Shadowing Practice: Inside Jensen and Danneel Ackles' Home | Open Door | Architectural Digest - Learn English Speaking with Video
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244 sentences
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Hello!
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Welcome AD to Austin, Texas and this is our home.
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My name is Jensen Ackles.
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Danielle Ackles.
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We got this house about four and a half years ago.
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It was not for sale but we drove by it.
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We were like let's make them an offer.
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Luckily for us they were looking to move and
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so we we bought it and we've been doing some work on it ever since.
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Anyway, this is the fun part so we're excited to show you guys so come on in.
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So this is our nice little sunken living room.
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We didn't really want a formal space.
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We have three kids now, so we can't have any spaces like that.
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I feel like we're in the belly of a ship with these big beams and a lot of woodwork going on.
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We wanted it to feel like an old lake house because we're on the lake.
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When we were younger, before all of our kids, in the old Laurel Canyon house, we used to always invite our friends over and everyone would play guitars
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and we'd all sit on the floor and sway and swing.
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So not swing, we would just dance.
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Like sway.
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But I just want to clarify.
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Yeah.
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So a lot of the art in the house is from local artists.
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This is from Isabel LeMay.
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I did not think Jensen was going to go for it
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because there was a lot of flowers and I thought he would be kind of like, that's too girly for me.
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But he actually loved it and was on board right away.
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I was proud of you for that one.
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I thought we'd end up with like, I don't know, a picture of a truck or something.
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Now this may just look like a black frame on a wall.
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You look into these little eye holes here
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and you hit this top button and it lights up an entire scene inside that box.
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I emailed Fern Santini, our designer, at about 2 o 'clock in the morning because that's when all great ideas come to you.
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And immediately she emails back a Venetian diorama from the 1970s.
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I had no idea what they were talking about when they pitched me the idea.
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I'm like, you guys just keep doing what you're doing.
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So just off from the living room was the formal dining room.
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Which nobody uses, so...
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We got rid of it.
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We got rid of it.
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Promptly.
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And made something everybody uses.
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Come here.
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Oh, this is the sex organ of a palm tree.
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Are you serious?
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Well, because these things they can kind of fall off and I've been picking them up all morning.
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Well, you might be pregnant
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Since you're here we should do let's do tequila
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and what better way to cure the Monday blues than shot of extra Anejo Cheers one in Austin
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This is One of my favorite places in the entire home.
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I fought really hard for this one I was against it, but let's check it out
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because I'm not anymore Just an old screen porch where you're watching boats go by on the river.
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This porch is the home of this giant cypress table.
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It was a sinker log, so it was buried at the west bank of New Orleans.
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We've had holiday dinners out here.
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We've had long hangout conversations.
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It's a little piece of home for me.
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I really love it.
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There's the cops.
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Oh, great.
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Hey.
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Welcome to the heart of the home.
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The kitchen.
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It's Jensen's first time in here.
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When we bought the house, there was a giant wall right here blocking the entire view of the lake.
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So we ripped that down.
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We had to keep one little pole so the ceiling doesn't fall on our heads.
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Support beams are important, they say.
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This is what I refer to as the jewelry of the kitchen, which is a Le Cornu.
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It's a great oven.
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It's so beautiful. So unnecessary.
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This room is kind of the fun room.
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So when friends and family are not here and it's just us and the kids, this is our jam here.
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This?
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Massimo Vitale.
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Yeah, but more importantly than that, I'm almost 100 % positive that this is my fourth grade teacher.
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This is our very colorful room where the kids sit and read a lot of books, eat their meals, hang out, and we love it.
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Ooh, the Texas rainstorm.
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Texas thunderstorms.
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This also moves.
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The kids like to do this.
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This is what we do with this chair all the time.
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They also like to stare at the deer with the plant heads.
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In case you didn't know, this is a fireplace.
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And for those who were wondering, we just went ahead and labeled it.
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Alright, so we're moving out of the living room, kitchen.
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This is, I don't know, I kind of call it the great room, but it's now become our dining room slash TV room.
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Yeah.
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Come on in.
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This is our dining room, and we don't use it a heck of a lot.
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These chairs were...
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Jamie Garza.
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Adam Marfa.
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This is really special for a number of reasons, even more so this weekend because the artist, Boyd Elder, passed away yesterday.
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Back in the late 60s, early 70s, he did a series of these animal skulls.
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There were only about two that were on account of war that were on the market in that series of ten, and we recently acquired this one.
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Boyd was happy to have it back home in Texas, and so we're happy to display it and keep that tradition going.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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A lot of these photographs and posters are from Armadillo World Headquarters,
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which back in the 60s and 70s was where you went to hear great music in Austin.
