Shadowing Practice: How To Learn Any New Skill So Fast It’s Unfair - Learn English Speaking with Video

Choose a practice mode

Each mode opens a full-screen practice room.

354 sentences

If sentences are too short or too long, click Edit to adjust them.

If you're learning a new skill, especially if it's a complicated skill, you're probably learning that because you need to use that skill to achieve something.

And I think it is completely possible for most people to

learn a new skill in half the amount of time it

normally would have taken them just by cleaning up their approach to skill mastery.

So in this video, I want to teach you three strategies that help you reach skill mastery in half the time.

These are strategies that I not only teach, but I use myself for any skill that I'm learning.

The first point is actually understanding the path of mastery itself.

So if you think about learning a new skill, let's say you start here, you're level zero at the skill.

You don't know how to do this at all.

And you're trying to reach, let's say here, level five.

And level five is what we would call mastery.

If we define mastery, mastery is when you have accuracy,

and you have consistency, and you have fluency.

These three components must all exist to have mastery,

and they do not develop at the same rates or even with the same mechanisms of practice.

And so the path to mastery usually looks like this.

From level 0 being like nothing at the skill to getting to level 1,

all you're doing is you're trying to achieve basic accuracy.

Now, note the wording I used, you're trying to achieve accuracy.

So you haven't even achieved accuracy yet.

What this means is that you're learning a new skill, you can't do it correctly,

and you're trying to figure out how to even just do it correctly for the first time.

And so the growth that you see, your indicator of progress at this point, is just self-awareness.

You're gaining an understanding about your habits, your processes, how you think about things,

the types of mistakes you tend to make and the types of biases you tend to have.

And everyone has different mistakes and different biases.

On the path of learning a skill, there are a million different mistakes you could make.

Each individual is not going to make all 1 million mistakes.

They're only going to make 20 of those.

And you don't really know which 20 you're going to make until you go out there

and actually try and experiment and get real world data.

And so in this initial phase on your first step of the path of mastery, as long as you are learning more about the types of mistakes you tend to make,

what your process looks like how you tend to do things

you are actually making progress you can see that's actually a

very already very different way of thinking about progress compared to how most people measure it

because most people tend to measure it based on accuracy

and fluency straight away if they're not improving in accuracy

and they're not getting faster they say that they're not improving

and this happens all the time with learning to learn people

will join my program they're working through some techniques they're doing

it correctly it's taken them a couple weeks of practice they're able to do it correctly

but then they stop because it takes too long

and they're not recognizing that fluency and speed is something

that happens later in your path to mastery not at the beginning

and so this is an example of why someone would give up despite making good progress and so at level one

you are developing self-awareness where at level zero you did not even have any awareness

and another framework of thinking about this sometimes this is called

the unconscious incompetence point whereas this at level one is called

the conscious incompetence point now after a certain amount of practice you have a certain level of accuracy

and now you're able to do it correctly for at least one or two times.

A lot of the time we tend to think

that now we've learned the skill and so now we should be getting faster.

It's still not the case because the next thing that we need to hit off is consistency.

That's the next part.

So at level two our target that we're aiming for is consistency and your improvement at this point,

your indicator of progress is your success rate.

Now this is really important because you can't measure a success rate with one attempt.

If you measure your progress based on a single attempt, it's just binary.

Did you do it accurately or not?

And so you might think, yay, I'm improving if you did it correctly.

And then if you did it wrong, it's like, oh no, I'm getting worse.

That's not accurate.

You have to measure it across a certain amount of sample size.

This depends on the skill.

So let's say you're learning a really simple skill, like learning to spin your pen.

You might practice this, get accuracy one time.

You can spin it and you catch it one time.

And then you might do it again and again.

And for every 10 attempts, you maybe get it right once.

And then the next 10 attempts, you get it right twice.

And the next 10, you get it right three times.

So you can see there's improvement here because we're measuring the success rate, even though the majority of the time, we're actually doing it wrong and we're failing.

