Shadowing Practice: Fluent Forever - Learn English Speaking with Video

Here's a true story.

Over 10 years ago, I was in a bookstore.

Remember those?

And I was just browsing the language shelves.

Because, of course I was.

And I see this book called Fluent Forever.

Now, even in 2014, there were YouTube polyglot grifters.

In fact, that was probably their apogee.

And even then, I was skeptical of outrageous claims like learning a language in three months.

So I pick up this book, ready to just rip it apart.

I was expecting a mix of linguistic naivete over confidence and just general confidence man pablum.

I open it to a random page

and he's talking about how important it is to learn the sounds of your target language

and how the international phonetic alphabet can actually help you do that.

Okay, I think.

Even the con men have to have a nugget of truth to give legitimacy to their lies

but surely there's something to tear apart here.

So I flipped to another page, and it's a great example of how to think about syntax and morphology in a useful way.

Okay, fine.

But then when I flip the page, something I've never seen before.

Surely this will be where I catch them.

But actually, wait a minute, this is really good.

Long story short, I bought the book, and it had a pretty strong effect on how I think about language learning.

So imagine my reaction

when I get an email out of the blue offering me a free copy of the updated second edition.

It'd be nice if you gave it a review, but there's no strings attached.

I was curious what updates there were and curious to revisit it 10 years and a PhD in linguistics later.

And it turns out it's still really good.

In fact, I had to wait to make this video, not just because I was making a failed foray into ASMR for an audience that hates ASMR even more than I do,

but also because I lent the book to a friend who was toying with the idea of revisiting their Spanish.

So today I'm going to talk about what I got out of Fluent Forever in 2014, what's different and interesting in the new edition,

and of course what Gabriel Weiner gets right and what he maybe gets a little wrong.

If you're new to the channel, I'm Dr. Taylor Jones.

I have a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, and I love learning languages and sharing the insights of linguistics.

Today, instead of debunking hyperpolyglot's ridiculous claims, we're going to see what one polyglot does right, and what we can learn from him.

I'm Dr. Taylor Jones, and this is Language Jones.

Perhaps surprisingly, this video is not sponsored, but I do want to give a special thanks to Jonathan

at Penguin Random House's Harmony Books imprint for thinking of me and for sending me the new edition.

I'd been meaning to revisit the original book, and this gave me the motivation to revisit it and some new content.

So who is Gabriel Weiner?

Honestly, if you read the preface to the new edition, and I won't post spoilers here, it seems like he's also been asking that question a lot lately.

Seriously, read the prefaces and acknowledgements and forewords to things if you want to piece together some hot DAS.

Gabriel, I'm happy for you and it sounds like you had a hell of a journey.

Anyway, for our purposes, what you need to know is

that Weiner was an aspiring opera singer who had failed at language learning in the classroom

but caught the language bug with an experience at Middlebury, the famous language school where you take a pledge to speak nothing

but your target language for a few months and you live in residence and they kick you out if you slip up.

He tells a great story in his book about applying for the wrong level in French and faking his way in.

Of course he realized

that part of his cramming to fake learning was actually just

making use of more effective methods with a lot of motivation and a specific goal, but I digress.

He became obsessed with learning effectively and did a ton of research, like actual research, and used himself as a language learning guinea pig.

Now, a brief note here is important.

Being motivated to study lots of languages

and even having success achieving a high level in those languages does not mean

that you know anything about how to teach those languages or even how to succeed at effective and quick learning.

Most of the hyperpolyglots I see on YouTube have succeeded to the extent that they have, despite themselves, and they peddle bad advice.

So that's basically what I was expecting the first time I picked up this book.

But instead, what I got was somebody who, when he wrote about linguistics, wrote knowledgeably and correctly.

When he talked about learning and memory, he drew on current research, and he put it together in a way

that made connections I hadn't yet made on how to actually apply the linguistic side of things

and the learning and memory side of things to efficiently effectively learn.

Now this video is not sponsored but I can say

that the original book was fantastic and the new edition is also great, clearly expanded, and was a blast to read.

If you want to order a copy, I will have a link in the description.

So I'm not going to go over all of it because that would be like a five -hour video.

But I will tell you some key points and some things

that surprised me and that I have added to my language learning routines.

And if you want more, check out his stuff and maybe buy the book.

His main argument basically boils down to three things that you didn't really need Gabriel Weiner to tell you.

Learn sounds first, don't translate, and use spaced repetition software.

But there's a lot to unpack in that alone, and the book itself covers so much more.

And for what it's worth, he's part of the reason that those three things feel obvious to people interested in language learning and on YouTube right now.

Let's unpack those three quickly, though.

