Shadowing Practice: Getting Fluent In English By Yourself - Where To Actually Start - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Stop.
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Before you download one more app, I need to tell you something.
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You are not bad at English.
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You're studying the wrong life.
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Every book you've opened, every course you've quit, they've been about someone else.
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No wonder you stopped.
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And here's the part nobody tells you.
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You don't need a teacher to fix this.
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I know, I'm a teacher, so it's interesting hearing that coming from me.
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But you don't need a classroom, a partner, or somebody sitting across from you because the one subject you could talk about for six hours straight,
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the one you'd never get bored of the one you already know everything about is you,
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your head, your hands, your heart, three places.
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And you can start today on your own with nothing.
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Are you ready?
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Well then let's jump right in.
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The starting point before we get into the three levels, I want you to realize something.
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You don't start with a book.
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You start with yourself.
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Your life is already the material.
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You've just never looked at it that way.
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Three places to look your head, your hands, your heart.
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Let's start with level one, the three parts of you.
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The first part is your head.
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And we're just speaking about your interests.
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That's right.
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The things your mind returns to when nobody is asking you anything, the things that bring you joy,
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the things that you enjoy thinking about over and over again.
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For example, my interests, I love cooking.
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I love art.
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I love exercising things that I go to when no one is around.
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No one is asking me anything.
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I find joy in these things my interests, starting with your head.
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You see, you already have the knowledge.
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You're just missing the English.
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You could talk about this subject for an hour in your own language.
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Whatever your interest is, you could talk about it for an extended period of time.
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The ideas are actually already built.
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You're not learning a topic and a language at the same time.
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You're only closing the gap on one of them.
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The information, the knowledge, the material is already in your brain.
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Interest is the only thing that survives a bad week.
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A week where your boss made you upset.
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Maybe your husband made you upset or your children bothered you.
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Your interests survive that bad week.
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There will be days you don't feel like studying English.
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I know it's true.
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You'll skip the English app.
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You'll close the English book, but you won't stop thinking about the thing you love.
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Your interests keep working on you.
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Even when your discipline stops, you see, it gives you somewhere to go deep.
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A textbook chapter ends.
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Your interest does not.
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You can follow one topic for years.
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I said earlier, I love to cook.
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I look up cooking recipes.
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I look up things about exercising.
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I look up things about art all the time.
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Why I am interested in these things.
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So you can follow one topic for years.
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The vocabulary keeps getting more specific.
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The expressions keep getting more natural and you never hit the bottom of it.
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Why?
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Because you are interested in these things.
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Part one, your head or your interests.
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Part two, your hands or your daily life.
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The things you physically do between waking up and going to sleep.
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Your daily activities, your daily responsibilities.
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Repetition is built in naturally because you do these things on a regular basis.
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You don't have to schedule them.
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You already do these things every single day.
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Maybe it's the commute that happens, whether you plan it or not, you have to get to work.
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So the English attached to it gets rehearsed daily.
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You're doing these things every day.
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And now you're just attaching English to these activities without you setting aside a single minute for practice.
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This is the English people actually ask you about.
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Nobody opens a conversation with a philosophical question.
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They usually ask, hey, what did you do yesterday?
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Or hey, what did you do this weekend?
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How was your morning?
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Whether the traffic was bad?
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Your daily life is the exact material real conversations are made of.
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specific in a way that makes you sound like a person.
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Anyone can say, I go to work.
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Only you can say that you leave at 640 AM in order to beat traffic on the highway.
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And you always take the exit before the bridge.
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Why?
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Because it's your daily life.
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That specificity is the difference between correct English and English.
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That sounds like someone's actually living a life textbook, English versus real English.
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Part two is your hands or your daily life.
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Part three now is your heart.
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I love this one.
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Your heart represents the people you love,
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the ones you'd cross a country for the ones you'd potentially die for the ones that mean the most to you.
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You see, emotion is what makes English stay or remain.
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You've forgotten hundreds of words from vocabulary lists that you've studied over the years, but you haven't forgotten a single thing.