And so what happens is that during this time,

what's actually happening in our brain is that our brain is building conditionality on the skill and on the knowledge.

It's understanding in this context, with these variables, in this environment, I'm able to do this correctly.

This is what it takes.

But when you change one of those variables, it's a slightly different context, it's a little bit more challenging, different combination of things.

Now it's a different situation.

Someone who is a master of that skill can still do it, but you are not a master yet.

You're only at level two.

So for you, you're not going to be able to know how to handle that.

You're going to make a mistake.

And as you do that, you're gaining more self-awareness.

And you're sort of cycling between these two levels.

Every single time you encounter a new variable, a new factor that makes it more challenging.

And your brain is starting to understand all the different contexts

and how it needs to slightly change the way that you perform the skill to be able to succeed more consistently.

And this is the part that is often the most time consuming for skill development.

This is usually the part where people talk about this 10,000 hour rule.

You need to just practice things 10,000 hours to become a master at it.

It's because you need to expose yourself to enough of these different contexts and challenges and variables to have consistency.

And so there's actually a really practical point that appears when you think about it this way.

What do you do if the skill that you're learning doesn't allow you to get many reps in?

You can't measure your success.

Like if you're using a skill once a month

and you need to have at least let's say five or six reps of using the skill to get a success rate, you know it's going to take you six months,

a year to be able to get enough data to even know what your baseline success rate is.

And so this becomes a really challenging situation.

And actually the solution to this is that you have to increase the reps.

100

If you're in a situation where the only practice

101

and the only reps that you're getting are so infrequent that you can't even measure your success rate, you're just not going to be able to measure it.

102

And you're also not going to be able to improve very fast

103

because your brain doesn't have many repetitions at learning these different variables and getting that practice.

104

So your options are either find a way to get more repetitions in more frequently or

105

Be okay with developing the skill more slowly and what I find with a lot of

106

Top learners that are really able to learn skills quickly is that they're very proactive about this.

107

They'll identify Hey, there's a bottleneck here.

108

I can't measure my success rate because I'm not getting enough reps in of practice My consistency isn't improving fast enough.

109

I need to do something and change my

110

environment my reality to allow me to have those repetitions whereas

111

a Lot of people probably most people take a more passive approach to this and just say Hey, I'm not getting enough reps in

112

I'm learning this really slowly and they just don't really do anything about it

113

So you have to give yourself the ingredients the opportunity to improve quickly

114

now in the conscious competence framework this is called conscious competency

115

and usually what this means is that it requires a very high level of effort

116

and attention and focus and concentration for you to be able to do it accurately

117

and so going from level two to level three your indicator of progress is

118

that the effort starts going down so your effort starts reducing It becomes easier.

119

And that's your indicator of progress.

120

As you continue to develop, the amount of effort you need to put in starts dropping.

121

What this means in your brain is that at this level, we're starting to develop a habit.

122

Your existing neural connections about how it performs a skill are starting to become a little bit more reinforced, a bit more autopilot is taking over.

123

And so you can spend your focus and attention on the parts

124

that are more tricky and that improves your consistency

125

Because now you're not having to spend all of your focus on just every single step of the process

126

And so again at this point, I want you to pay attention to the fact that we're still not very fast

127

Speed of using the skill has not actually come yet.

128

In fact, it's only in the next level here level four where speed

129

comes in and I'm going to put this in brackets because there's a very important part about speed.

130

Speed is not something that you develop.

131

Speed is a natural by-product when you're able to do all the lower levels correctly.

132

Well, not level zero.

133

Okay, not that part, but all the levels from one to three, when you are able to have accuracy and you can do it consistently

134

and you can do it with decreasing amounts of effort, what naturally will occur is that your speed will start to increase.

135

And what I've noticed in my years of coaching is that when you deliberately try to increase your speed,

136

it often just increases your rate of error or decreases your consistency.

137

And then you start introducing all sorts of different mistakes and complexities with developing the In reality, if you just don't worry about getting faster at all,

138

you will just naturally get faster.

