Shadowing Practice: Historical Myths That Turned Out To Be Real - Learn English Speaking with Video
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You know the sword and the stone.
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Magic sword and solid rock can only be pulled out by whoever's worthy of the hammer of Thor or whatever.
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Now, you're smart, you know how this goes.
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Obviously fake, right?
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Well, Italy has a real one.
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It's in a little round chapel on a hill near Siena, and it's been there for like 800 years.
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The story goes that in 1180, a knight named Galgano got told in the vision to just give up violence, and he scoffed at that.
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He scoffed hard.
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He said that quitting his sword would be as easy as splitting stone, and then he stabbed the rock to make the point, and the blade sank in like butter,
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which seems like the opposite point to what he was trying to make.
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Doesn't that mean that quitting the sword is going to be really easy?
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I guess we won't be seeing him and his sword together anytime soon.
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Anyway, it's still there.
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Handle up, buried to the hilt in the middle of the chapel floor.
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In case you're doubting the Legitness?
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In 2001, a chemist actually tested the thing, and the metal matches the 1100s.
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No modern steel, no tricks, and radar found a hollow space under the rock.
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Maybe a tomb, or maybe a colony of giant ants.
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But probably a tomb.
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There's also paperwork.
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Rome opened one of its first ever formal sainthood investigations on Galgano in 1185, four years after he died, and put sworn witnesses on record about the sword.
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And part of that hearing is still around.
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Receipts.
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He also died in 1181, and the earliest King Arthur's Sword in the Stone stories show up about 20 years later.
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So the most famous magic image in fantasy might be a knockoff of a real sword, in a real stone, that you can really go stand in front of this week.
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And nobody's pulled it out yet, by the way, so feel free to try.
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You'll have a better chance of pulling it out if you subscribe.
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Just saying.
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So the ancient Greeks were just positive that one-eyed giants used to exist.
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Homer put one in the Odyssey, eating people in a cave and apparently regular Greeks read the Odyssey like a historical textbook.
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For centuries, everyone laughed at them.
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But then, fossil hunters started digging on Crete, Sicily, and Cyprus, and the islands turned out to be full of skulls.
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Big ones.
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Like, twice the size of yours.
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Shaped roughly like a person's, with one giant hole in the middle of the face.
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Look at this thing, genuinely, if you see this with no additional context, there's no way you're not assuming it's a cyclops skull.
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Well, in reality, they're dwarf elephant skulls, and the hole is the nose where the trunk attached.
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Oh, obviously I knew that, you say?
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False.
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Nobody would assume that.
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Anyway, the Greeks collected these things.
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They had temples showing off giant bones as the actual remains of heroes and monsters.
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Cities traded them, underpaid teenage tour guides pointed at them.
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They became a huge part of the culture, which I guess makes a lot of sense.
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It's either that or pissed the cyclopie off.
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And you saw the size of their skulls.
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China's old records list the Shang dynasty as one of its first great royal families, like 3,000 years back.
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But scholars in the West, and plenty in China too, pretty much thought it was fake.
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They made up kings to give the country a cool backstory, the way every country claims its founder was raised by wolves or descended from the son or whatever.
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Cough, Italy, cough, no evidence.
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And separately, this whole time, for centuries, Chinese pharmacies were selling dragon bones.
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Actual dragon bones.
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Well, obviously not, but it's not like anyone was checking.
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It was foolproof medicine, and it worked, I think.
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The thing you gotta understand is dragon bones were prescribed for basically everything.
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Pharmacies move these by the ton, like Costco.
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And some of the bones had writing carved into them, and buyers thought that carvings made a bone look damaged.
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So some dealers just scraped the writing off before selling them.
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What could possibly be wrong with that?
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Well, apparently, in 1899, a scholar in Beijing named Wang Yirong gets sick and somebody brings some dragon bones from the pharmacy.
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But before they hit the grinder, he actually looks at them.
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There's writing on them, writing older than any modern Chinese script they could understand.
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These dragon bones were oracle bones, 3,000 year old ox bones and turtle shells the Shang kings would carve into to ask questions from the gods.
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I don't know how they got a response, but they kept doing it so it obviously worked.
