And even at an early stage, a very large population of the U .S.
201
The proportion of this wasn't meat, but animal by -products, eggs and milk.
202
The historian Ilya Steffenbauer has traced the status of meat from antiquity through the Middle Ages to modern times.
203
Meat remained throughout a rare but integral part of the diet, and at most times was cherished as a precious substance.
204
The poor ate bread, animals were sacrificed to the gods.
205
And that remained the case until the end of the 19th century, until the 20th century in many regions.
206
Here in Central Europe, in the German -speaking countries, it was quite the status quo till after the Second World War.
207
What do people live on then?
208
Mainly from their daily bread, so from carbohydrates of some kind.
209
Bread, noodles in the south, potatoes, dumplings, whatever it's always some kind of carbohydrate.
210
Anything else is extra.
211
Meat and vegetables made up a very small portion of the diet.
212
And that's why we're so greedy for meat.
213
It's not just our species history that makes us crave more meat.
214
In this long period of scarcity, meat became prestigious." to a prestige food.
215
150 years ago, the railroad spread across the United States, and the common diet was revolutionized once again.
216
Trains transported animals cheaply from the southern states to the hungry cities, and beef became a food for the masses.
217
The first modern slaughterhouse was built in Chicago.
218
We all know the story of Henry Ford and his automobile assembly line.
219
Henry Ford actually copied the assembly line principle from the slaughterhouses.
220
The first industrial production with a conveyor belt was not for putting a car together, but for taking a cow apart.
221
After the two world wars, what we now call the Western pattern diet, became more established in industrialized nations.
222
The post -war economic boom led to an explosion in European meat consumption.
223
And the problem that soon became apparent is
224
that we didn't compensate for this massive increase in meat consumption by adopting the rest of the hunter -gatherer diet.
225
Suddenly, we're eating much more meat, but we're still eating as many carbohydrates as before, just not enough vegetables.
226
And, well, we all know how that ends.
227
A look at the history of human evolution shows
228
that our living conditions determine our diet at least as much as our genes.
229
So how carnivorous are we?
230
The answer depends on how deeply we look into the past.
231
eating meat can be considered natural, but is it necessary?
232
And do we, like lions, have no choice?
233
What's your name?
234
Carina with a C.
235
Okay.
236
Nico Rittenau is a nutritionist, best -selling author and ardent vegan.
237
His books call for a fundamental change in our eating habits.
238
The current Western pattern diet is a disaster.
239
It provides too much of what is harmful in excess, and too little of the essential nutrients we need to survive.
240
We are overeating but undernourished.
241
But it's also not true that meat per se is unhealthy, as the media sometimes suggests.
242
Even if I'm personally vegan, I'm primarily a nutritionist, and the data does not show that all meat consumption isn't healthy.
243
Meat and other animal products are nutrient -rich foods when produced properly.
244
But Nico Retenau believes that we're no longer dependent on these nutrient -rich foods today.
245
In his cooking shows and lectures, he debunks common misconceptions.
246
Animal products don't monopolize certain nutrients.
247
We don't need meat, but the minerals in meat.
248
We don't need milk and dairy products, but the calcium and other nutrients from cheese and milk.
249
We don't need fish, but omega -3.
250
We don't need eggs, we need protein and choline.
251
We don't need animal products, we need the nutrients that are in the animal products." But the fact is,
252
throughout the history of our species, we have always eaten meat.
253
And most of us still find meat simply delicious.
254
Isn't that our body's way of telling us something?
255
Yes, no. It would be nice if nutritional deficiencies could be corrected by following our instincts.
256
So if we developed a preference for certain foods, it would be a sign we needed a couple of vitamins or minerals.
257
But in reality we are actually victims of our own preferences because although they're evolutionary and made sense in the past, they don't work in today's conditions.
258
We have a natural preference for salt, because salt, sodium, was rare in our ancestral diet.
259
But then we discovered table salt and put it in all our food for preservation and flavor enhancement.
260
So today it's excessive.
261
Our preference for salt, however, is strong as ever, and there's no stopping us when it comes to well -salted junk food and fast food.