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Anyone said to you at a hard moment in your life.
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Maybe when your mother died or your grandfather or your child, unfortunately, in those hard moments,
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you can remember clearly in those moments, what was said to you by those who loved you.
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Words attached to people you love don't need to be reviewed.
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They stick on the first pass.
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Why?
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Because that person already is important to you.
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And now you're attaching words to that person.
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This is where the language stops being an exercise and it becomes just a part of you.
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Describing your mother, that's not a task.
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It's not homework.
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You're not performing English.
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You're saying something that's true, something that's real, something that's a fact.
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And the moment you're saying something true, the fear of making a mistake actually gets smaller.
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We talked about fear in our last lesson.
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Why does it get smaller? because you're focused on the person instead of the grammar.
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You see, it reaches the part of you that English has never touched.
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Right now there's a version of you that exists only in your first language.
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The one who's funny, who's tender, who knows exactly what to say.
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Talking about the people you love is how you start bringing that person into English a translated version of you,
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actually the real you.
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So again, the three parts we have head or your interests,
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hands or your daily life and your heart or the people you love.
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This leads us now to level two, choose three inside of each of these,
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your head, your hands and your heart.
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We need to choose three inside each part.
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So let's start with your head, the three interests.
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Now again, you are going to do this.
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This is how you're going to study to get fluent, but let's do some examples together.
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Your head or your interests, right?
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I mentioned earlier, I love cooking.
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So cooking is one interest.
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Think about it, what you make, how you learned how to cook, the food you grew up on.
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Talk about these things.
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A second interest, football.
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I actually played flag football in college and I started playing again a few months ago.
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I enjoy it.
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My body, I'm not as young as I used to be, but I had a good time.
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So let's say football is one of your interests.
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Okay.
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What team do you follow?
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My dad loves the Philadelphia Eagles.
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It's true.
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The matches you watch.
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When do you watch the football matches?
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The arguments you have about it.
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Oh, my team is better than your team.
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Think about your interest.
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And third, what about music?
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What you listen to?
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One of my favorite singers, his name is Smokey Norfolk.
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I'll sing a little bit.
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One of his songs is I know too much about him.
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Real quick.
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I know too much about him and there's nothing to make me doubt him.
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That's all you get.
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But again, I like music.
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So maybe one of your interests is music.
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So what do you listen to?
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When do you listen to it?
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What are the songs that are tied to your emotions or certain periods of your life?
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Your head is the first part, three interests, cooking, football, music.
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But what about part two, your hands, three daily activities now.
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So one activity could be the drive to work.
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What route do you follow?
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What's the traffic like?
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Is it really heavy or is it light and what's playing in the car as you're driving along the road?
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What are you listening to?
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Is it a podcast?
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Is it teacher Tiffany's English lesson?
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What are you listening to in your car?
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One daily activity is the drive to work or what about making coffee in the morning?
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I don't drink coffee, but I have a lot of friends who drink coffee.
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So maybe you drink coffee.
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Well, the first thing you did in the morning or the first thing you did to make the coffee, do you use the same cup?
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What's the order that you follow to make the coffee?
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Again, a daily activity you do every day so you can start describing it.
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And again, another activity, picking up your daughter from school.
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Think about the wait outside when you're sitting in your car, waiting for the teacher to bring your daughter and the other students out
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or the walk to the car with your daughter or the same question you ask her every day.
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Think about your daily activity.
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Part two, your hands, your daily activities.
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What about your heart now?
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People you love.
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Let's think about three people you love.
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For example, your mother.
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How did she raise you?
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What did she say to you on the phone?
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Maybe you talked to her yesterday and she said something to you on the phone.
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Think about how your mother spoke to you yesterday on the phone or what you inherited from her.
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My mom always smiles.
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My mom literally looks very young.
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She's 71, but she looks like she's in her early sixties.
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She looks very young.
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So the reason I look so young is because of my mother.
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Think about the things you inherited from her.
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Another person, maybe your younger brother, how you grew up together.
