Shadowing Practice: Kenyon College: John Green Commencement Address - Learn English Speaking with Video

Please join me in welcoming Kenyon College's 188th commencement speaker, John Green.

Thank you so much.

President Decatur, faculty, staff, parents, friends, and members of Kenyon's class of 2018,

2016, congratulations to all of you.

17 years ago, I was supposed to be graduating from Kenyon.

It ended up taking me an extra semester.

But I was in the audience that day with my friends and classmates.

I remember nothing about the commencement address, except that it lasted for 10,000 years.

Like empires rose and fell, and still the speaker droned on cicada-like in his monotony.

So I come to you today with but one solemn promise.

One way or another, this will be over in 14 minutes.

I want to spend one of those minutes, if you don't mind, in silence.

This is a trick I learned from the children's television host, Mr. Rogers.

If you don't mind, I'd like us all, not just the students, but all of us, to close our eyes and think for one minute,

just a minute, about the people who loved us up into this moment.

Family and friends, teachers and kind strangers.

I'll keep the time.

Thank you.

Those people, they're so proud of you right now.

My thoughts turned inevitably back to my years at Kenyon and to my professors, especially Don Rogan, who died this school year.

Mr. Rogan was a brilliant teacher, but I've forgotten much of what I learned in his classes about phenomenology and gospel redaction.

What I remember most is that he loved me, and that he took me seriously.

He and his wife Sally welcomed me into their home, fed me, laughed with me, cried with me.

And for many years, I wondered why he loved me.

Like I wasn't a particularly good or committed student.

I showed no particular promise.

And then when he died, I saw the grief-stricken Facebook posts pour in from his old students, and I realized he had loved us all.

Love is not like mass or energy.

It is not conserved.

And in the next 17 years, you will forget a lot.

But you will not forget the kindness

and generosity of those on this hilltop who were kinder and more generous than they needed to be.

So when I was a student here, there was widespread agreement among my peers

that the so-called real world of proper adulthood was basically a disease you caught and then eventually died from.

Like, adulthood, with its mortgages and spreadsheets and lawn maintenance,

seemed to be a thing to be dreaded and resisted until finally it overtook you, like a zombie plague.

And then, like, once you acquired adulthood, you would start saying things like brand awareness in a fractured media landscape.

And we need a president who knows how to get things done.

To be an adult meant engaging in totally unironic conversations about the weather.

I remember once when I was at Kenyon, my grandmother called me to tell me that she was watching the Weather Channel

and that it looked like it was raining in Ohio.

I explained to her that I was reading Ulysses.

That I wasn't even in Gambier, but in Dublin, Ireland in 1904.

And that history was a nightmare from which Daedalus was trying to awake.

And that nothing, literally nothing, mattered less than the current weather.

And then after a moment she asked, Well, is it raining or isn't it?

To be an adult was to be a river rock blasted

by an endless torrent of mundane terrors from resume formatting to electricity bills

that would inevitably smooth all my hard edges until I looked and felt just like everything else.

Now this is the part of the commencement address where I'm supposed to tell you

that in fact adulthood isn't so bad and blah blah blah but no, no, it is so bad.

If anything, it is worse than I could have imagined.

I mean, have you ever been to a homeowners association meeting?

Like each of you in the class of 2016 is a wondrous

and precious and rare life in a vast and almost entirely dead universe.

devoting two hours of your bright

but brief flicker of consciousness to a debate over whether the

maximum allowable length of grass in your neighborhood's front lawns should be four inches or six.

But it's true, you will debate grass length or something equally stultifying.

You will learn, almost against your will, the difference between whole and term life insurance.

You will test drive a minivan and find yourself surprised by the quality of its handling.

And along the way, along the way you'll find yourself wondering, why am I doing this?

Why am I doing any of this?

And this is, in my experience, where your Kenyan education will come in very handy because whether you've studied economics or anthropology,

for the last four, or if you're like me, five years, you've been investigating what constitutes a fulfilling, successful human life.

