Shadowing Practice: English Listening Podcast - Reality TV - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Welcome to the Listening Time Podcast.

Hey everybody, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 184 of the Listening Time Podcast.

I hope you're doing great today.

I hope that you're ready to practice your English with another episode and remember that you have the transcript

for all of these episodes for free.

Each transcript is in the description below each episode.

I'm mentioning that because many people still ask me where the transcripts are.

So the transcript is down below.

It's for free.

So in today's episode, we're going to talk about reality TV.

Okay, so reality TV refers to television programs that aren't scripted.

It's not like it's a show with actors and they're saying their lines.

No, it's just real people,

but there are cameras recording and these aren't actors, right?

This is reality TV.

So I think that most reality TV today is probably not very good.

Some people would even say that it's trash.

When you say that something is trash, you're saying that it's horrible.

Okay.

So I know there's a lot of reality TV today that is trash that isn't good.

But when I was growing up, when I was a kid, there were some reality TV shows that I really enjoyed.

And so I thought it would be fun to talk about those shows in today's episode.

I'll try to explain how these shows worked and I'll talk about why I liked them.

I don't watch any of these shows nowadays, and I don't watch reality TV nowadays,

but I used to really like these shows in the past, so I'm gonna have fun talking about these different shows,

and I hope that you find this episode interesting as well.

And I want to encourage you to use my advanced episodes

if you haven't done so already so that you can practice listening to real English spoken fast.

So the link to sign up is down below and the link to my U.S.

Conversations podcast is also down below.

In that podcast, I talk to native speakers from around the country about all kinds of different topics.

It's a lot of fun.

You learn a lot about the U.S and the different states and cities,

and it's great practice for your listening because it gives you the opportunity to listen to two people talking at normal speed.

That's a skill that you'll need to develop at some point So why not use my U.S.

Conversations podcast to start practicing with that?

The link is down below, like I mentioned Alright, let's get started Are your ears ready?

You know what time it is It's listening time Okay,

let me talk about some different reality TV shows that I used to really like.

So first, I want to talk about Survivor.

For me, Survivor is the greatest reality TV show of all time.

Some people might disagree with me about that.

I'm sure many people would, but I think a lot of people would also agree with me about this.

And I think Survivor has really influenced other reality TV shows,

and it has inspired other types of reality TV shows.

And I think that it's still going on now.

It's been going on for many years and this was my favorite reality TV show.

I'll talk a little bit about it.

Let me try to explain how it works.

This will be good practice for your listening because I'm going to be describing something in detail here.

So in the show Survivor,

people are taken to an island or to some faraway country,

and they have to survive on this island.

But it's not a game about surviving, really.

That's part of the game.

But really, it's a competition.

So these people are divided into different tribes at first,

and they have to work together with their tribe to build a shelter.

A shelter refers to some place where you can go inside

and sleep and be safe from the rain and all of that, right?

That's shelter.

So they have to work together to build a shelter,

to make a fire, to find food, all of that stuff.

But they also have to compete against the other tribe or the other tribes,

depending on how many tribes there are.

They have to compete with them in these physical competitions.

Sometimes they're also mental as well, not just physical.

And when they win, they get different rewards or they get immunity.

So immunity refers to the fact that if that tribe wins the challenge,

then they don't have to go to what is called tribal council.

At tribal council, the losing tribe has to vote out one of the people.

They have to kick them off the island, basically, and that person goes home.

So if one tribe loses, then they have to vote out one of the people in their tribe.

And this is where it gets really interesting.

the social and strategic aspect of the game.

So people have to vote out one of their tribe members

and so they have to strategize and talk to other people and decide who is the best person to vote out.

They might vote someone out because they're not very strong in the different challenges,

so they don't want them on the tribe anymore.

Or they might vote someone out because they don't like them, they don't like their personality.

Or they might also vote someone out for strategic reasons.

They think that the other person is a good strategic player,

and so they want them gone because that other person is a threat to them.

So there are different reasons why people might vote someone out.