139

Unless you're deliberately trying to do it slowly, which most people aren't.

140

And so in level four on the path to mastery, you start noticing, without even trying, it's getting faster and faster and faster.

141

Your consistency is not dropping, your accuracy is staying high,

142

but it's just naturally getting faster until level five you're at mastery you have accuracy consistency and fluency aka speed

143

and they're locked in this is where you're going to get

144

those really hard plateaus your accuracy i mean your accuracy

145

and consistency are already very high

146

but your speed is just not getting any faster at all

147

because you're about as fast as it can get unless you completely change your entire process

148

and it's at these levels here

149

that in the conscious competence framework sometimes we We call this unconscious competence

150

and that you're able to do it great without even trying.

151

And so simply just by being aware of the path of mastery, it allows you to have a more accurate measure of your progress.

152

And also because you know what the right thing to measure is, you can also change the way you practice to get good at that metric.

153

For example, if you know that fluency is something that comes much later, you don't worry about trying to get fast.

154

If your current focus is accuracy, you focus on just building accuracy.

155

If your focus is consistency, you just focus on consistency.

156

And so just being aware of this allows you to hit mastery much more quickly and easily with less demotivation.

157

So that's the first part.

158

The second strategy is early interleaving.

159

Now my normal approach to learning a skill used to be that I will try to build that accuracy and consistency, And I'll just try to get really, really good at it.

160

And then when I feel like I'm at a certain level, I'm going to challenge myself by trying it on different types of contexts and just more challenging situations.

161

And then as expected, my accuracy and my consistency will break down because I'm challenging myself at a higher level.

162

And then I'll just continue at that until I'm able to do it and then I'll move on.

163

That's actually a slower way to develop.

164

And this is what early interleaving is about you actually want to continually mix up the challenges

165

and the variety of your practice

166

from your earliest levels of practice

167

and one of the famous examples of using interleaving actually comes from basketball free throwing

168

so the idea was

169

that i guess in the old days the method of practicing

170

your basketball free throw was to stand in the like penalty zone line i i don't watch basketball

171

and I don't play basketball.

172

You know, you stand in one spot

173

and you throw the ball into the hoop and you just continue to do that until you get accuracy.

174

And then what sports scientists figured out was

175

that actually your ability to accurately and consistently throw the ball from that spot goes up when you practice around that area.

176

So you don't just stay in that spot, you stand in front of that spot, behind that spot, to the left of that spot, to the right of that spot, while you're moving, while you're staying still.

177

And by creating variation early on and frequently in that practice process,

178

what it does is it allows your brain to find the edges of the skill, which is, I know that's like a kind of an abstract imagery,

179

but from your brain's perspective, when you're learning a skill, it doesn't know how to do it in a way that produces a certain result.

180

It doesn't know what to do and how much to do.

181

How much is too much?

182

How much is not enough?

183

What does it feel like to underthrow, overthrow, under-aim, over-aim?

184

And so by creating slightly different situations and constantly challenging yourself beyond your comfort zone,

185

it actually helps your brain figure out the right way of doing it.

186

In a way, you could say that it's learning more from the mistakes than it is from the successes.

187

And so the way that I like to think about applying interleaving

188

when you're learning a new skill is to think about lateral versus vertical challenge.

189

So lateral versus vertical challenges.

190

So let's say I'm learning to learn and I'm practicing a mind mapping skill.

191

So I want to be able to do a mind map for this topic using this technique that I've been given.

192

That would be the center point, that's our primary dominant goal.

193

A lateral challenge would be to apply the same technique for a topic that's similar level of complexity

194

but a different topic or a different set of concepts.

195

So what we're changing with a lateral challenge is the context that we're are applying the skill to.

196

On the other hand, with a vertical challenge, we're gonna change the level of difficulty.

197

So this might mean trying to use a mind map technique for a harder subject

198

or a more complex set of concepts or maybe learning from a resource that's harder to understand.

199

We're keeping the context relatively similar but we're changing the difficulty of applying the technique.