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What was life like growing up?
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What did you fight about?
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What were your arguments about?
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How has your younger brother changed over the years?
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Do you see how your life can be the focus to help you getting fluent in English?
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And what about your closest friend?
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Think about your friends.
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How did you meet that friend?
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How long has it been?
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Why have they stayed your friend again?
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Three people you love.
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Here's the choosing rule in practice.
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Notice that none of these are impressive.
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Nothing you have to search for online.
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No, it's your actual life.
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Nobody chose philosophy or classical literature or a mentor who changed my life.
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They chose coffee, traffic, football, and a brother.
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That's the point.
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The material has to be true.
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Now, if your interest is philosophy, choose philosophy.
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That's good, but make sure it's your interests, not someone else's.
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The material has to be true because you'll be living inside it for months.
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Nine starting points now.
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Nine starting points.
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We have the three parts.
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Head, hands, heart.
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And for each part, we have three different examples.
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So nine starting points.
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Now each one goes through level three.
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This is where it gets really good.
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Level three, five sets of three for each of the nine, five sets of three for each of the nine.
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I'll break it down.
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So everything that we're about to say follows three examples.
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We have the three examples for head.
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We have cooking for hands.
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We have the drive to work and for heart, we have your younger brother.
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All right.
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We're going to just use these one from each part to continue with level three.
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Here we go.
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Five sets of three.
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So five examples for each.
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So this is what you want to do.
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You now need to find three vocabulary words for that part.
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The words your topic is built from.
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So for example, for our head, we have cooking.
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That's the one we're going to continue working with cooking.
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We need three vocabulary words connected to cooking.
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Well, one word is simmer.
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Sim, simmer.
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Sorry.
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That's a song.
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Okay.
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Simmer.
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What does this word mean?
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It means to cook something in liquid just below boiling with small, slow bubbles rather than violent ones.
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Here's the sentence using the word.
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I let the sauce simmer for about 20 minutes while I got everything else ready.
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Makes sense, right?
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Another term seasoning, the salt, pepper, herbs, and spices you add to give food flavor.
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All right.
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Here's a sentence.
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It smells amazing, but honestly, the seasoning was a little heavy for me.
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Still on the topic of cooking, remember, right?
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Head.
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Next, leftovers.
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This is a new word, leftovers.
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What does this term mean?
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The food that remains after a meal saved to eat later.
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I'll eat that a little bit later the leftovers.
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Here's a sentence.
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There were so many leftovers that I ate the same thing for three days straight.
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You got it, right?
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So again, starting with part one, the head, one of our interests, cooking three vocabulary words, simmer seasoning leftovers.
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What about hands?
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We chose the drive to work.
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We need three vocabulary words.
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First word, commute, commute.
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Now the word commute means the regular trip you make between your home and your workplace.
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It works as both a noun and a verb.
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Here's a sentence.
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My commute is about 40 minutes each way, which isn't bad for this city.
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Here's a second vocabulary word for the drive to work.
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Traffic.
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This word means the vehicles on the road, especially when there are so many that everything slows down.
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Here's the sentence.
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The traffic was so bad this morning that I sat in the same spot for 10 minutes.
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And our third vocabulary word connected again to our topic, the drive to work for hands is route.
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This means the particular path you take to get somewhere, the specific streets and turns.
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Here's the definition we have.
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Now the sentence we have.
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I've been taking the same route for six years and I could drive it with my eyes closed.
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So for our topic, the drive to work, three vocabulary words, commute, traffic, route.
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You see, again, we're building.
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We have head, hands, heart.
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Now we're finding three vocabulary words for the topic underneath each part.
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What about heart?
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We selected your younger brother.
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Three vocabulary words.
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Number one, stubborn, stubborn.
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It means refusing to change your mind or your behavior, even when other people are pushing you to.
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Here's the sentence.
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He's the most stubborn person I know.
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Once he decides something, that's it.
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Second vocabulary word, protective.
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It means wanting to keep someone safe and acting to defend them.
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Here's the sentence.