262
We have an innate preference for sweet foods too, because in nature sweet -tasting ripe fruit is a good source of carbohydrates.
263
And our brain is carbohydrate -hungry.
264
But nowadays, this preference for quick -fix carbohydrates, for sweet tastes, is often our undoing.
265
And we eat far too much sweet food, because sugar is a cheap commodity that can be added to everything.
266
The same goes for other taste preferences we have.
267
So when people say we should eat more intuitively, I would say no, we should resist.
268
We should use our brains and not trust our good feelings so much.
269
In fact, today we have access to several alternative sources for the nutrients available in animal products.
270
You can find protein, for instance in soybeans, iron in lentils, calcium in spinach.
271
The most critical nutrient is vitamin B12.
272
It's essential to the maintenance of our nervous system.
273
A deficiency can lead to incurable damage.
274
B12 is found mainly in animal products, but animals don't produce it themselves.
275
It's a waste product of bacteria.
276
Ruminants, like cows and sheep, have these bacteria working for them in their largest stomach, or rumen.
277
In monkeys and apes, like us for example, B12 is produced in small quantities in the colon.
278
But because it can only be absorbed in the small intestine, the body has no access to it.
279
Gorillas have a pragmatic solution.
280
They eat their own feces from time to time.
281
But if that's not for you, and you wish to completely avoid animal products, you'll have to take B12 in tablet form.
282
This issue, taking B12 as a food supplement, is often presented as an obstacle or a counter -argument to veganism.
283
But it's misleading.
284
For one, those on a Western -pattern diet are already supplementing.
285
First of all, through iodine prophylaxis, We enrich our salt with iodine, because otherwise we wouldn't consume enough iodine.
286
And then in classical animal husbandry, animal feed is enriched with a whole range of vital substances.
287
The pigs, cows and chickens are supplied with all the extra minerals and vitamins they need for optimal growth.
288
Our argument is that we should simply remove the middle fish, cow or pig from the equation.
289
Your camera running, Urs?
290
Go ahead.
291
In his YouTube videos, Nico Rittenau explains how this can work with our own diets.
292
Ultimately, he says a healthy life does not depend on whether we eat animals.
293
What's important is the answer to two general questions.
294
Number one, what nutrients are essential for the survival of the human body?
295
And where can I get them?
296
And on the other hand, while I'm procuring these essential nutrients,
297
I can ensure that those substances which are bad for my health when excessive are simply not excessively supplied.
298
And if I can ensure these two things, I have an array of dietary options.
299
Vegan, vegetarian, western pattern diet, high carb, low carb, Atkins, ketogenic, whatever.
300
This is pigeonholing, of course.
301
But all these options can cover our nutrient requirements correctly.
302
Historically, we've been dependent on animal products for a very long time and in parts of the world we still are.
303
But today in the global north we can eat healthily without animal products.
304
Eating meat is not a necessity.
305
This leaves the third N – normal.
306
I'm already in the seventh generation.
307
The farm has been in family hands since 1855.
308
Florian Boucherie keeps ducks and geese on his farm in Perigord.
309
How normal you find what he does with them probably depends on where you are watching this program from, because Florian Boucherie is a proud producer of duck liver pâté.
310
As you can see, the neck pouch is filled right down to the bottom so in rearing.
311
It's of the utmost importance to prepare the animal well.
312
If the animal is well prepared, you risk nothing in the process.
313
So the pouch is full.
314
It's very stretchy, very elastic.
315
It's been banned in almost all European countries, including Germany.
316
In France, however, foie gras is part of the national heritage.
317
You can give points in different categories — for presentation, warmth, originality.
318
At the foie gras challenge in Paris, culinary talents from all over the country present their creations in front of a renowned jury.
319
My kitchen is a kitchen of memories.
320
It's inspired by my father.
321
Every Christmas he'd serve a dish known as foie gras with apple.
322
Although the tradition is increasingly criticized here too, people of all generations associate foie gras with the smell of childhood and the cozy Christmas feeling.