Languages are spoken, first and foremost.

We're bracketing sign modalities here.

So sounds are the building blocks.

Learning the sounds of your target language first and using all

and only the sounds of your target language is a tremendous piece of advice.

It will give you a good accent.

It will help your listening comprehension.

It will help prevent mixing up similar languages like Spanish and French, because while a lot of the words look similar on the page,

under the hood, they're totally different.

And the sounds are the building blocks of morphemes and in turn words, phrases, and sentences.

Morphological and syntactic patterns that could be confusing are just not

when you start with the sounds and get a handle on what's actually going on.

Similarly, don't translate seems like either obvious advice or completely impossible and unhinged when you're first starting out.

But the idea is basically just to map those sounds that you've learned to concepts, ideally circumventing the process of translating through your L1.

The benefits are well documented and include faster comprehension, recall, and production.

And more importantly, you start to train both phonological and semantic priming in line with your target language.

He gives an example in the book of a textbook claiming girl in English is девушка in Russian.

Technically true.

But a Google image search turns up results that are, shall we say, very different depending on the language.

And it's like this for, well, every word.

Otherwise, languages would just be code and not, you know, different languages.

And lastly, he kind of folds all of his memorization advice into use spaced repetition software

and then just has a lot of details on how to optimize that.

But of course, the devil's in the details.

He gives so many excellent tips, it's hard to remember them all, ironically.

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So spaced repetition software, or SRS, is basically just a software -optimized approach to surfing the forgetting curve.

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I've talked about this at length elsewhere, but long -term learning is actually a process of repeatedly forgetting

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or nearly forgetting something and then strengthening all the neural networks it connects with in the act of remembering, trying to remember, or being reminded.

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So in service of these big three ideas, he has chapters or sections of chapters on learning and memorization, the importance of sound and how to approach it.

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This is what got me hooked.

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Words and vocabulary building, sentence structures and how to memorize them, stress minimization, and a lot of other good stuff.

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I'm just going to share a few of the things that really stood out to me.

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First was his game of spot the differences, which we've already seen with девушка.

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This is surprisingly fun and extremely helpful.

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Second was his use of action mnemonics for memorizing grammatical category things like gender or case marking.

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I talk on my channel a lot about what I call naughty mnemonics, but he's got a masterclass on how to maximize their impact and why they work.

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Basically, anything that kicks your animalistic hindbrain into gear, things like violence and sex and strong emotions,

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are things that are implicated in memory circuits and the formation of vivid, long -term memories.

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I'm pretty sure I still remember his examples from German from reading the first edition in 2014.

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So there's maybe something to be said for this kind of amygdala hacking.

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But the main two things that really stood out to me in reading the new edition were his approach to

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simplifying learning grammatical rules and pick a thing.

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His approach to grammar is so totally diametrically opposite to my training as a linguist

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and yet it's also just another way of saying the same thing.

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He suggests learning grammatical structures by referring to a good grammar, where have you heard that before,

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and picking an example sentence or two or three and then just breaking that sentence apart into multiple flashcards using closed deletion.

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That's a fancy term for fill in the blanks.

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The way he recommends is to have one for new words, one for new forms of a word, and one for any kind of surprising word order.

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So he gives the example of learning pacifization by taking a sentence like, my homework was eaten by my dog,

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and giving yourself an image of a dog along with multiple cards.

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One would be like, my homework was eaten blank my dog.

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You can do that or you can try to memorize

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that by is the preposition that introduces the optional agent in a passive construction.

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But honestly, that technically correct linguistic description is basically just another way of saying

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that the word by goes there in that sentence.

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Similarly, he might have a card with my homework blank to eat by my dog, and he'd have to supply was eaten.

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So you get really, really good at a few specific sentences, but they're sentences that teach you all aspects of the structure that you're learning.

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And then when you learn a new word, you can easily fit it into those structures.

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I thought this was brilliant.

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And an even brillianteer addition was to underspecify agreement and other hints, meaning basically something like, my homework was eaten by A slash N blank,

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if you were memorizing dog.

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This way you don't narrow down the search space by having the word A indicate you're looking for a noun

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that starts with a consonant.

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Pick a thing was another great trick that's a simplification of the memory champion technique of person, action, object.

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He gives the example of needing a mnemonic for multiple different German plurals.

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There's like six different ways that German pluralizes things.

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How do you know if words pluralize with S or EN or something else entirely?

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In general, you have to just memorize that.

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So the brilliance of his approach is its unashamed laziness.

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Ends with an S, that's just like English, so treat it as the default.

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Even if linguists would argue about whether that is structurally or statistically accurate.