200

I'll give you another example.

201

Let's say that you are a software developer

202

and you are learning how to create a checkout page on a website with some custom billing software.

203

The software is new.

204

You've never really created a checkout in this way before.

205

There's lots of complexities to it You need to learn how to do this So you have your goal state, which is the specific checkout page You need to create the project

206

that you've been given and you have the particular component

207

that you're building You read through the documentation

208

and it says this component is meant to be used in this way

209

and it can achieve this function

210

So your first round of practice is just to try to do it in

211

that way It's often the simplest most obvious way of trying to apply the skill You might do

212

that a couple of times get your head around that and now instead of moving on to the next component

213

Assuming that you've got mastery over this

214

or instead of just continuing to Practice doing that until you're able to do that consistently.

215

We could apply a lateral challenge So this might be building a very similar thing, but integrating it with a different software, a similar level of complexity,

216

similar functions that you're using, a similar architecture and approach, but just a different product that you're integrating.

217

Whereas a vertical challenge might be

218

building a slightly more complicated checkout than the one that you've been given as part of your project, creating a more complex logic or a complex workflow.

219

And so these types of challenges, you want to do this very early on when you're learning a skill, and that's going to allow you to learn that skill much more quickly.

220

And this process of applying these challenges is a form of what we call interleaving.

221

Now, before I go into the third strategy, I will say that this idea of path to mastery and early interleaving are two really important strategies,

222

but they are still only two strategies.

223

And there are lots of other little strategies that you might be able to apply in different types of contexts.

224

And I'm not going to go over those in this video

225

because I think these three really make a big difference for most people.

226

But if you do want to go a little bit deeper into this

227

and you want to get a few more of these types

228

of tips then I would recommend checking out my free weekly newsletter.

229

If you don't already know I have a newsletter it's free

230

and sent out weekly and I talk about these types of insights

231

and these tips on how you can learn new skills and learn new knowledge more quickly.

232

I usually talk about some kind of important principle like this path mastery thing is actually a concept

233

that I talk about in one of the newsletters as well

234

and I'll give you some practical takeaways for you to practice throughout the rest of the week

235

and in a way it becomes this week by week pretty digestible course

236

that you can take to start upgrading the way that you learn

237

so if you're interested in that i'll leave a link to

238

that in the description to sign up below anyway moving into the third one

239

which is something that i call gap seeking

240

so before i talked about this idea of the 10 000 hour rule

241

which i'm sure you know You've all heard about before but you don't need 10,000 hours

242

Some people take this really literally in fact I've had people take it

243

so literally actually count the amount of hours that they've spent on it

244

And then they start getting really anxious when they're approaching like 9,000 hours

245

and they're like I know I'm not as good as I need to be yet

246

it's entirely possible for you to spend 10,000 hours learning a skill and and still not be very good.

247

And it's also entirely possible to spend half the amount of time, or sometimes even like a tenth of that time, and be very good.

248

And so what's important is to understand the science behind the 10,000 hour rule.

249

What is it that's meant to happen in those 10,000 hours?

250

Because if you know what's meant to happen in those 10,000 hours, you can just directly trigger that.

251

You can just make that happen.

252

Because it's not the hours, it's not the time passing that makes the difference, It's what happens in those hours.

253

And one of the biggest things that happens in those hours is the idea of finding these gaps.

254

And I think gap seeking is a good one to end on

255

because it ties together the path of mastery

256

and the early interleaving part into kind of like a single frame of mind

257

that you should have when you're learning new skills.

258

And this is a frame of mind that I didn't used to have

259

and I found really uncomfortable to have when I was younger.

260

And I think reframing the way

261

that I thought about learning new skills with this gap seeking mentality was one of the most important changes

262

that I made that allowed me to start learning skills much more quickly.

263

And so to explain this, I'm going to refer to something called the zone of proximal development.

264

The zone of proximal development, which is a theory that was coined by this guy called Vygotsky,

265

who's this very well-known learning and educational theorist and philosopher years ago.