And then eventually the different tribes, they merge, meaning they combine together.

They merge into just one tribe and then all of the challenges become individual or most of the challenges become individual.

So it's like there's only one winner,

one single person who wins immunity and then everyone goes to tribal council and they have to vote someone out.

So this continues until the end of the game when there are just two or three people left.

And then what happens is there are certain people on the jury.

The jury in Survivor is comprised of maybe the last nine

or ten or however many people who were voted out of the game.

and that jury gets to vote on who they want to win the game.

And this is really interesting because maybe someone was really good in the competitions and was really strategic in the game,

but the jury just doesn't like them.

So they don't vote for that person.

So it's pretty interesting because these people that are still in the game and trying to win,

they have to convince the jury to vote for them.

It's like when you go to court and you try to convince people

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that you're innocent or the other person is guilty or whatever.

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It's kind of like that.

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So in the end, the jury votes on a winner, and of course the person with the most votes wins.

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So hopefully you were able to follow that.

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Like I said, that was good practice for your listening.

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I won't go into that much detail with these other shows,

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but I wanted to talk about Survivor in detail because it was my favorite show,

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and I thought I would give you a little bit of complicated listening practice with that one.

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But yeah, that is Survivor.

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Now let me talk about American Idol.

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Some of you might be familiar with this show.

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I watched this show with my family when I was a kid, and I really liked it.

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There were some parts that weren't as interesting for me, but there was one aspect,

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one part of this show in particular that I loved,

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and that was like the auditions at the very beginning of the show.

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So basically at these auditions, people would go to sing

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in front of three judges and they tried to do their best

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and then hopefully the judges would tell them that they were accepted into the competition.

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So these auditions were super entertaining because they didn't only include the good auditions in this show.

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They also included the really bad ones,

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and it was always hilarious to watch these really bad singers try to impress the judges with their horrible singing.

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This was always really funny.

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Sometimes it was like too embarrassing to even watch, but overall I loved that part of the show.

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I loved to see these different auditions.

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I liked watching the good people as well, but I really liked watching the bad singers.

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It was always really entertaining.

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So I liked that part of the show.

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I also watched the competition afterwards where they would sing and people would be eliminated.

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And I liked that too.

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But really, after the audition part of the show, I would sometimes lose a little bit of interest.

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but American Idol was a phenomenon in the U.S in the past.

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A lot of people watched this show.

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I think Survivor and American Idol were two of the most popular reality shows ever in the U.S.

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Many people watched these shows.

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And some of the winners of American Idol actually became well-known artists afterwards, right?

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So some people that won this competition went on to have a great career as a famous singer or whatever.

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So American Idol helped propel some people into great careers afterwards.

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When someone is propelled, it means that they're pushed,

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they're given this momentum or push somewhere.

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So American Idol was a huge show in the past, and I watched it as a kid.

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Another reality TV show that I watched was Fear Factor.

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So Fear Factor was a show where people would compete doing things that were really scary,

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things that a normal person would never want to do or would be really scared to do.

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So they had to do these different stunts.

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Stunts are like these different activities or movements that you do that are dangerous or scary.

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So they had to do these different stunts.

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They had to do things that were really intimidating, scary.

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But really, the best part of this show, I think almost everyone would agree.

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The best part of this show was that one of the competitions would usually involve something really disgusting,

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like eating certain disgusting things, like cockroaches and things like that.

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And of course, this is awful.

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It's disgusting.

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I don't know why this is so entertaining.

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Just talking about it makes me feel a little embarrassed that I thought this was so fun to watch as a kid.

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But when I was a kid, I loved watching them do these horrible,

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disgusting things like eating cockroaches or they would lie down in some

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container and then someone would pour spiders all over them or something.

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Things like that.

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Whenever it involved insects and spiders and animals and things like that,

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that was always the funnest part of this show.

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For me, that would be the worst part about competing on this show.