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Just a fun music walk of history here.
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This is our movie room.
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This is our Sunday afternoon football room, our Netflix room, big couch we can all kind of jump on,
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lay down, and watch an oversized television.
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When the babies get old enough, we'll probably all hang in here a bunch,
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but usually whoever's watching Netflix is the lucky one and the other one's got to be like on it, changing diapers.
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Yeah, he's always the...
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That's not true.
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That's true.
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That's not true.
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This is our gym.
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It's where we attempt to come and sweat.
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I don't spend a lot of time in here, I'm not going to lie.
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I was in here this morning, let's be honest.
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He's running a marathon, so that's not fair.
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And it's also ridiculous, but good for you.
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I agree.
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This is our hallway down to the guest room.
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What?
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Everybody needs a good hallway.
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But more importantly, you need good hallway art.
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I got it last time I was in New Orleans, and it's Prince in his underwear.
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I mean, who doesn't love that?
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This is our little guest room.
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We only have one.
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Because what do they say?
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Guests are like fish.
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Three days.
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They start to stink after three days.
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It's one of my favorite rooms.
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It has just a lot of really fun stuff.
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A lot of books, a lot of travel books that we've collected over the years.
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But also I come home late at night sometimes when I'm traveling.
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And as an attempt not to wake her up or the children up, I will come crashing here.
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Whenever I'm staying in here, there's one thing that I do in order to be comfortable.
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And that is...
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Oh, that thing, yeah to turn this away from me.
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What is wrong with him?
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It's freaking creepy, man.
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Oh, it's cute.
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Look at that little belly.
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No. I know that there's a reason why our guests don't stay long, and it's this thing.
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So a lot of times we'll have our friends over, who just also happen to be an incredible architect named Paul Lam.
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And they'll sit down and just tickle the ivories.
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All right, we're going to take you upstairs to kids' rooms.
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We got JJ in here.
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JJ's really girly and likes everything pink and purple and glittery
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and fun and that was kind of what we wanted to do in here.
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This is our son's room, Zeppelin, who doesn't currently reside in here.
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Currently resides in a crib.
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But this is ready to go for him when he does graduate from that crib.
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This is mostly all of my childhood things.
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These are kind of cool.
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These were actually handmade by her mother.
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Who took a woodworking class and then brought us these.
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Zep on a bunch of trucks.
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Now we're going to go downstairs.
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There used to be an elevator here.
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It seemed odd.
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It was pointless.
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Yeah.
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So we got rid of it.
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We put a little stairwell here so you can get down really quick. So you made it.
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This is our pool room.
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When we moved from our house in California, we had a lot of wood that we had planned on using there.
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We brought it all with us and we put it on the ceiling and the walls here.
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There was just enough to fill this room.
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And it was perfect.
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Yeah, that worked out really well.
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When the weather's not raining like it is today, we can go in and out here, hang out by the pool.
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If we're doing barbecuing, this is also a nice little prep kitchen.
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And tile floor, so you can't mess it up.
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This was the mechanical room that serviced the elevator, which we all of a sudden had this free space.
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Mechanical room, wine cellar mechanical room.
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Yeah, Paul Lamb had a great idea.
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He incorporated the curvature of the stairwell.
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It's our little off the pool powder bath.
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I love this door.
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It's just so cool.
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So when you come off the spiral staircase, you just continue the circle.
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Yet another bathroom we have to clean.
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You don't clean them.
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They don't know that.
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Well, we're going to take you into the master bath and then the master bedroom.
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The master suite.
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The master suite.
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Sounds fancy.
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Where the magic happens.
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Oh man.
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Well everybody, you have to say that.
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No you don't.
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Okay.
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We'll cut that out.
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No, leave it in.
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Alright, here we are in our bathroom.
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And I think this is one of the rooms that changed the most through the renovation.
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We opened up the whole window.
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There was just a little picture window.
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Yeah, it just feels, it feels really nice.
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Jensen's always worried about people watching while you take a bath, but I'm not.
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It's two separate counters, but...
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His and hers.
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Divided by a...
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Lovely piece of furniture.
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The shower I love, and actually I'm a huge fan of Architectural Digest.
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And this shower I got from Neil Patrick Harris's house.
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So thank you, Neil.
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The metal work on this is intense.
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These are really, really solid, heavy beams.
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I got to have a good shower.
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Something with a lot of water pressure, room to move around.
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All right, one of my favorite parts of this bathroom happens to be the toilet.
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Let me show you why.