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So then, scholars followed the pharmacy supply chain backwards to a field near Anyang, and dug up the Shang capital.
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Palaces, royal tombs, and tens of thousands of carved bones, which named the mythical kings in order, which matched to the old lists almost exactly.
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Which is insane by the way, the proof of an entire dynasty was sitting in medicine jars.
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Great for headaches I assume.
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Now, hearken back to the dealers who would scrape the bones clean.
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That was so messed up.
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Thousands of years of history was just obliterated.
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Nobody knows how much of Chinese history went through the weed whacker.
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Atlantis.
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A guy named Plato writes it down in 360 BC.
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A rich, arrogant island city that annoyed the gods and sank into the sea in a single day and night.
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People have been hunting for it ever since, and the discoveries so far include about 40 documentaries and zero cities.
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Solid ratio.
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I'll save you the suspense.
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Atlantis, as written, is made up.
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Gasp. Who knew?
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But everything surrounding it was real.
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So like 10 or 20 years before Plato wrote about Atlantis, an actual Greek city called Helic sank.
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One winter night, an earthquake turned the ground to liquid, which is not ideal when your city's next to the sea.
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The ground dropped, a wave came in, and by morning, the city, which by the way, had a temple of the ocean god Poseidon in it, was gone.
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Along with everyone in it.
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Greek tourists later swore that you could just sail over the spot and see statues in the water.
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Historians actually called it a myth as well, But then, in 2001, archaeologists dug the city out of a lagoon near the Gulf of Corinth.
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Walls, streets, coins, the whole city starter pack.
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And it goes deeper, because more than a thousand years before Plato, there really was a rich island empire, the Minoans, and their island just blew up.
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Santorini, one of the biggest volcanic explosions that humans have ever been around for, and it killed the entire Minoan civilization in the blast.
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But the crazy part is, it didn't.
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I lied.
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Diggers later found Akrotiri, which was a Minoan town buried under all that ash, with three-story houses, paved streets, and zero skeletons.
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Everyone got out.
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Clean getaway.
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That's kind of insane.
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I guess they've learned from Pompeii.
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Was Pompeii before that?
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No, I think it was after.
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Actually, I think Pompeii was later on.
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So, everyone knows the Terracotta Army, the 8,000 clay soldiers buried with China's first emperor.
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Those soldiers are just the parking lot.
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The actual tomb of Qin Shi Huang is a hill nearby, and it's never been opened.
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Actually, hold on.
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Quick note on the man himself first, because it explains everything.
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He spent his last years drinking mercury potions that his doctors promised would make him immortal.
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As my more intelligent viewers have already realized, that did the opposite.
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You know what mercury is.
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His doctors apparently didn't.
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So like, a hundred years after the burial, a Chinese historian wrote down what's supposedly inside the tomb.
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Bro, it sounds like a fantasy book.
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It has a whole miniature china, palaces, a ceiling of pearls for stars, crossbow traps rigged to shoot anyone who breaks in,
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and of course, flowing rivers and seas of liquid mercury that used machines to keep flowing.
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For 2,000 years, the thought was basically that he never saw it, because why would the river of poison metal exist?
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Until scientists actually went and explored.
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They walked the burial mound with instruments and tested the soil.
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The ground above the tomb was brimming with mercury, way above natural levels.
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And depending on which survey you read, it spread in a pattern that some researchers say matches where China's rivers and seas sit on a map.
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Sick.
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So, why is it still sealed?
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Couple reasons.
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1. Everything inside is fragile.
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The terracotta soldiers came out painted and the paint flaked off within minutes of hitting air.
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the inside might genuinely be full of mercury fumes, which means that the crossbow traps are genuinely not even the most dangerous thing in there.
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Okay, one more detail from the historian.
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When the funeral ended, the workers who'd built the inner tomb, the ones who knew the layout and where the traps were, got sealed inside with it.
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R.I.P bro.
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In the islands off Thailand and Myanmar live the Mokin, sea nomads, people who spend most of their lives on boats and know the water better than anyone alive,
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and they carry an old myth about the laboon, the wave that eats people.