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none of the other stuff is

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that horrible for me personally like I don't have an issue with heights

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so if I had to go up to some very high place

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and jump to another place that's very high

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that wouldn't be as bad for me as these horrible gross challenges with these different bugs and things like that,

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snakes and all of that kind of stuff.

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That would be the worst part for me if I had to compete in this challenge.

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But yeah, Fear Factor was a pretty big show when I was growing up.

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And the host of Fear Factor was Joe Rogan.

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Some of you might be familiar with Joe Rogan.

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He has one of the biggest podcasts in the world.

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It's probably the biggest one that's not put out by some big company or whatever,

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but he has a huge podcast, so many people know who he is because of his podcast,

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but I first learned about Joe Rogan from Fear Factor.

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He was the host of that show.

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So that's another one that I used to watch.

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And another show that was really big when I was a kid,

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again, this is up there with Survivor and American Idol in terms of like the most famous,

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the most watched reality TV shows of all time probably.

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And that is Who Wants to Be a millionaire.

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So this was a show that involved answering different questions.

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You would start with the easier questions,

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and then the questions would get harder and harder as the game went on.

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and if you were able to survive all the way to the last question and answer it correctly,

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you would win a million dollars.

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So this show was really about your knowledge.

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So if you were able to compete on this show, you had to use your brains,

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your knowledge to answer these questions.

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So the questions would always be multiple choice.

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There would be four options that you could choose from.

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And everyone that competed on the show would always get three lifelines, as they were called.

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These lifelines were like some type of help that would help them if they didn't know the answer to a question.

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So they had these different lifelines that would help them,

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but once they used all of those three lifelines, then they didn't have any more help,

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and they just had to try to answer the question.

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And one interesting part of this show was that each question was worth a certain amount of money.

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I don't remember the amounts, but for example, it might be that the first question was worth $10.

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If you answer that right, then you have $10.

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And then the next question was worth $50.

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If you answer that right, then now you have $50.

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It was like that.

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So at any point in this show, in this game, so to say,

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the person could say, you know what?

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I don't know the answer to this question.

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And so I want to stop right here and just take the money

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that I've already earned because maybe they've already earned $10,000 from their questions so far.

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And so they can quit right there and then take that $10,000 and leave.

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And they would do this sometimes because if you get the question wrong,

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then you lose a bunch of your money.

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So there were certain thresholds that once you passed them,

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like maybe the $500 question, then even if you get one of the answers wrong,

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you're still going to leave with $500.

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So there were, I forget how many,

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there were a couple, maybe two or three of these different thresholds that once you get there,

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then maybe you feel like you can just try to guess even

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if you don't know a certain question because you know that you'll still win $500 or $10,000 or whatever.

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But the higher you get, the more money is on the line.

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When something is on the line, this means that it's at risk, right?

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You can win it or you can lose it, right?

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So once you reached a higher level, maybe you didn't want to take the risk of losing half the money

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that you already have because it's tens of thousands of dollars, right?

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So some people would just quit so that they didn't lose a bunch of the money they had already earned.

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But some people went in with the goal of becoming a millionaire and they wanted to make it to the end.

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And I remember watching one person win the million dollars.

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I think it was the only time I saw that live and it was super exciting.

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It was really fun to watch that.

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But the vast majority of people on that show don't make it to the million dollar question.

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But that show was really fun to watch.

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I really liked it when I was growing up.

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And I think that, like I said, it was one of the most popular shows, one of the most popular reality TV shows.

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And lastly, I just wanted to mention all of those cooking shows,

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those reality cooking shows, because nowadays those are some of the most popular reality TV programs,

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MasterChef and all of those types of shows.

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I was never a huge fan of those shows.

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However, I used to really like watching those shows while I was eating.

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I don't know if you have done the same.

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I used to turn on those shows when I was eating breakfast

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because it was so satisfying to eat food when I was watching this show where they would prepare delicious food or whatever.

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For some reason, it made my breakfast taste better.

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So even though those weren't my favorite shows growing up,

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I did like to watch them while I was eating.

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I like to do that at the same time when I was eating breakfast, for example.