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He's very protective of our mother, especially since she got sick.
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Notice I'm creating sentences using the vocabulary word, but connecting it to the topic.
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And third, we have sibling.
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Sibling is a brother or sister.
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The neutral word people use when the gender doesn't matter or when talking about them as a group, my siblings.
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Here's the sentence.
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We're three siblings and I'm the oldest by five years.
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You got it, right?
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So again, we have for the heart, your younger brother, three vocabulary words, stubborn, protective, and sibling.
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Now this leads us to the next section, three expressions.
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Again, head, hands, heart.
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We have our topic.
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We already found three vocabulary words.
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Now you need to find three expressions.
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You're using your life to expand your English and speak fluently.
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Now three expressions, how people actually say it, not how a book says it.
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This is why finding expressions is so important.
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So for the head, we're still staying with cooking.
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Here's the first expression.
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Let it sit for a minute.
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This means leave the food alone for a short time before serving or cutting it.
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So it finishes cooking or the flavors settle in.
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Also used outside the kitchen to mean give it some time.
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Here's the sentence, take it out of the oven and let it sit for a minute before you cut into it.
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Topic of cooking connected to our head, our interests.
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Second expression, a pinch of salt.
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It means a very small amount of salt as much as you can hold between your thumb and finger, not a measured quantity.
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Here's the sentence.
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It tasted flat.
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So I added a pinch of salt and it came right back.
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And our third expression, I threw it together.
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I threw it together.
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It means I made it quickly and without a plan using whatever I had usually said modestly, even when the result was good.
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Here's the sentence.
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Don't be too impressed.
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I just threw it together with what was in the fridge.
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You see again, three expressions for our topic cooking, let it sit for a minute, a pinch of salt, And I threw it together.
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What about three expressions now for hands or the drive to work?
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What are we doing?
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We're expanding.
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We're building upon our own life and getting fluent hands, the drive to work.
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First expression bumper to bumper.
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This means traffic is so heavy that cars are almost touching, barely moving.
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Describes the worst kind of slow traffic bumper to bumper.
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I don't like bumper to bumper traffic.
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Here's the sentence.
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It was bumper to bumper from the bridge all the way downtown.
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Expression number two, I take the back way.
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This means I use smaller, less obvious streets instead of the main road, usually to avoid traffic.
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Here's the sentence.
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When the highway gets bad, I take the back way.
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It's longer, but it keeps me moving.
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And our third expression connected to our topic, the drive to work connected to the part of our body hands.
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It's I left early to beat the traffic.
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This means I departed before the busy period specifically to avoid it.
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Beat here means get ahead of.
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Here's the sentence.
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I left early to beat the traffic and still got there with 10 minutes to spare.
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I left early to beat the traffic.
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So three expressions for the drive to work topic, which is connected to our daily activity or our hands.
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Now we get our heart, our younger brother, people we love.
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Here are the three expressions.
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Number one, we're close.
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It means we have a strong, warm relationship and we talk often used constantly about family and friends.
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Here's the sentence.
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We fought constantly as kids, but we're close now.
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Second expression.
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He takes after our mother, meaning he resembles her in personality, in habits, or in appearance.
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Take after means to inherit from a family member.
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Here's the sentence.
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He takes after our mother, same laugh, same temper, same everything.
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And our final expression for our younger brother, our heart, the person close to us.
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He drives me crazy.
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Now this is a funny expression, but we do use it for people we love sometimes.
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What does he drives me crazy mean?
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It means he annoys or frustrates me.
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Usually said with affection about someone you love.
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Here's the sentence.
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He drives me crazy, but I do anything for him.
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So now we have three expressions for our topic.
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Your younger brother.
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We have, we're close.
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He takes after our mother and he drives me crazy.
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Head, hands, and heart.
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Three expressions we're building.
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We're expanding our English fluency by looking at our lives.
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This leads us now to the third part, three details.
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Now the specifics that make it yours and not generic.
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So we have head, we have hands, and we have heart.
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We need three details about each topic we have underneath these three parts.
