Shadowing Practice: Introduction to HTML | An HTML5 Tutorial for Beginners - Learn English Speaking with Video

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hello and welcome hi i'm dave this tutorial series is for you

if you are just beginning your journey towards learning web development

or maybe you're looking for an html resource to share with

a friend who is just beginning their journey towards learning web development

or you may be looking for a refresher course

because you previously learned html but it has been a few semesters or even years since you looked at it.

Or maybe you have another reason that I haven't even thought of.

No matter.

You're welcome, and I hope I help you on your journey.

Throughout the tutorial, I will mention some references and tools, and I will provide links to everything I mention in the description below.

Let's get started learning HTML.

What is HTML?

HTML is an acronym that stands for Hypertext Markup Language.

And Hypertext Markup Language is the most basic building block of the web.

It defines the meaning and structure of web content.

And Hypertext refers to links that connect web pages to each other, and that can be within a single website or from one website to another.

Overall, HTML uses markup to annotate text, images, and other content for display in a web browser.

And you can see an example of some of these markup elements here.

But before we begin creating a web page and using these markup elements, we need to get the necessary tools.

So let's start with a web browser.

If you don't have one, or if you're curious what I will be using in this series, I'll be using the Google Chrome browser,

and you can download that at google .com slash chrome.

So if you don't have that and want to use that, go ahead and download and install now and then come back to the tutorial.

Also, I will be using an extension,

and we go to chrome .google .com slash web store to get extensions for the Chrome browser

and there if you want to use the extension

that i'm going to use it's called dark new tab

and you can press enter to search for that

and once you've completed your search you'll see dark new tab offered by keller

which is the one that i have added

and you can see added here i'll click on that

and once you're inside the page for dark new tab

you should have an install button here since i already have it installed

this is now a remove button for me what this does is

when you open a new tab in the browser it uses a dark page instead of a light page

and I use dark mode whenever possible so I prefer that.

If you see me open a new tab in this development series you'll probably see a dark tab like this one.

From there we need to get a code editor

and the industry standard right now and what I prefer to use is Visual Studio Code.

Again you can use other code editors to write your HTML code.

But if you go to code .visualstudio .com, you'll be able to download

Visual Studio Code for free.

And there you can download for Windows if you're on Windows like I am, or you can click other platforms.

And it's also available for Linux and Mac OS.

So now would be a good time to go ahead and download

Visual Studio Code and install your code editor and go ahead and open that up and then come back to the video.

Okay I am now assuming you have installed

Visual Studio Code and have opened it up and you may see something like this or you may see a welcome screen.

What you need to do is create a folder on your computer and we will put our files inside that folder.

So if I go to the file menu

and choose open folder you can see once this pops up what folder I am in, the HTML course folder in Windows,

and then I've created an 01 underscore lesson folder.

So if I highlight that and select the folder, I am now inside that folder and ready to create my first HTML file.

So if you see the file tree over here on the left, and it's currently empty, if you don't click this icon in the top left,

which is the file explorer, and that will hide or show this file explorer we're going to create the plus button

or click the plus button here for new file

and create a new file now we'll type index .html as that is always the file name

that is expected to launch a website

and you always want to keep your file names lower case

and with no spaces now windows will not complain

if you put a space or use upper or lower case however

when we host our files on a web server a web server will differentiate many times

and that can cause problems

so the naming convention is to always use lowercase no spaces you can use hyphens dashes

and then end each file in dot html

Okay, we have an empty index .html file.

Let's create our first HTML element.

And as you might guess, the first HTML element we'll create is HTML.

So if we type HTML, all lowercase, and press tab in Visual Studio Code, it creates the tags.

And by tags, that is often interchanged as a word with element.

However, the element consists of the starting and ending tag

and everything in between

but here we might just be referring to the starting also called the opening tag

or the ending also called the closing tag

so we refer to html tags but every page starts

and ends with the html opening and closing tags and everything else on the page goes between those tags.

After creating our HTML element, HTML pages have two main areas, and one area contains data that is not seen on the page,

but is considered to be metadata about the page, and that is the head area.

So just type head, not header, but head, and press tab, and now we have our head element,

and we will put metadata about the page inside this area.

