Shadowing Practice: How I Learn Multiple Languages While Working a 9-5 (just copy me) - Learn English Speaking with Video

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you want to learn a language but between work, school, and everything else going on, it feels like it's impossible to find the time.

A month ago I started my first 9 to 5

and overnight I went from feeling like I had hours free every day to barely any free time.

But the thing is I really love learning languages.

I've become conversational in six languages the past few years

and we were not about to let a new job stop us from keeping up the language learning grind.

So I changed my routine.

Today I'm taking you through a full day from

when I wake up to when I go to bed

and show you my exact routine so that you can learn how to fit language learning into your busy life too.

Let's do it!

But yeah, just woke up.

It's like 7 15.

I'm gonna go wash up and whatnot and I will see you guys in a bit.

Alright so now I'm here in my kitchen.

It's like 730.

So I'm gonna have some breakfast real quick.

We're gonna head to the gym

and I'm gonna show you guys how even in the morning I sprinkle in a bit of language learning.

Hello.

Alright so our first stop of the day is the gym.

But if you guys noticed, I got three things with me.

We got a basketball.

We got these little boards to do some exercise with and we got our Chinese book.

Being someone whose job is looking at screens all day, and I'm sure a lot of you guys is as well, I realize it's nice sometimes not to always wake up in the morning

and look at a screen and look at your phone right away.

Getting into our language learning, this here is a Mandarin book.

It's like a beginner's Mandarin book.

It's got some short stories in it.

I'll show you guys what that looks like on the screen, and we'll talk about this more later, but while I am learning multiple languages per day, I try to cut that to two languages each day.

I think if you try to focus on more than improving two languages each day, things can get a bit messy and stuff.

You could definitely stay at a maintenance level in your other languages, but I would recommend if you want to learn multiple languages, I would pick a max up to you.

Those two for me these past months have been Mandarin and also Cantonese, which we'll get to later.

One other thing that I also do here in the morning, but also really just throughout the day in general, is using the languages that I'm trying to learn and trying to actually think in those languages.

Pretty much like describing your day, what's going on, describing your thoughts in those languages, it helps you stop being a learner of that language

and more go on your way to being a speaker of that language.

For example, right now, I'll typically think in Mandarin, to me to myself like, Ah, so I'm in the gym, doing a exercise.

Today is the week of the week.

And I will be happy.

Today I don't know if I will eat what I'm going to eat.

But I'm doing my job lately, so I'm excited to be happy.

Once you're already able to form some of your own sentences, start just trying to describe your day and think to yourself in

that language because you'll very easily come across words that you're like, oh, how do I say bench or like weights?

If you don't know it, you could look it up, add it to your flashcards, and you just got a new word that you learned.

Okay, workout done.

It's like 8.30.

Now I've got to hurry up, eat some food, and get on the road, and get to work.

All right, I'm in the car now, and we are on our way to work.

Normally in the car, as most people do, it's like, I'll typically listen to music, but I want to show you guys one other thing you can do on your commute that will really help your pronunciation,

speaking, listening comprehension, all that good stuff.

Now what I'm going to do is listen to this podcast, and as we're listening to it, I'm going to shadow the speaker.

I'm going to say the words along with them.

Let me give you guys an example of what that looks like.

It's like, So you guys have the idea,

the person in the podcast is saying the words out, and I'm kind of just repeating them right after them, I'm shadowing them.

What this does, one, you're imitating a native speaker's accent, so you're naturally going to improve your accent, because you're following their speech patterns,

which are going to be much more native sounding than if you just tried saying words on your own, early on in your language learning process.

So one, you're improving your accent.

Two, what it's doing is helping you form sentences.

So early on when you're starting to learn languages, we have to try to form sentences and use our brain to like connect word blocks, them together to form ideas, right?

That's like the process of forming a complete sentence.

But early on when you're learning, sometimes it's hard to do that.

And so what you get by shadowing someone else is they're doing that harder part for you.

They're connecting the blocks of the sentence and you are listening along with it, practicing your accent, but you're also subconsciously kind of hearing how it sounds to form sentences.

Some of the words that she's saying, I don't know what they mean.

Totally okay to listen to something where you don't understand everything.