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Remember for head, what did we choose?
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Cooking.
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So three details.
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Ah, the pan you always reach for.
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The next detail, the dish you make when you're tired.
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The third detail, the one thing you never measure.
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For example, I never measure salt.
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I never measure garlic.
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I never measure the seasonings I'm using using.
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So three details about cooking my interest.
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What about hands?
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Remember we have the drive to work.
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So three details about the drive to work.
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We have what time did we leave?
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What did we listen to in the car?
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And the exact place where the traffic always stops.
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For me in Maryland, it's around 15 a that's where the traffic always stops when I'm heading to church.
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Going to work, same place.
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So you see again, three details about the topic under hands.
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Now we have our heart.
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Remember our younger brother, three details, how he laughs, what he does for work.
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And the thing you always argue about, we're building on your life to get fluent.
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Why?
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Because you know yourself.
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This moves us now to the fourth part.
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Again, using your life to expand, using your life to become more fluent.
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These are the ways you do it.
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Here we go.
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Now, personal experience, but three personal experiences, the stories that only you can tell for our head.
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We have cooking.
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So what story could you tell the first meal you cooked alone?
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What's another story?
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The time you burn something badly or another story, the recipe you learned from someone else.
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Think about it.
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Personal experiences connected to the topic you chose.
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What about your hands?
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Remember the drive to work.
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Three experiences.
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Number one, the day you were late for something important.
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Tell that story.
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Number two, a conversation you had in the car.
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Maybe you called a friend or called your family member.
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Talk about that experience.
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It's still on the drive to work.
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Number three, the morning something unusual happened on the road.
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You're speaking about your experiences connected to your life.
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And what about your heart?
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Again, your younger brother, for our example, speak about a time he helped you.
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Second experience, a memory from your childhood.
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Third experience, the last conversation you had.
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You see what's happening.
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We're using your life.
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We started again, head, hands, heart.
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You picked three interests connected to your head, hands, three things that happen in your daily life, heart, three people you love.
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And now we're drilling down to show you how to expand even more about these individuals, these interests, these activities to speak English fluently.
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Now we go into the fifth section, the fifth section, three discussion questions.
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This is what turns a topic into a conversation.
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You still have your head, your hands and your heart.
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Let's look at the head.
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What's the topic?
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Cooking.
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Three discussion questions connected to that topic.
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You can find them online.
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You can think of your own, but you need to answer them.
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Here's one for cooking.
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The first one, what's a dish that reminds you of home?
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And you answer it.
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Second discussion question for cooking.
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Do you cook to relax or because you have to?
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Third discussion question.
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What's one thing you refuse to eat?
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You see how it's expanding.
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It's like mind mapping your English.
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Second, your hands.
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Again, the drive to work.
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First discussion question.
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How long is your commute?
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Second discussion question.
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Do you prefer driving or being driven?
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Third discussion question.
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What's the worst traffic you've ever sat in?
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And finally your heart.
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Remember your younger brother, three discussion questions.
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First, are you close to your family?
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Second, who understands you best?
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And third, what's something you've never told him?
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Here's the arithmetic, the math behind all of this.
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I love teaching English.
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I love technology and I also love math.
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So here's the math behind it.
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15 pieces of English per topic.
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Remember, we have the topic.
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We have three vocabulary words, three expressions, three details, three,
483
yes, personal experiences, and then three discussion questions, team pieces connected to each topic about you.
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There are nine topics and all of them come from your life nine topics, 15 pieces of information for each topic.
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I am telling you, as you study following this method, you will speak English fluently.
486
So why this works when nothing else you did before worked.
487
You see, my friend, you don't forget words attached to people you love.
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You never run out of things to say about your own life.
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Nobody can correct your material.
490
Why?
491
Because it's yours.
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Those years you spent quitting.
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You were not bad at English.
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You were studying a stranger's life.
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So where do you begin today?
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I want you to pick one, one interest, just the head, one interest.
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Find the three words, then the three expressions, then keep going the details,
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the personal experiences, the discussion questions you've been living around this material your entire life.