But the next area is the page that every

or is the part of the page that everybody sees in the browser

and that is held within the body element so type body

and press tab and now we have our two major sections of our page

that are both inside of the html element we have a head section

and a body section now inside the head we'll just put one piece of metadata today

and it really won't start with the word meta we'll come back to

that word in the future we're going to create a title element

and give our page a title let's just call this my first web page

and this will stay inside of the html document now i just pressed ctrl s

which saved the document you otherwise would see a dot up here by the index .html So I saved that,

and I am using an auto -formatter.

Visual Studio Code may or may not do that for you when you save your file.

If you want that, you can go to the extension icon over here and search for a Prettier extension.

And I'm not sure if mine is enabled or I'm using something else right now.

We'll have to check.

Now, mine is disabled, but I do recommend this one.

Prettier is a code formatter that will auto -format your code, but Visual Studio Code may do some of that as well.

But if you want to use Prettier, go ahead and click

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Install, and you can use that as well.

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So I'll close out that Prettier tab, go back to the File Explorer here,

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so we see our index .html on the left instead of the extensions.

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And now we can see our HTML is formatted in a very easy to read manner.

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We have our HTML element, and then the head element, and then the body element, and they're separated by spaces.

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Very easy to read.

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And we have a title inside of the head.

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Again, the title will not be seen inside of the browser in the body of the page,

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but I will show you very shortly where we do see it.

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Inside of the body element, though, let's put an H1 element which stands for a heading

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and it is the biggest heading we could put you only put one h1 element per page

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and that should be saying what your page is about it doesn't necessarily have to be the same text

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that is in the title

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but here we're just going to put hello world as is

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the tradition for creating your first file in any language you're learning and so we have hello world on the page,

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and we have my first web page in the head section.

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Let's add one more element in the body of the page.

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And this is a paragraph element that starts and ends just with the letter P.

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But notice each of our tags, of course, start with this less than, and then end with a greater than.

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And then the ending tag, you'll notice, has a slash.

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But all we have to do in Visual Studio code is type P and press tab and it creates both for us.

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So we're going to put some text inside of our paragraph

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and here we'll just put this is my first web page with a period to end the sentence and save.

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Once again I'm pressing ctrl s on the keyboard to save.

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You can go to the file menu

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and from there you can also choose save but you'll notice the shortcut is ctrl and the letter s.

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We're almost ready to view our web page, but before we do, remember the extensions we went to?

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I want to show you just a few if you want your Visual Studio code to look like mine.

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One thing to draw your attention to is when I created an index .html file,

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i have the little icon for html5 beside it you may not have that but if we click on extensions

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and then we can delete prettier

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that i searched for before type vs code dash icons there you'll find the extension

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that will add that to your vs code as well

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so you can install i already have it installed

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so mine says uninstall and that will add icons as you create files

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and it might add the icon up here as well in the tab

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and that's how you see the icon here beside my index .html in the file explorer

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so visually it helps you see what type of file you're working with quickly without even reading everything after

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that extension let's go ahead and click the extensions icon again

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and then search for github theme i am using a specific theme which i prefer dark mode in everything that I do.

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So I am using the GitHub theme extension and it has light and dark themes.

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I believe I'm using the default dark theme.

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This might be bright for a second, but I'll click set color theme.

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And yes, it switched back to light, but I choose GitHub dark default, and then yours will look much like mine.

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Now these previous extensions have been optional, but one that I say is a must for you to install is called Live Server.

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So let's pull up

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Live Server by Ritwick Day.

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I'll click on that.

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And you want to install

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Live Server because it's going to help us view our web pages.

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So go ahead and install Live Server.

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And after you have it installed, we'll go ahead and take a look at the web page we've created.

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Okay, with that installed, I'm going to close

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that tab i'll come back to the file explorer here to show the file

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and now if you have live server installed you should be able to right click

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and open with live server

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and once we choose open with live server it opens our browser

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and we can see our web page it says hello world

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this is my first web page in addition in the tab at the top it says my first web page so

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that is where the title goes at the very top of the browser in the tab

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now this is very bright and i have mentioned

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that i prefer dark mode so let's go back to visual studio code

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and i'm just going to paste in some quick styling

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that is actually css once again this is optional

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but it will save my eyes and possibly yours as we work through this tutorial

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so once we're back in visual studio code just underneath the title in the head section

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I'm going to paste this in I'll quickly describe it I put in a style element

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and that allows me to put in some quick CSS

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and I changed the font size to make it just a little larger

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and then I changed the background color to a dark color

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and I changed the font color to an off -white color called white smoke

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and that's all I did we're not really learning CSS here, but this will save our eyes going forward if you want to make these changes.