Real quick, I want to share with you guys.

I made a list of channels and podcasts I would recommend for your language learning for a bunch of different languages.

So if you're learning Mandarin, if you're a beginner, I would recommend Lazy Chinese or ChinesePod.

If you're an intermediate, I would recommend the podcast I'm listening to now called Cozy Mandarin.

If you are learning Spanish and you're a beginner, I would recommend Spanish After Hours.

If you're an intermediate or advanced, I would recommend Dreaming Spanish, the YouTube channel.

If you are learning Cantonese, I would recommend 5-Minute Cantonese if you're a beginner.

If you're an intermediate, I would recommend Cantonese with Brittany or Winnie Cantonese, which is a podcast.

If you're learning Portuguese, I would say, regardless of level, I would recommend Speaking Brazilian School.

And then, if you're an intermediate, there's one other channel that I'd like.

Put her channel name on the screen now, too.

If you're learning French, I would really recommend French mornings with Elisa.

If you're learning one of those languages, I would check out one of those channels.

I know.

One egg has three parts.

Every egg has three parts.

Alright, we're at the office.

I'm going to work.

It's a few minutes after 9, so I likely you guys have to get to work now.

I will see you guys later in the day for some more language learning.

So I graduated from grad school like two months ago and I got a job as an engineer.

So my nine to five

or nine to six ish is spent pretty much here in our office

and I'm on my computer and I'm coding away building some cool stuff.

Not too much to share with you guys throughout this part of the day in terms of language learning

because I don't do much language learning.

I focus on my job.

Yeah, I'm gonna get to work and I'll catch up with you guys probably sometime later in the day or after work.

Alright, real quick.

I'll teach you one way to say bye to your homies in Portuguese that they say in Brazil.

You say, We're together.

Alright y'all, we're done with work.

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Time to get back home.

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We're together.

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Yes, sir.

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Okay, how it's open?

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We are back.

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We are done with work.

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That was a pretty long work day.

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Normally I work till like 5.30ish.

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We're going to commute back home.

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And I'll see you guys a bit later in the evening

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to show you what our evening routine looks like for language learning.

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So it's about 7.30 now.

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I took some time to get home and eat some food, relax, watch some YouTube, just chill, basically.

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Now we're getting to the good stuff.

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We're going to start my little evening, nighttime language learning session, which normally consists of two parts.

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The first part is what I like to call immersion, or the most active learning I'm actually doing throughout my day.

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The second part, which is going to be some speaking practice that I'll show you guys in a bit, Pretty much what I do for my first session here is still going to be learning Mandarin.

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I want to hear the language more, interact with it more throughout my day.

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Also, like learn some new words.

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Typically, I'll watch some content on YouTube or Netflix,

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dual subtitle, Chrome extension, on top of just watching these videos that makes watching content into like a real language learning experience.

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And you guys can see, for example, right here, I'm watching this Mandarin video.

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And it gives me a few things.

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For videos that have subtitles, it's going to give me the Chinese subtitles on the video.

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under that it's going to give me the English it's also going to give me

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if you're a beginner learner the opinion as well to each word

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so you know like how words are said

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and basically what I do is I just chill here in my living room get some good background music going

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and for example whenever I see a new word uh like

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this right here I could just hover over it click on it

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and that'll save my word to my flashcards that I can go

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and study for later so for example I could just go on my phone later

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and if I just open up my app and see that

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that word awesome and I could see I got a brand new word here, then I can click on and I can go and do flashcards with it to learn from it.

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So regardless of whatever specific tool you want to use, what I'm getting at here and what I like to,

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you know, fit into my evening learning is just finding something that you can understand like a decent amount of, like hearing how the language sounds from native speakers.

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I typically do this for about 20-30 minutes.

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I'll just watch some content in the language I'm trying to learn.

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Oh!

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Alright, so by this point in the day, we've gotten a lot of input, a lot of listening practice in, but we haven't really got that much speaking practice in.