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I mean, come on.
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Here we are in our bedroom.
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We got our hands on some really cool wood early on and wanted to find a place to utilize it.
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It's a barn in Wisconsin.
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Yep.
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I think well over 100 years old.
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And when they took it down, they salvaged the wood and we got it and ended up using it for the ceiling.
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I think it just kind of warms up this whole space and it makes it really comfortable.
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This is 100 % my favorite room in the house.
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Yeah.
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I love it.
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Our little sitting area, our little play area.
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I always envisioned myself taking a nap right here.
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Yeah, that's never going to happen.
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If you lay down on this thing, it's generally an invitation for three children to jump on top of you.
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Yeah, and our architect Paul Lamb had this genius idea, which I know it's going to be great, but I had no idea what he was talking about, literally until he put it up.
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And he was like, we have all these panels and they all move and then behind it you see the wallpaper.
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And so now I get it because all the wallpaper goes away and all of these clothes.
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You can do it with the whole room.
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Cuz, what does he like to say?
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Sometimes you want an audience and sometimes you don't.
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You want to show your closet off?
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Yeah, let's look at the closet.
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This is my side and we purposely did that because I am a little bit neater than Jensen, just a little.
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Not today.
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Yeah, well, someone helped you do that.
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Someone helped you do that.
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All right, Architectural Digest, thanks for coming by, thanks for visiting.
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We've seen it, we've done it, we've drank it, we ate it.
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Yeah, hope you enjoyed it.
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That's it for us.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 244 sentences and 2195 words to shadow. The speech runs for 12:00. The speaker talks fast, about 183 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 85% 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
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| bath noun | /bɑːθ/ | A tub or pool which is used for bathing: bathtub. |
| mechanical adjective | /məˈkænəkəl/ | Related to mechanics (the branch of physics that deals with forces acting on matter). |
| ceiling noun | /ˈsilɪŋ/ | The overhead closure of a room. |
| beam noun | /ˈbiːm/ | Any large piece of timber or iron long in proportion to its thickness, and prepared for use. |
| hallway noun | /ˈhɔlˌweɪ/ | A corridor in a building that connects rooms. |
| bedroom noun | /ˈbɛdˌɹum/ | A room in a house, apartment, hotel, or other dwelling where a bed is kept for sleeping. |
| formal adjective | /ˈfɔɹməl/ | In accordance with established forms. |
| swing verb | /ˈswɪŋ/ | To rotate about an off-centre fixed point. |
| suite noun | /swiːt/ | A group or train of attendants, servants etc.; a retinue. |
| closet noun | /ˈklɑzɪt/ | A small room within a house used to store clothing, food, or other household supplies. |
| belly noun | /ˈbɛli/ | The abdomen (especially a fat one). |
| importantly adverb | /ɪmˈpɔɹ.tənt.li/ | Used to mark a statement as having importance. |
| architect noun | /ˈɑɹ.kɪˌtɛkt/ | A professional who designs buildings or other structures, or who prepares plans and superintends construction. |
| elevator noun | /ˈɛləˌveɪtɚ/ | Anything that raises or uplifts. |
| porch noun | /pɔɹt͡ʃ/ | A covered entrance to a building, whether taken from the interior, and forming a sort of vestibule within the main wall, or projecting without and with a… |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| come on in verb | Synonym of come in (“to enter”). | |
| come off verb | To become detached. | |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| fall off verb | To become detached or to drop from. | |
| get down verb | /ɡɛt ˈdaʊn/ | To bring or come down; to descend; to cause to bring or come down. |
| go ahead verb | /ˌɡoʊ əˈhɛd/ | To proceed with; to begin. |
| go away verb | To depart or leave a place. | |
| lie down verb | To assume a horizontal position. |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 50 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, we're, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: bath /bɑːθ/, marathon /ˈmæɹəθən/, thunderstorm /ˈθʌn.dɚˌstɔɹm/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: invitation /ɪnvɪˈteɪʃən/, renovation /ɹɛnəˈveɪʃən/, envision /ɪnˈvɪʒn̩/, preposition /ˌpɹɛpəˈzɪʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: mechanical /məˈkænəkəl/, importantly /ɪmˈpɔɹ.tənt.li/, elevator /ˈɛləˌveɪtɚ/, ridiculous /ɹɪˈdɪk.jə.ləs/, unnecessary /ʌnˈnɛs.əˌsɛɹ.i/
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 bath, mechanical, ceiling.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | we've been doing · I've been picking |
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to always invite · used to be |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | We've had · we've collected · We've seen |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | kitchen, which is · those who were |
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.