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If you prefer the white with dark text, that is fine too.

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But now that I've saved this, the beauty of live server is that it automatically reloads our page for us in the browser.

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So let's go back to the browser and look at our update.

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And now you can see our webpage is in dark mode and we have a little bit larger text here as well.

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It did not change our title from the head because that just goes into the tab of the browser.

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Also notice the address.

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This is an IP address and then we have a colon and this is a port number.

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But this is on your own computer.

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This is not on mine.

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I can't go onto the web and see your page that we just created.

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We haven't loaded it to the web.

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It is just running on your computer.

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But this is the way to view web pages as we create them, which creates your own local server.

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It's what's called a dev environment and that is preferred.

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What you don't want to do in Chrome is try to open a file like you would in Word

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or some other document browser, or even Visual Studio Code, how we open files.

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That's not how you want to view a web page.

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You want to use a development server, and that's what we're doing with live server in Visual Studio Code.

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Now, if you ever want to stop the server, down here in the bottom, you can see the port number 5500,

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and it says click to close server so i can just click

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that it says disposing and now we have a go live button

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which you can also use you can also right click on your document

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and choose stop or open with live server now we would once again since we stopped

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that we would need to open with live server to have a live web page

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that responds to changes we make

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and notice how it opened a new tab here instead of our old tab our old tab.

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server for that page closed so we close that out

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and now we're using this one

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because this is going to show our most recent changes

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now after we've created a web page how do we know

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if we have errors or not well that's where a validation service comes into play

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and this is the w3c markup validation service w3c stands for the worldwide web consortium

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that really makes the standards for the web overall what we

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want to do to check our page is click file upload

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because remember our web page is really not on the web

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it's just on our computer your web page is on your computer

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and mine is on my computer so let's click file upload

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and from here we're going to choose the file on the computer

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and we get a browse window and now i'm going to click

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html tutorials and then i have an html course folder

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and then the zero lesson one folder that we just created

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and there is the index .html file we've been working with so i'll click open

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and now that it's here we can click check

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and we're going to get some errors and we'll go over those okay now

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that we have checked our page we have got a warning

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and a couple of errors

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so there are things

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we need to fix in our html file let's address these

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in order with the first warning says consider adding a lang

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attribute to the html start tag to declare the language of the document

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so that is something we should do now we're going to go to the html tag

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and we can add what is called an attribute

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and this is the lang attribute and i'm going to set it equal to E -N, which is the abbreviation for English in general.

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You can supply a dialect like this, dash U -S, or I believe the other would be G -B, but I don't usually do that.

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So I'm just putting E -N for English.

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You might have another language you prefer to put there, and you can find a list of those at the MDM network as well.

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And that's the page where we were looking for the definition of HTML at the beginning of this tutorial.

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So I will link to MDN, the Mozilla Developer Network, in the description.

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Now that we've added the language attribute, let's go look at the other errors we had and see what else we need to fix.

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It says the character encoding was not declared.

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So we also need to handle that.

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Let's go back to Visual Studio Code.

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And now inside the head, there is an element called meta.

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Earlier I said the head stores metadata.

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Let me keep it all lowercase here.

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And here we can set what is called the character set attribute inside of a meta element.

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And from here, I'll put UTF -8, which is the standard for all web pages that I have worked on.

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There are other character sets, but this is the typical value you would see in there.

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So I'm going to save this.

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And in the future, we'll cover more meta tag values that we'll have inside of the head.

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Now let's go back and look at that last error that we got from the validation service.

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And that said start tag seen without seeing a doc type first expected

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and it shows you exactly what it wants doc type HTML.