323
In meat -eating cultures around the world, people learn to classify a small handful of animals as edible
324
and all the rest they classify as inedible and often disgusting to consume.
325
And people around the world tend to view their own choices of
326
which animals to consume or which animals are edible as rational
327
and the choices of other cultures as irrational and often even offensive and disgusting.
328
What we consider normal always depends on what culture we grow up in
329
and at what time many things we reject today were once normal
330
so normality alone is not a useful value
331
when a behavior is no longer seen as a necessity then it becomes a choice
332
and once a behavior becomes a choice rather than a necessity it takes on an ethical dimension
333
that it didn't have in quite the same way before
334
So our typical answers to the question of why we eat
335
meat serve for the most part to deflect another uncomfortable question – is it morally right to eat animals?
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 335 sentences and 4267 words to shadow. The speech runs for 31:35. The speaker talks at a steady 135 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. Only 80% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| nutrient noun | /ˈnuː.tɹi.ənt/ | A source of nourishment, such as food, that can be metabolized by an organism to give energy and build tissue. |
| pig noun | /ˈpɪɡ/ | Any of several mammalian species of the family Suidae, having cloven hooves, bristles and a snout adapted for digging; especially the domesticated animal Sus… |
| belief noun | /bɪˈliːf/ | Mental acceptance of a claim as true. |
| preference noun | /ˈpɹɛf(ə)ɹ(ə)ns/ | The selection of one thing or person over others (with the main adposition being "for" in relation to the thing or person, but possibly also "of") |
| hunter noun | /ˈhʌntɚ/ | One who hunts game for sport or for food; a huntsman or huntswoman. |
| necessity noun | /nɪˈsɛsəti/ | The quality or state of being necessary, unavoidable, or absolutely requisite. |
| procedure noun | /pɹəˈsiː.d͡ʒə/ | A particular method for performing a task. |
| vegan noun | /ˈviːɡən/ | A person who does not eat, drink or otherwise consume any animal products |
| consume verb | /kənˈsum/ | To use up. |
| survival noun | /sɚˈvaɪ.vəl/ | The fact or act of surviving; continued existence or life. |
| consumption noun | /kənˈsʌmp.ʃən/ | The act of eating, drinking or using. |
| disgusting adjective | /dɪsˈɡʌstɪŋ/ | Causing disgust; repulsive; distasteful. |
| substance noun | /ˈsʌbstəns/ | Physical matter; material. |
| trace noun | /tɹeɪs/ | An act of tracing. |
| farmer noun | /ˈfɑɹ.mɚ/ | A person who works the land and/or who keeps livestock; anyone engaged in agriculture on a farm. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| break down verb | To stop functioning. | |
| grow up verb | To mature and become an adult. | |
| come up with verb | To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it. | |
| cool down verb | /kuːl ˈdaʊn/ | To become cooler; to be reduced in temperature. |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| fall under verb | To belong to for purposes of categorization. | |
| go ahead verb | /ˌɡoʊ əˈhɛd/ | To proceed with; to begin. |
| make up verb | /ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/ | To constitute, to compose. |
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 | have been saved · has not conditioned · we've also learned |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | have been saved · is not made · was really disgusted |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | survival, which is · people who cannot · person who cared |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 59 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, I'm, we're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: myth /mɪθ/, ethical /ˈɛθɪkəl/, worthy /ˈwɝ.ði/, breathe /bɹiːð/, seventh /ˈsɛvənθ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: consumption /kənˈsʌmp.ʃən/, delicious /dɪˈlɪ.ʃəs/, rational /ˈɹæʃ(ə)nəl/, nutritional /njuːˈtɹɪʃ.ə.nəl/, establish /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ/
- Long words — get the stress right: necessity /nɪˈsɛsəti/, primarily /ˈpɹaɪ.mə.ɹə.li/, psychology /saɪˈkɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/, historian /hɪˈstɔɹi.ən/, vegetarian /vɛ.d͡ʒɪˈtɛ.ɹi.ən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like nutrient, pig, belief.
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.