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Before starting my job, I would normally get

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that speaking practice by something like hopping on omitv

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and trying to find someone to have a good conversation with

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and while i still do that from time to time i've realized

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that i want something with a bit more structure

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if i want to keep improving consistently

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so what i do now once a week is i do

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a 30 minute online tutor session i've been doing it in cantonese

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and yeah just having something on my calendar means

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that no matter how busy i get i know

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that i'm gonna have an opportunity to get some speaking practice

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in all right my lesson is about to start let's hop on Good morning, good morning.

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Good morning, have you eaten?

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Have you eaten?

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What do you think?

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Do you think you'll be in Guangzhou, one year, will be in the rain?

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Alright, so we just finished up our lesson.

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That went super well.

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I really enjoyed chatting with the teacher.

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Now that we're done with that, I want to show you guys what I do after my lessons that makes them really useful.

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It actually helps you take a lot away from the lesson.

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So hopping over here to my computer, you guys can see I have this Google document here.

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And what this is, is this is from today's lesson

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and these were some words that naturally came up

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that I didn't know how to say that I now can have here

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and then do things like add them to flashcards or learn from later.

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So we talked about food and now I know how to say onigiri.

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What I do here is have these words, right?

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I got my 30 minutes of speaking practice here on a Tuesday.

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And now throughout the rest of the week, I'm gonna do my work to actually learn these new words because I've said them once today, but I'm probably gonna forget them by tomorrow.

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So what I do is I take these words and I go over here to my flashcard app which is Speakeasy, the app I made.

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And I'm going to just add it into my flashcards basically.

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I'm gonna do that for a bunch of these new words.

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And then throughout the week, I could just go on my phone and I can just do flashcards with these words.

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But yeah, with that, that is pretty much how I fit my language learning into a busy schedule while working at 9 to 5.

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If there's one thing I'd hope for you guys to leave the video with is

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that finding ways to integrate studying into your day.

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When we're busy, which me and you both are, it's harder to find these big time chunks and blocks of time to study,

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but it's a lot easier if we can find smaller ways to fit learning into things

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that we're already doing in our day.

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Like the gym, like the commute, like things like watching TV.

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And I would also say at the end of the day, the best language learning routine isn't the perfect one, but it's the one that you can actually stick to consistently.

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And yeah, hopefully some of these tips are able to apply to you

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and help you out with whatever language you might be learning at whatever level you are at.

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If you guys want more vlogs like this,

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let me know in the comments and we'll get some more vlogs, some more daily life, some more language learning vlogs.

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We got a Portuguese vlog up over here.

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We got a Kansas-Diesemander vlog up over here.

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Go check them out and I'll see you guys next video.

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See ya!

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164 sentences

Boost Your Daily English Speaking with Real-Life Routines

This video is all about turning busy schedules into language-learning gold—perfect for anyone aiming to build english speaking practice into their 9-5 life. The fluency milestone here? Consistency over intensity. You’ll learn to integrate English into daily moments, moving from "learning" to "using"—the key to natural speaking.

Phrase Bank: Reusable Expressions for Daily Life

"I’m gonna go wash up and whatnot" – Casual way to describe routine tasks.
"sprinkle in a bit of language learning" – Add small, regular practice to your day.
"cut that to two languages each day" – Limit focus for better progress.
"come across words that you’re like, oh, how do I say..." – Natural way to talk about new vocabulary gaps.

Fix Your Weak Spots: Shadowing for Pronunciation & Flow

The video’s commute tip is a game-changer for shadow speech—a technique where you repeat phrases immediately after hearing them. Try it with the dialogue: pause, mimic the speaker’s tone and rhythm, and notice how they connect words (e.g., "gonna" instead of "going to"). This fixes stiff pronunciation and builds listening comprehension. For extra practice, use a shadowing app or shadowing site to slow down clips. Remember: even 5 minutes a day of learn english with youtube videos like this can transform your speaking. Start small—think in English while making breakfast, describe your workout, or shadow the car ride dialogue. Progress happens in the gaps, not the grand gestures!

Grammar in this video

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

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	If you're an intermediate, I would recommend · If you are learning Cantonese, I would recommend · If you're learning Portuguese, I would say
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	I've become · have been · we've gotten
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	Cantonese, which is · part, which is · app which is
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	is spent · are said

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: How I Learn Multiple Languages While Working a 9-5 (just copy me) - Learn English Speaking with Video

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