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The story goes, when the sea suddenly runs away from the shore, when the water pulls back and the fish are flapping on bare sand, the laboon is coming to devour the land,
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and you run to high ground or you get far out to deep water.
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Right now.
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Researchers thought it was folklore.
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And then, guess what?
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December 26, 2004, the sea off those islands suddenly ran away from the shore.
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Tourists all over the region walked out into the exposed seabed to look at the stranded fish.
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The Mokan elders saw it, said the word, and everyone got out.
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Multiple, whole entire villages walked up the hills, boats turned and drove into deep water, which is exactly right because a tsunami barely bumps you out there,
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and then the Indian Ocean tsunami came in and killed almost a quarter of a million people, one of the deadliest disasters in modern history.
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But in the Mokan villages that listen to the myth, Almost nobody died.
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On the Surin Islands, the wave flattened the entire village, stilts, boats, everything.
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The people were standing on a hill, watching their whole world get eaten alive.
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Which is insane, because kids who'd heard a spooky story about a hungry wave did better than an entire national warning system.
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Mithridates was a king in what's now Turkey, and Rome spent like 25 years trying to kill him.
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Fair enough, he killed somewhere in the ballpark of 80,000 Romans in a single day.
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That's a full football stadium him, but that's a different video.
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He grew up watching his own family get poisoned, dad included, so he came up with a plan.
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And the plan sounds like something a five-year-old invented.
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He would poison himself a little bit every day until none of the poisons worked on him.
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A little arsenic, a little hemlock, a little viper venom, a little expired milk.
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Ancient writers wrote that down, and historians were skeptical for a while because are we really expected to believe a guy took poisoned for years, and then became resistant to it.
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Except, yeah, I guess.
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It's called mithridatism now.
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Named after him, and for a whole whack of poisons and venoms, tiny doses really do work to become invulnerable.
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It's basically how anti-venom gets made.
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You dose an animal a little at a time until its blood learns the trick.
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And there's a modern example.
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It comes from the US.
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Can you make a wild guess which state the dude who poisoned himself for years was from.
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That's right, Colorado, Florida.
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Yeah, it's obviously Florida.
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A snake guy in Florida named Bill Host injected himself with snake venom every week for over 60 years,
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got bitten by deadly snakes about 170 times, which for a man grabbing venomous steaks on purpose every day is honestly a decent safety record,
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and lived to 100 years old.
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One, zero, zero years old.
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Hospitals flew his blood around the world to save bite victims.
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Bro, the goat.
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My body just gives up after gas station sushi.
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Nowhere to keep a stomach in here.
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My life is hell.
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Europe kept selling a version of the king's recipe called mithridadium as a cure-all in the 1700s.
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And we also have to talk about how he died.
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When Rome finally cornered him, he'd tried to go out on his own terms with poison.
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However, he'd spent his whole life making sure poison couldn't kill him.
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And then one day, he really needed it to.
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So he had to ask a soldier to run him through with a sword instead.
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Awkward.
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In 132 AD, a Chinese inventor named Zhongheng walks into the emperor's court with this big bronze jar.
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Eight dragons around the outside, each holding a ball in its mouth, and under each dragon, a little bronze toad looking up, mouth open.
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His pitch, when an earthquake happens, anywhere, even one that nobody in the room can feel,
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a dragon drops its ball into a toad and the clink tells you a quake happened and which direction it came from.
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This is like 1700 years before the seismograph, and he's proposing an earthquake alarm.
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Zhang Hang, buddy.
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You knew what they were going to say.
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Half the court thinks that it's nonsense, but the emperor keeps it installed.
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Worst case, it's a fancy vase.
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And the empire genuinely needed it, because China is like huge.
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Earthquakes kept flattening far provinces, and news would take weeks to crawl to the capital.
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No report, no relief for the people.
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People starved waiting for the government to find out that they existed.
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And then one day in 138, a ball drops.
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Clink.
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An earthquake had just hit the Capitol.
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I'm lying, nothing hit the Capitol.
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So the scholars do what scholars do best, and start calling the machine junk and the inventor of fraud, out loud, in court, while he's standing right there.
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It says an earthquake happened.