And I'd argue that actually is adulthood.

Like maybe adulthood isn't something you've spent your time at Kenyon preparing for.

Instead, maybe you've been doing it, albeit not on the minivan scale.

You're probably familiar with the old line that a liberal arts education teaches people how to think.

But I think it mostly teaches you how to listen.

In your classes and in your readings, you've been listening.

You've listened to your professors and to your peers,

but also to Toni Morrison and Jane Austen and John Milton as you all together examine the big questions of our species.

What do we owe ourselves and what do we owe others?

What is the nature of the universe and what is our role in it?

How best might we alleviate the suffering within and without?

You learned about these questions at Kenyon, but you won't leave them here.

And while making your voice heard on those questions is vital, you've also learned here that your voice gets stronger the more you listen.

and not just listening to loud voices, but also to those that are hard to hear because they've been systemically silenced.

I hope that listening will help inoculate you from the seductive lies of our time.

The lie that strength and toughness are always assets, that selfishness is not just necessary,

but desirable, that the whole world benefits most when you act in your own narrow self-interest.

That seductive lie is appealing because it allows us to go on doing what we would have been doing anyway

because it imagines a world in which I am what I feel myself to be, the exact center of the universe.

But living for oneself, even very successfully,

will do absolutely nothing to fill the gasping void inside of you of you.

In my experience, that void gets filled not through strength but through weakness.

You must be weak before the world because love and listening weaken you.

They make you vulnerable.

They break you open.

And it is only when you are weak that you can truly see

and acknowledge and forgive and love the weakness in others.

Weakness allows you to see other humans not as enemies to defeat, but as collaborators and co-creators.

In the end, we're making humanness up together as we go along.

At the homeowners association meeting, where the miserable adults are debating grass length, what they're actually doing is hashing out what kind of neighborhood they want to share.

When you're deciding between whole and term life insurance, you're actually thinking of a world without you and how you might be helpful to those you leave behind,

and how lucky you will be to leave people behind, to have been woven so deeply into the interconnected web of the human story.

All of it, actually, from electricity bills to the job where your coworkers call themselves teammates, even though this isn't football, for God's sakes.

All of these so-called horrors of adulthood...

100

I lost my place.

101

There we go.

102

All of these so-called horrors of adulthood emerge from living in

103

a world where you are inextricably connected to other people to whom you must learn to listen.

104

And that turns out to be great news.

105

And if you can remember that those conversations about grass length

106

and the weather are actually conversations about how we're going to get through and how we're going to get through together, they become not just bearable,

107

but almost kind of transcendent.

108

One more way that listening will be of use to you.

109

Over the next few days, you're going to straggle out of this strange and wonderful place and enter a world where you will be,

110

at least for a little while, manifestly weak.

111

If you're lucky enough to have a job, it will likely involve fetching coffee for ungrateful bosses, or entering data, or writing press releases that no one reads.

112

Some people will probably treat you as less than fully human, imagining you not to be the complex and multitudinous person you are,

113

but instead as an easily replaceable cog in the clockworks of their organization.

114

And all of that will be easier if you can see yourself not as the protagonist of your own heroic journey,

115

but instead as a collaborator in a massive, sprawling human epic.

116

I don't remember anything said at my commencement address, but I do remember Wendy McLeod's speech the day before.

117

Professor McLeod, I apologize in advance for butchering your quote and for not swearing when you swore, but she said something like, you're about to be a nobody,

118

and that's important because when you become a no- and that's important because when you become a somebody, if you can remember what it was like to be a nobody,

119

you won't be a jerk.

120

This is.. the parents are clapping.

121

Looking back, I think that's about the second best piece of advice I've ever received behind only

122

that given me by Professor Rogan, who once told me, and this I can quote directly, You're a good kid, but you need to learn when to stop talking.

123

So I will shut up momentarily.