266

The idea with the Zone of Proximal Development is that you have this comfort zone in the middle,

267

and this comfort zone is made up of your current level of skills and habits and processes.

268

So your current skill is represented by the edge of this comfort zone.

269

Anything that is Outside of that is beyond your current skill

270

and anything that is inside of that is something that you find very easy You already have mastery of it.

271

So when you're learning a new skill, obviously It being a new skill is not going to be inside your comfort zone.

272

So it's gonna be somewhere Outside of this and if it's a complex skill, it's probably gonna be like way out here, right?

273

It's far beyond your current level of comfort

274

and actually even further than the zone of proximal development which is the area just outside of your comfort zone.

275

The idea is that if you are learning skills inside this zone of proximal development,

276

it's outside of your comfort zone but still close enough that allows you to learn new skills very quickly.

277

If you go way too far out and you try to learn the skill all the way over there, it's so different to your existing habits and your processes

278

that your brain doesn't really know what to do and

279

so it's very slow at learning it and so

280

if you want to get there what you need to do is get to this point

281

and then you need to get to this point

282

and you need to get to this point and get to this one

283

so obviously your comfort zone is kind of expanding every single time you're learning it

284

and your zone of proximal development is obviously you know expanding

285

until one day your goal state is inside your zone of Proximal Development and now you can learn it.

286

And that's basically what we're trying to do with this Path of Mastery.

287

The Path of Mastery is you hop in your way over from, you know, here all the way through to this point.

288

Okay, let's just clean that up.

289

Now here's the issue that happens in reality when you're trying to learn a new skill, which is that it's easy enough to go from your current comfort zone into your zone of Proximal Development

290

and just learn this new skill.

291

So you can go from here to here relatively easily

292

and you continue to practice this and it gets more comfortable you You start gaining this mastery,

293

you know, it starts getting easier and easier And so these are all indicators that your comfort zone is expanding out.

294

So let me redraw this to encompass that Okay,

295

so now our comfort zone has expanded out and likewise our zone of Proximal development is slightly out as well.

296

So we're one step closer.

297

So naturally, of course, the next step as I just explained is for us to take the next step outside here.

298

This next step is not as easy as it seems

299

and the reason is that it's actually much easier and sometimes even more intuitive

300

for us to stay inside here and just continue to loop around instead of going to the next stage.

301

And there are a couple of reasons for this.

302

First of all, when you go from where you were before in your comfort zone to here you at

303

that time experienced your error rate was going up your consistency was not very high you had to travel

304

that path of mastery until it became a new skill

305

and a new habit and then only then did it become comfortable for you

306

and now your error rate is very low and your consistency is very good and so it feels a little off,

307

it feels a little wrong to now deliberately do something that is going to increase your error all over again.

308

It feels like you're making negative progress.

309

And so that point is just a misunderstanding of the fact that you're still making progress, it's just that you're moving on to the next level of the skill.

310

And so that's just something to be aware of.

311

But the other issue, and this is really the big one,

312

is that we as humans have a tendency to reinforce what we already know rather than seeking out new uncertainty.

313

We like to know things.

314

We like to be good at things.

315

We like things to be certain and stable and predictable.

316

And so when we practice for 10,000 hours,

317

what's actually happening in those 10,000 hours is that we are continually exposing us to challenges that show areas of uncertainty.

318

And as we overcome each uncertainty, that's building mastery.

319

But the reason it takes so long, when it doesn't have to,

320

is that most of that time tends to be spent on just reinforcing what we're already comfortable with.

321

So we develop an initial level of comfort, and then we reinforce that.

322

It might take us, you know, 10 hours to get to this point and then we'll spend another 20 hours just reinforcing here.

323

And so the feeling, and this is the part that actually feels counterintuitive in a way, because the feeling is that when this happens,

324

what we're doing is we're stabilizing the skill.

325

And that seems like a good thing.

326

We've learned a new skill, we're trying to stabilize it before we push on ahead.