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So you are going to be able to speak about it.
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I hope you enjoyed this lesson.
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And if you want to learn even more about my methods, I want you to get your copy of the notebook, get your copy of the notebook,
502
the fluency panion, and you can take notes using it go to shop.speakenglishwithtiffany.com.
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Get your Fluency Panyan notebook and start taking notes on your life.
504
I'll talk to you in the next lesson.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B1 speaking lesson is built on the video “Getting Fluent In English By Yourself - Where To Actually Start”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: word, topic, hands, interest, English. This video has 504 sentences and 4272 words to shadow. The speech runs for 29:41. The speaker talks at a steady 144 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 89% 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 |
|---|---|---|
| vocabulary noun | /vəˈkæb.jə.lə.ɹi/ | A usually alphabetized and explained collection of words e.g. of a particular field, or prepared for a specific purpose, often for learning. |
| bumper noun | /ˈbʌmpəɹ/ | Someone or something that bumps. |
| commute verb | /kəˈmjuːt/ | To exchange substantially; to abate but not abolish completely, a penalty, obligation, or payment in return for a great, single thing or an aggregate; to cash… |
| leftover adjective | Remaining; left behind; extra; odd; in reserve. | |
| simmer verb | /ˈsɪmɚ/ | To cook or undergo heating slowly at or below the boiling point. |
| fluent adjective | /ˈfluənt/ | That flows; flowing, liquid. |
| sibling noun | /ˈsɪb.lɪŋ/ | A person who shares a parent; one's brother or sister who one shares a parent with. |
| attach verb | /əˈtæt͡ʃ/ | To fasten, to join to (literally and figuratively). |
| stubborn adjective | /ˈstʌbɚn/ | Refusing to move or to change one's opinion; obstinate; firmly resisting; persistent in doing something. |
| fluency noun | /ˈfluːənsi/ | The quality of smoothness of flow. |
| fluently adverb | In a fluent manner, as expressing oneself easily, especially in a foreign language. | |
| inherit verb | /ɪnˈhɛɹɪt/ | To receive (property, a title, etc.), by legal succession or bequest, usually after the previous owner's death. |
| notebook noun | /ˈnoʊtˌbʊk/ | A book (physical or digital) in which notes or memoranda are written. |
| pinch verb | /pɪnt͡ʃ/ | To squeeze a small amount of a person's skin and flesh, making it hurt. |
| protective adjective | /pɹəˈtɛk.tɪv/ | Serving or intended to protect. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| look up verb | /ˌlʊk ˈʌp/ | To have better prospects. |
| grow up verb | To mature and become an adult. | |
| get ahead of verb | To take preemptive action before a potential development becomes reality. | |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. | |
| pick up verb | To lift; to grasp and raise. | |
| set aside verb | /sɛt.əˈsaɪd/ | To separate and reserve something for a specific purpose. |
| slow down verb | To decelerate. | |
| wake up verb | /ˌweɪk ˈʌp/ | To stop sleeping; to awake. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- They usually ask, hey, what did you do yesterday?
- What team do you follow?
- When do you watch the football matches?
- What's one thing you refuse to eat?
- What's the worst traffic you've ever sat in?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | I've been taking · you've been living |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | are actually already built · is built · are made |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | you've opened · You've just never looked · You've forgotten |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | those who loved · friends who drink · topic, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 75 contractions and reduced forms, such as we're, you're, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/, arithmetic /æɹɪθˈmɛtɪk/, thumb /ˈθʌm/, grandfather /ˈɡɹæn(d)ˌfɑðɚ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/, dish /dɪʃ/, repetition /ˌɹɛp.əˈtɪʃ.ən/, affection /əˈfɛk.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: vocabulary /vəˈkæb.jə.lə.ɹi/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, arithmetic /æɹɪθˈmɛtɪk/, repetition /ˌɹɛp.əˈtɪʃ.ən/, specificity /spɛsɪˈfɪsɪti/
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 vocabulary, bumper, commute.
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.