124

And anyway, I can offer you no real advice on how to live a successful adult life, but I don't need to.

125

The people you thought of during that minute of silence, they are who you want to be when you grow up.

126

They have been strong for you, but also weak for you.

127

They listened to you.

128

They were irrationally, impossibly kind to you.

129

It's not just that you wouldn't be here without them.

130

You wouldn't be without them.

131

If they're here today, I hope you'll take a second to thank them.

132

And if they aren't, they may call later to ask you how it went.

133

They may even ask what the weather was like.

134

Tell them it was rainy, inexcusably cold for late May.

135

and remember to ask if it is raining in their pocket of the world.

136

Thank you.

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57 sentences

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This video has 136 sentences and 1841 words to shadow. The speech runs for 13:40. The speaker talks at a steady 135 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 82% 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
adulthood noun		The state or condition, for humans and other animals, of physical and psychological maturity: being an adult.
grass noun	/ɡɹɑːs/	Any plant of the family Poaceae, characterized by leaves that arise from nodes in the stem and leaf bases that wrap around the stem, especially those grown as…
silence noun	/ˈsaɪ̯ləns/	The absence of any sound.
weakness noun	/ˈwik.nɪs/	The condition of being weak.
electricity noun	/ɪˌlɛkˈtɹɪsɪti/	Originally, a property of amber and certain other nonconducting substances to attract lightweight material when rubbed, or the cause of this property; now…
horror noun	/ˈhɒɹ.ə/	An intense distressing emotion of fear or repugnance.
peer noun	/pɪɹ/	Somebody who is, or something that is, at a level or of a value equal (to that of something else).
void adjective	/vɔɪd/	Containing nothing; empty; not occupied or filled.
lawn noun	/lɔːn/	Ground (generally in front of or around a house) covered with grass kept closely mown.
inevitably adverb	/ɪˈnɛvɪtəbli/	In a manner that is impossible to avoid or prevent.
vast adjective	/væst/	Very large or wide (literally or figuratively).
pocket noun	/ˈpɑ.kɪt/	A bag stitched to an item of clothing, used for carrying small items.
trick noun	/ˈtɹɪk/	Something designed to fool, dupe, outsmart, mislead or swindle.
format noun	/ˈfɔːɹ.mæt/	The layout of a publication or document.
argue verb	/ˈɑɹ.ɡju/	To show grounds for concluding (that); to indicate, imply.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
get through verb	/ɡɛt ˈθɹu/	To overcome; to endure.
end up verb		To bring to a conclusion.
go along verb		To participate, cooperate, or conform.
grow up verb		To mature and become an adult.
leave behind verb		To abandon.
look back verb		To think of (past events) in retrospect (in hindsight).
shut up	/ʃʌt ʌp/	Stop talking (usually in the form of making annoying, irrelevant, or false comments, during a period of peace and quiet, or when one is not allowed to talk)…

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	you've been investigating · you've been doing · you've been listening
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	If you don't mind, I'd like · If they're here today, I hope you'll take
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	I've forgotten · you've studied · you've spent
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	is not conserved · be dreaded

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 45 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, you've, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: smooth /smuːð/, grandmother /ˈɡɹæn(d)ˌmʌðɚ/, anthropology /ˌænθɹəˈpɑləd͡ʒi/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: congratulations /kənˌɡɹæt͡ʃəˈleɪʃ(ə)nz/, consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/, hash /ˈhæʃ/, irrationally /ɪəˈɹæ.ʃə.nə.li/, redaction /ɹəˈdækʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: electricity /ɪˌlɛkˈtɹɪsɪti/, inevitably /ɪˈnɛvɪtəbli/, successfully /səkˈsɛs.fə.li/, economics /ˌiːkəˈnɒmɪks/, congratulations /kənˌɡɹæt͡ʃəˈleɪʃ(ə)nz/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like adulthood, grass, silence.

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: Kenyon College: John Green Commencement Address - Learn English Speaking with Video

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