327

And that's totally appropriate if we were in the earlier stages of the path to mastery.

328

If we are in the accuracy or the consistency phase,

329

we absolutely need to stabilize to improve the consistency or improve the accuracy until we get fluency.

330

But once it's become a habit and therefore we actually feel comfortable with it,

331

there is no real benefit to continuing to stay at that level.

332

And the reason I said that this is kind of like a biologically hardwired thing is that

333

staying inside here and looping at the same level of comfort is a self-reinforcing loop.

334

What happens is that we have a task that used to be challenging for us.

335

We learn to get good at that task.

336

We are able to succeed at that task.

337

This makes us feel good.

338

And then we continue to loop and do this because it feels good.

339

And so staying in that zone where we're already comfortable becomes something that we look forward to and that's self-reinforcing.

340

But it's also inadvertently self-sabotaging if what you needed to get to was way over here.

341

And so if you're trying to learn a complex skill or to a high level,

342

you always need to keep a level of awareness on systematically resolving uncertainties.

343

What that means is that you are actively thinking about where your current level of skill is, what feels uncertain?

344

Where does your confidence drop with applying the skill?

345

And trying to resolve that, going towards the challenge, moving towards the mistakes and the failures.

346

And then once you're comfortable with that, then finding the next zone of uncertainty.

347

And obviously we can use our target skill level as an indicator.

348

Like if there's a certain outcome that you want to achieve, a certain problem that you want to solve, a project that you want to do, you're going to know if you are at the skill level where you can actually do that successfully or not.

349

So you can use that as a goalpost and continue to find areas of uncertainty

350

that allow you to move along in this way

351

instead of getting stuck into that very easy and common trap of just cycling within your new comfort zone.

352

And honestly, just this final mentality of gap seeking alone can probably cut down your skill mastery time by like 40-50%.

353

Now, if one of the complex skills you want to develop is learning

354

and you want to be able to learn any new skill more quickly, you might want to check out this video here where I go into that topic in a lot more depth.

Download App

Everything you need to speak fluently

AI PronunciationScore every sentence

IPA PracticeMaster every sound

VocabularyBuild your word bank

Vocab GameLearn while playing

Scan QR

Download on theApp Store Get it onGoogle Play

Same Channel

FOR YOU

Recommend Video

37 sentences

HOW TO MASTER ANY SKILL FAST

Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults

116 sentences

How To Become Dangerously Self-Educated (complete plan)

Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults

194 sentences

How To Actually Get Good At Hard Things | Napoleon's Learning Strategy

Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults

156 sentences

The Psychology of Fast Learners: Why You’re Actually Learning Wrong

Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults

151

12 sentences

How To Learn Faster Than 99% of People

Daily ConversationWorking Adults

220 sentences

I learned 3 languages to C1 with a 30-minute routine, so you can just copy me

Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students

106 sentences

Why Some People Become Fluent — and Others Stay Stuck

Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults

306 sentences

Give me 14 minutes and I'll help you think & speak faster

Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults

271 sentences

How to Build Unfair Advantage in your 20s

Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students

171 sentences

Learn 10X Faster In 10 Minutes

Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults

63 sentences

The Art of Doing Less and Achieving More

Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “How To Learn Any New Skill So Fast It’s Unfair”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: skill, learning, mastery, zone, accuracy. This video has 354 sentences and 5033 words to shadow. The speech runs for 28:37. The speaker talks at a natural 176 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 86% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
mastery noun	/ˈmæs.tɚ.i/	The position or authority of a master; dominion; command; supremacy; superiority.
consistency noun	/kənˈsɪs.tən.si/	Local coherence.
proximal adjective	/ˈpɹɒksɪməl/	Closer to the point of attachment or observation.
interleave verb		To insert (pages, which are normally blank) between the pages of a book.
reinforce verb	/ˌɹiː.ɪnˈfɔːs/	To strengthen, especially by addition or augmentation.
fluency noun	/ˈfluːənsi/	The quality of smoothness of flow.
indicator noun	/ˈɪn.dɪˌkeɪ.tə(ɹ)/	A pointer or index that indicates something.
uncertainty noun	/ʌnˈsɜːtənti/	Doubt; the condition of being uncertain or without conviction.
lateral adjective	/ˈlætəɹəl/	Situated on one side or other of the body or of an organ, especially in the region furthest from the median plane.
variable adjective	[ˈvæɹ.i.ə.bl̩]	Able to vary or be varied.
checkout noun	/ˈt͡ʃɛkˌaʊt/	The process of checking out of a hotel, or the latest time to vacate a room in one.
complexity noun	/kəmˈplɛk.sɪ.ti/	The state of being complex; intricacy; entanglement.
vertical adjective	/ˈvɝ.tɪ.kəl/	Standing, pointing, or moving straight up or down; parallel to the local direction of gravity; along the direction of a plumb line; perpendicular to something…
conscious adjective	/ˈkɑn.ʃəs/	Alert, awake; with one's mental faculties active.
repetition noun	/ˌɹɛp.əˈtɪʃ.ən/	The act or an instance of repeating or being repeated.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
figure out verb	To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
check out verb	To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.).
go up verb	To move upwards.
break down verb	To stop functioning.
clean up verb	To make an area or a thing clean; to pick up a mess; to tidy.
cut down verb	To cut downward.
give up verb	To surrender (someone or something); to inform on (someone).
go down verb	To descend; to move from a higher place to a lower one.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

You don't know how to do this at all.
Did you do it accurately or not?
You're only at level two.
You're going to make a mistake.
Where does your confidence drop with applying the skill?

Grammar in this video

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

Structure	In the video
“Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true	used to be · used to have
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	haven't even achieved · we've learned · has not actually come
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	is called · I've been given · you've been given
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	Someone who is · skill, which is · state, which is

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 146 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'm, we're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: theorist /ˈθiːəɹəst/, overthrow /ˌoʊvɚˈθɹoʊ/, tenth /tɛnθ/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: conscious /ˈkɑn.ʃəs/, repetition /ˌɹɛp.əˈtɪʃ.ən/, unconscious /ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəs/, sabotage /ˈsæb.əˌtɑʒ/, documentation /ˌdɑkjəmɛnˈteɪʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: consistency /kənˈsɪs.tən.si/, indicator /ˈɪn.dɪˌkeɪ.tə(ɹ)/, uncertainty /ʌnˈsɜːtənti/, complexity /kəmˈplɛk.sɪ.ti/, repetition /ˌɹɛp.əˈtɪʃ.ən/

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 mastery, consistency, proximal.

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 To Learn Any New Skill So Fast It’s Unfair - Learn English Speaking with Video

Choose a practice mode

Download App

The SIMPLEST Way to Become Good at Learning

You Can Become A Genius In 12 Months. Here's How...

The Psychology of Deep Thinkers

How To Learn Any Skill So Fast It Feels Illegal

How to Remember Everything You Read

How to Think So Clearly People Assume You’re A Genius

How to Learn Anything Once and Remember Forever

Watch This For 18 Minutes, and You’ll Outlearn 99.9% Of People

How to Learn So Fast People Assume You're Naturally Gifted

How to Build Systems to Actually Achieve Your Goals

How to Read Anything Faster Than Everyone Else

How to Learn ANYTHING Faster Than Everyone

HOW TO MASTER ANY SKILL FAST

How To Become Dangerously Self-Educated (complete plan)

How To Actually Get Good At Hard Things | Napoleon's Learning Strategy

The Psychology of Fast Learners: Why You’re Actually Learning Wrong

How To Learn Faster Than 99% of People

I learned 3 languages to C1 with a 30-minute routine, so you can just copy me

Why Some People Become Fluent — and Others Stay Stuck

Give me 14 minutes and I'll help you think & speak faster

How to Build Unfair Advantage in your 20s

Learn 10X Faster In 10 Minutes

The Art of Doing Less and Achieving More

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Sentences worth repeating

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?