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For an English speaker, it's the closest to expected, so for our learning process, it's the easiest and therefore the default.

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Ends with EN.

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Can you remember that without additional effort?

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No action needed.

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But let's say you can't.

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The example he gives is struggling to remember that it's not students, but in German it's Studenten.

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So, pardon my accent by the way.

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So he thinks about a thing related to students.

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In this case he settles on a backpack.

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He adds a backpack to the card.

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And then to every card that he makes for a word that has an en plural.

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He goes on to explain something like an envelope might be better since it triggers phonological associations.

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So what about something like nation, which also takes EN?

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Well, you're going to imagine multiple nations wearing backpacks.

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That's it.

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I started doing this with my memorization, and holy shit, you guys, to give context, I'm super lazy.

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And Duolingo Hebrew is actually one of the better things out there if you supplement with Anki.

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That's a space repetition software.

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But of course, I went with pre -made Anki decks as a time saver.

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So I've been adding pictures to my deck, but often it's just of, you know, something evocative of the concept.

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And I have words that I struggled with because I just kept getting them wrong or confusing them.

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Exam and frying pan, for example.

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That's mifkan and makvat.

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I had a bunch of words like this.

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I started adding more mnemonics, phonological cues, or even just partial phonological cues, or both.

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Phonological cues and mnemonics and holy shit.

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Literally the process of even just trying to do that got some of these words locked in.

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For a frying pan, I added a chef shrugging and asking a question.

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The question, of course, is do you want I should machvat?

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For peilut, activity, I had a bunch of kids bouncing on balls.

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That wasn't working for me.

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I've added pay and loot.

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It's absolutely ridiculous how effective this is.

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It's so freaking stupid, but it really, really works.

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And if you speak a bunch of languages, you're not limited to English for the priming.

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I finally memorized importing, which I used a picture of a container ship at a port for by adding bees to it.

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It's mais à b.

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Get it?

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Mais à b.

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Anyway, it works for me and that's all that matters.

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If you use mnemonics, leave me a comment with your craziest one.

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Oh, and one more thing.

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He has an approach for memorizing grammar paradigms without just brute forcing it like we did in French class.

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Je mange, tu mange, il allon mange, nous mangeons, vous mangez, il mange.

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Not knocking that method, but I'm excited to try his version,

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which is basically to use closed deletion flashcards with interesting stories for each of the forms.

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Something unexpected and engaging like le médecin mange son stethoscope.

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The last thing that I want to say he gets really, really right is a chapter on stress management and goal setting.

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Insert joke here about the state of the world such that this wasn't in the 2014 edition of the book.

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There's tons of other good stuff in the book, and he writes in a clear and engaging fashion, and there's only 153 pages of appendices and how -tos.

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Seriously, it's pages 220 through 373.

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It's got all sorts of information on flashcards, and of course the list of your 625 first words to learn that he's famous for.

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I will say there are some flaws, but nothing that I think really detracts from the overall benefit of the book.

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First, he doesn't really have much to say about how to learn under -resourced languages.

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He has a ton of information on resources, but a lot of this is just assuming that you're learning something like Spanish or French or Russian or Japanese,

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which, frankly, is statistically a safe bet.

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And while he does have some on using AI, I was surprised not to see much discussion of AI image generation,

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which I applied to make mnemonics based on what he had written elsewhere in the book.

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For instance, ma guiche is serving, so I made geese who are servers as a mnemonic.

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It works for me.

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Meat Gaber is overcoming, so I made a mnemonic about a bear who overcame the world telling him

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that he couldn't be a Lady Gaga impersonator in a meat dress.

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Meat Gaber.

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But on the whole, the book is great, and I'm grateful that Harmony Press sent me a copy.

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Like I said, I immediately loaned it to a friend.

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Said friend is now fired up to improve their Spanish because it feels more achievable.

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That's the main thing that he's selling.

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Of course, the other thing that he's selling is an app, which purports to simplify a lot of the process for you,

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reducing your data entry time and allowing you more time for memorization and learning.

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I think that's totally fair.

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And if you have the money to throw at the problem, why not?

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He says as much as well.

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If you want to snatch a copy of the book, I'll have an Amazon affiliate link in the description.

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I definitely think it's worth the asking price.

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I'm probably going to try to implement all of his suggestions when I go back to Persian, which has been a struggle for me to retain, compared to French and Spanish and so on.

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If you like what I'm doing with the channel, you know, except that one attempt at ASMR, then please like and subscribe and leave me a comment.

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I've said it before, but comments feed the algorithm and the algorithm feeds my family.

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You can also support the channel with super thanks, or over on patreon .com slash languagejones.

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Until next time, happy learning!

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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 →

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