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And that is a document type declaration

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that should be on the very first line of your page

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so let's go back to our html file go to the very top

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and we'll press return and we'll paste in exactly what they had there

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so you see once again it starts with the less than

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and the greater than symbol but this is not really an html element

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or tag this is just a doc type declaration that you should have in every html file at the very beginning.

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So now I'll put that in and save as well.

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Let's look at the validator first and let's choose the file again.

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And now I've selected the index .html to upload with our changes and we'll click check.

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Document checking completed.

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No errors or warnings.

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So our document is just fine.

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Let's go to the tab with our page, and let's reload the page.

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And once we reloaded, everything looked great.

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So we've got

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Hello World, this is my first web page, and we still have my first web page in the tab at the top for the title,

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and we have passed all validation checks.

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Remember to keep striving for progress over perfection, and a little progress every day will go a very long way.

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Please give this video a like if it's helped you.

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And thank you for watching and subscribing.

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You're helping my channel grow.

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Have a great day, and let's write more code together very soon.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “Introduction to HTML”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: page, html, web, file, code. This video has 267 sentences and 3459 words to shadow. The speech runs for 20:15. The speaker talks at a natural 171 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 84% 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
element noun	/ˈɛləmənt/	One of the simplest or essential parts or principles of which anything consists, or upon which the constitution or fundamental powers of anything are based.
server noun	/ˈsɝvɚ/	A program that provides services to other programs or devices, either in the same computer or over a computer network.
extension noun	/ɪkˈstɛnʃən/	The act of extending; a stretching out; enlargement in length, breadth, or time; an increase.
browser noun	/ˈbɹaʊ.zəɹ/	One who or which browses.
folder noun	/ˈfoʊldɚ/	An organizer that papers are kept in, usually with an index tab, to be stored as a single unit in a filing cabinet.
icon noun	/ˈaɪ.kɑn/	An image, symbol, picture, portrait, or other representation, usually as an object of religious devotion.
install verb	/ɪnˈstɔl/	To connect, set up or prepare something for use
tag noun	/tæɡ/	A small label.
installed verb	/ɪnˈstɔːld/	readied for use
tutorial noun	/ˌtjuːˈtɔːɹɪəl/	A self-paced learning exercise; a lesson prepared so that a student can learn at their own speed or convenience.
chrome verb	/kɹoʊm/	To plate with chrome.
explorer noun	/ɛkˈsplɔːɹə(ɹ)/	One who explores something
attribute noun	/ˈæt.ɹɪˌbjut/	A characteristic or quality of a thing.
meta adjective	/ˈmɛtə/	Self-referential; structured analogously (structured by relationships), but at a higher level.
validation noun	/ˌvæl.əˈdeɪ.ʃən/	The act of validating something.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
go ahead verb	/ˌɡoʊ əˈhɛd/	To proceed with; to begin.
go back to verb		To stem from; to originate in.
close out verb		To terminate; to call the end of.
go back verb		To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time.
go over verb		To look at carefully; to scrutinize; to analyze.
going forward adverb		In the immediate future and beyond.
pop up verb		To come up with a "pop" sound.
pull up verb	/ˌpʊl ˈʌp/	To lift upwards or vertically.

Sentences worth repeating

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

I believe I'm using the default dark theme.
We haven't loaded it to the web.
You're helping my channel grow.

Grammar in this video

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

Structure	In the video
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	has been · haven't even thought · you've completed
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	is expected · is often interchanged · is not seen
Possibility with “might / may” might/may + verb — something that is possible but not certain	may be · may see · might guess
Advice with “should” should + verb — saying what is a good idea	should have · should be · should do

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 82 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, we'll, we're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: extension /ɪkˈstɛnʃən/, validation /ˌvæl.əˈdeɪ.ʃən/, dash /ˈdæʃ/, declaration /ˌdɛk.ləˈɹeɪ.ʃən/, optional /ˈɑp.ʃə.nəl/
Long words — get the stress right: validation /ˌvæl.əˈdeɪ.ʃən/, declaration /ˌdɛk.ləˈɹeɪ.ʃən/, automobile /ˈɔː.tə.məˌbil/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, consortium /kənˈsɔː.ti.əm/

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 element, server, extension.

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: Introduction to HTML | An HTML5 Tutorial for Beginners - Learn English Speaking with Video

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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?