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So I wanted to include that here.

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But really, those other four shows were four of my favorite reality TV shows when I was growing up.

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All right, I hope this episode was interesting for you.

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It might have been a little harder than my other episodes because I was describing shows in detail,

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but I would encourage you to re-listen to this episode,

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repeat it again, use the transcript if you need it, and try to understand everything, okay?

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And remember that you can start using my advanced podcast episodes to practice with real English spoken fast.

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The link is down below.

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And you can use my U.S.

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Conversations podcast to practice listening to conversations that two native speakers have at normal speed.

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The link to that is also down below.

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And please give this podcast a five-star rating and write a review if you can.

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All right, thank you so much for listening to this episode, and I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This B1 speaking lesson is built on the video “English Listening Podcast - Reality TV”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: reality, episode, vote, tribe, listening. This video has 255 sentences and 3033 words to shadow. The speech runs for 26:28. The speaker talks at a steady 115 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 88% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.

Key vocabulary in this video

The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
podcast noun	/ˈpɑdˌkæst/	A program, especially an audio program, produced on a regular basis, delivered over the Internet in a compressed digital format and designed for playback on…
audition noun	/ɑˈdɪʃən/	A performance, by an aspiring performer, to demonstrate suitability or talent.
transcript noun	/ˈtɹæn.skɹɪpt/	Something which has been transcribed; a writing or composition consisting of the same words as the original; a written copy.
lifeline noun	/ˈlaɪfˌlaɪn/	A line to which a drowning or falling victim may cling.
disgusting adjective	/dɪsˈɡʌstɪŋ/	Causing disgust; repulsive; distasteful.
shelter noun	/ˈʃɛltə/	A place where a person or animal may find protection from the elements (especially rain, storms, or cold) sometimes as a place to sleep (such as a cave).
entertain verb	/ˌɛntəˈteɪn/	To amuse (someone); to engage the attention of agreeably.
stunt noun	/stʌnt/	A daring or dangerous feat, often involving the display of gymnastic skills.
immunity noun	/ɪˈmjuːnəti/	Protective resistance against disease.
tribal adjective	/ˈtɹaɪbəl/	Of or relating to tribes.
nowadays adverb	/ˈnaʊ.ə.deɪz/	At the present time; in the current era.
propel verb	/pɹəˈpɛl/	To provide an impetus for motion or physical action; to cause to move in a certain direction; to drive or push forward.
millionaire noun	/ˌmɪl.i.əˈnɛə(ɹ)/	Somebody whose wealth is at least one million (10⁶) currency units (usually understood to exclude holders of hyperinflated currencies).
merge verb	/mɝd͡ʒ/	To combine into a whole.
threshold noun	/ˈθɹɛʃ(h)oʊld/	The lowermost part of a doorway that one crosses to enter; a sill.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
grow up verb	To mature and become an adult.
go in with verb	To commit to something with; to partner with.
put out verb	To blind (eyes).
sign up verb	To add a name to the list of people who are participating in something.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

I hope you're doing great today.
I'll talk a little bit about it.
I don't know why this is so entertaining.
I don't know the answer to this question.
I don't know if you have done the same.

Grammar in this video

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

Structure	In the video
“Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true	used to really like · used to watch · used to turn
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	aren't scripted · are taken · are divided
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	haven't done · has really influenced · has inspired
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	person who wins · people who were

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 53 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, you're, didn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: audition /ɑˈdɪʃən/, shelter /ˈʃɛltə/, threshold /ˈθɹɛʃ(h)oʊld/
Long words — get the stress right: immunity /ɪˈmjuːnəti/, millionaire /ˌmɪl.i.əˈnɛə(ɹ)/, intimidate /ɪnˈtɪmɪdeɪt/, momentum /ˌmə(ʊ)ˈmɛntəm/, phenomenon /fəˈnɒm.ɪ.nən/

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 podcast, audition, transcript.

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: English Listening Podcast - Reality TV - 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

Sentences worth repeating

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?