Shadowing Practice: How cruise ships got so big - Learn English Speaking with Video
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In the world of boats, there are little boats and bigger boats.
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And then there are the really big boats.
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This is a cruise ship, the MSC Maravilia, built in Saint -Nazaire, France, in service since 2017, and christened by Sophie Lorraine.
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It is the—sorry, she is the biggest cruise ship to have ever docked in New York City.
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There's a water park, a rope course, a spa, a mall, an arcade, a bowling alley, a casino, a gym, two theaters, five pools,
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nine restaurants, 23 bars, 19 floors, and enough room for 5 ,655 passengers and 1 ,536 crew members.
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Cruise ships are the biggest passenger vessels that humans have ever built.
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They can fit a small town's worth of people into a single vehicle.
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But they have a certain look to them, far from the look of the big transatlantic ships of a hundred years ago.
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So how did the biggest ships we build wind up looking like this?
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Before cruise ships, the biggest ships on Earth were ocean liners.
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Built for one purpose — to take you somewhere.
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In the golden days of ocean travel, before the airplane, people had no choice.
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They had to use ships.
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That's Peter Canigo.
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He's a cruise journalist and ocean liner historian.
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Advertisements from this golden era of ocean liners boasted their speed across the Atlantic and their luxurious comfort, which given the conditions on the open ocean,
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wasn't always easy to achieve.
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If it's February and you're crossing the Atlantic, you're going to be absolutely miserable.
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And the last thing you want to do is realize that you're on a ship.
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What they used to do at the turn of the 20th
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century is they would design at least the first -class part of ships to look like great palatial hotels
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or even palaces themselves.
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Ocean liners like this one, the RMS Aquitania, tried to replicate all the amenities of life on land.
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There were restaurants, smoking rooms, gardens, and a massive lounge with painted ceilings.
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For the first -class passengers, at least all of the comforts of a city but at sea.
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There was a picture of the Aquitania lined up against what was then the world's tallest building, the Woolworth building.
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And the Aquitania was longer and taller than the Woolworth building.
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And that was their way of saying, this is like literally a floating city at sea, just to inspire the confidence of passengers.
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But the rise of air travel meant that ships stopped being the only way to cross oceans.
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And by the 1960s, ocean liners were slowly becoming obsolete.
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As ocean liner companies struggled to sell tickets, they tried something different.
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No longer do liners even attempt to compete with airspeed.
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Now the word is luxury.
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A vacation at sea.
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They continued transatlantic service in the northern hemisphere's summer months.
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But in the winter months, more companies started offering leisure trips to warmer regions.
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And they started advertising ocean travel differently, from selling transportation to selling a vacation.
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The cruise ship was born.
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But they got off to a slow start.
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They didn't really take off until the TV show
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The Love Boat, which exploded the idea of cruising.
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It wasn't just something that your rich grandmother did and made cruising something for the mainstream.
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But as cruises started to become mainstream, ocean liners had a problem.
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They were designed to go fast and consumed a lot of fuel.
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They sat low in the water, which kept them stable in rough seas, but meant they could only access ports with deep harbors.
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They had separate sections for first, second, and third class, but that left a lot of passengers without access to amenities
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and limited everyone's freedom of movement throughout the ship.
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And compared to the full -time cruise ships of the time,
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ocean liners were huge, so they'd have to attract a lot of vacationers to be profitable.
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Everything
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that had made ocean liners optimally designed for commuting quickly through
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rough waters made them poorly fit for vacationing slowly through calm ones.
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As sea travel continued to dwindle even the largest ocean liner in the world.
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The SS France couldn't generate enough revenue to operate, and it's that idle for years.
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Until 1979, when Norwegian Caribbean lines purchased it and made an announcement that shocked the industry.
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They were going to convert the France into a full -time cruise ship.
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Since speed was no longer a concern, they shut down one engine room and removed two of the four propellers.
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To get passengers to islands without deep ports, they installed tenders.
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These are smaller ships that ferried passengers to shore.
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To open up amenities to all passengers, they took out the barriers between class sections.
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And to attract enough vacationers, they loaded the ship with a massive roster of entertainment options.
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There are sporting facilities and shopping centers, the cinema, a multi -confession church, saunas, kindergarten, party games, educational courses, a library, charades.
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The ship began service in 1980, renamed the SS Norway.
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Where other ships made three to four stops in a week -long cruise, the Norway only made two.
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They weren't advertising a cruise to a destination.
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The ship was the destination itself.
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The Norway proved that size worked for cruise ships,
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and it kicked off a race to build bigger and bigger ships that changed the look of cruise ships forever.
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To fit more cabins and amenities, those superstructures — that's all of this that rises above the deck — became taller,
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which hid the once -prominent smokestacks.