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Yes.
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Nobody felt an earthquake.
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The dragon pointed west.
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Oh, the dragon pointed west.
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Well then.
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But a few days later, a messenger comes galloping in, half dead from hundreds of kilometers west.
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An earthquake had flattened the region.
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on the day the ball dropped, in the direction the dragon pointed.
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Okay, crazy, it works.
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So, what was inside the jar?
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Nobody knows.
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The design is lost.
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Of course it is.
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Seems to be a recurring theme on this channel.
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But modern rebuilds of what it maybe looked like with a hanging pendulum inside actually work, because a faraway earthquake sends waves through the ground that a hanging weight will feel before your legs do.
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When Europeans reached the Pacific, they found people living on specks of land separated by thousands of kilometers of open water, and it blew their minds.
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They didn't have any compasses, maps, not even like metal or anything.
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The island dwellers said that their ancestors crossed the distances just by using their memories.
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The official answer until the 1960s was impossible.
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They must have drifted there by accident.
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Storms flew them around and they got lucky.
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But the islanders kept explaining.
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They said that they had navigators who were trained from childhood to steer by stars, by birds, by the color of clouds over land.
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And this is the part I love.
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By lying down in the bottom of the canoe and just feeling the waves.
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As waves hit land, the land bends the ocean around its shape, and apparently, a trained navigator can feel islands beyond the horizon through his back.
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So in 1976, a crew built a traditional double-held canoe called the Hokula, and sent out to figure it out for themselves.
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Hawaii to Tahiti, like 4,000 kilometers of open Pacific, guided by a navigator.
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He was from a Micronesian island a couple kilometers wide, and one of the last men alive who'd had the skill.
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He had a mental map in his head of where more than the hundred stars rose and sat, and he stayed on watch for basically a month straight at sea.
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Zero instruments on board.
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No compass, no charts, no little arrow on a screen telling him when to turn.
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Just vibes.
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And 33 days later, they hit Tahiti bang on, and half the island was waiting on the beach screaming.
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So yeah, the drift theory died.
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The greatest navigators in human history were these guys.
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Anyway, if you liked this video, you'll like this one even more.
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Why This Video Is Perfect for English Speaking Practice
This video’s mix of storytelling, casual humor, and historical detail makes it ideal for english speaking practice. The conversational tone—with phrases like “You know the sword and the stone” and “I guess we won’t be seeing him and his sword together anytime soon”—mimics real-life dialogue, helping learners master natural flow. Plus, the mix of past and present tenses (“He scoffed,” “it’s still there”) and vivid descriptions (“the blade sank in like butter”) offers rich material for building vocabulary and fluency. Whether you’re using a shadowing app or practicing on your own, this clip keeps you engaged while sharpening key skills.
Breaking Down Natural Speech Patterns
Let’s look at a few lines that showcase authentic English:
- “Well, Italy has a real one.” The word “well” softens the statement, a common tactic in casual speech to connect ideas. It’s not formal, but it’s how native speakers often start a surprising point.
- “In case you’re doubting the Legitness? In 2001, a chemist actually tested the thing…” The playful mispronunciation “Legitness” (instead of “legitimacy”) and the casual “the thing” make the dialogue relatable. Native speakers often simplify words for tone, and this is a great example to mimic.
- “Cough, Italy, cough, no evidence.” The fake cough adds humor and emphasis, a conversational trick to highlight a joke. Practicing this helps learners add personality to their speech.
A Simple Shadowing Routine for This Video
Use a shadow speech technique with this clip to boost your fluency: 1. Watch the video once to understand the story. 2. Play a 5-second segment, pause, and repeat it aloud, copying the tone, speed, and pauses. Focus on phrases like “the blade sank in like butter” to match the rhythm. 3. Record yourself and compare it to the original. Notice if you’re rushing or missing the casual “well” or “anyway” that make the speech flow. 4. Do this daily for 10 minutes, using a shadowing app to track progress. Over time, you’ll start to naturally use these patterns in your own conversations. This shadow speak method works because it trains your brain to think and speak in English, not just translate. And with a story as engaging as this, you’ll barely notice you’re practicing!
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.