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The smokestacks, because the ships are so tall, the funnels are these tiny little afterthoughts.
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To fit even more cabins and amenities, superstructures became wider, which shortened the bow.
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That's this forward part of the ship.
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There is no space where there's just an open deck where
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Jack and Rose can go stand and say they're king of the world or whatever.
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That's all gone.
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The bow didn't need to be long and pointed to cut through intense waves like on transatlantic liners.
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So builders rounded them out, giving even more square footage for amenities.
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When the Norway began service in 1980, it was the biggest operating passenger ship in the world,
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with an internal volume of over 70 ,000 gross tons.
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But the ships built over the following decades make the Norway look tiny, and even make once legendary ocean liners look small.
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The ship that held the record for so many years was Queen Elizabeth of 1940.
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She was 83 ,000 tons.
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People said they will never build a ship that big again.
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Well, now the new
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Royal Caribbean ships are literally three times the size.
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When this ship, the Icon of the Seas,
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launches in 2024, it'll be all the way up here with a volume of over 250 ,000 gross tons.
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That elegance of design is missing, I think, on a lot of the big new ships.
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It's just the way things go and, you know, we all miss what came before and pine on.
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And I'm sure people in 50
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or 100 years from now will pine on about how great -looking the ships were back in the 2020s.
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There are over 320 cruise ships sailing around the world right now.
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But there's only one ocean liner left — the Queen Mary II, also built in St. Nazaire, France, in service since 2004,
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and christened by Elizabeth II, still in regular service from Southampton to New York City.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “How cruise ships got so big”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: ship, ocean, liner, cruise, passenger. This video has 105 sentences and 1220 words to shadow. The speech runs for 7:14. The speaker talks at a natural 169 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 78% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| cruise noun | /kɹuz/ | A sea or lake voyage, especially one taken for pleasure. |
| liner noun | /ˈlaɪnɚ/ | A large passenger-carrying ship, especially one on a regular route; an ocean liner. |
| passenger noun | /ˈpæs.ɪn.d͡ʒɚ/ | One who rides or travels in a vehicle, but who does not operate it and is not a member of the crew. |
| amenities noun | /əˈmɛn.ə.tiːz/ | Synonym of pleasantries. |
| vacation noun | /veɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/ | An extended trip or journey away from home for rest or pleasure. |
| ton noun | /tʌn/ | The short ton of 2000 pounds (about 907 kg), 20 hundredweights of 100 pounds avoirdupois each. |
| gross adjective | /ɡɹoʊs/ | remarkably great, big, vast in an often unpleasant way; (of behaviour) Highly or conspicuously offensive. |
| comfort noun | /ˈkʌm.fət/ | Contentment, ease. |
| deck noun | /ˈdɛk/ | Any raised flat surface that can be walked on: a balcony; a porch; a raised patio; a flat rooftop. |
| mainstream adjective | /ˈmeɪn.stɹiːm/ | Used or accepted broadly rather than by small portions of population, market, scientific community, etc. |
| destination noun | /dɛstɪˈneɪʃən/ | The place set for the end of a journey or to which something is sent; place or point aimed at. |
| attract verb | /əˈtɹækt/ | To pull toward without touching. |
| cabin noun | /ˈkæbɪn/ | A small dwelling characteristic of the frontier, especially when built from logs with simple tools and not constructed by professional builders, but by those… |
| pine noun | /paɪn/ | Any coniferous tree of the genus Pinus. |
| stable noun | /ˈsteɪ.bəl/ | A building, wing or dependency set apart and adapted for lodging and feeding (and training) ungulates, especially horses. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| cut through verb | To take a shortcut through. | |
| kick off verb | To make the first kick in a game or part of a game. | |
| open up verb | To open. | |
| shut down verb | To close, terminate, or end; to stop operating, either permanently or temporarily. | |
| take off verb | To remove. | |
| take out verb | To remove. | |
| wind up verb | /waɪnd ˈʌp/ | To wind (rope, string, mainsprings, etc.) completely. |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 13 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, didn't, wasn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: theater /ˈθi(ə)tɚ/, grandmother /ˈɡɹæn(d)ˌmʌðɚ/, afterthought /ˈæft.ɚ.θɔt/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: vacation /veɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/, destination /dɛstɪˈneɪʃən/, shock /ʃɔk/, luxury /ˈlʌk.ʃə.ɹi/, shore /ʃɔɹ/
- Long words — get the stress right: amenities /əˈmɛn.ə.tiːz/, destination /dɛstɪˈneɪʃən/, differently /ˈdɪf.ə.ɹənt.li/, legendary /ˈlɛd͡ʒ.ənˌdɛɹ.i/, miserable /ˈmɪz(ə)ɹəbəl/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like cruise, liner, passenger.
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.