Shadowing Practice: Learn English: Good Habits vs Bad habits - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Today is all about good habits and bad habits.
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These are my habit socks.
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I'll be putting good habits and bad habits inside these socks.
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And throughout this video, I'll be sharing my top tips with you guys to help you speak about habits in real natural English conversation.
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Let's go.
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First habit of the day, I am taking a brisk walk on the beach.
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A brisk walk is a quick walk, unlike taking a stroll.
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A stroll is a gentle walk.
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Oh, what a beautiful morning to stroll.
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So, is taking a walk a good habit or a bad habit?
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For me, it's a logical choice.
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It's a good habit.
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Right now it's 8.05 in the morning.
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It's 5 past 8 and I'm taking a walk along the shore.
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The shore is the place where the ocean meets the sand.
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But I'm not just here for a walk, I am collecting shells.
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Wow, what a shell that is.
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And it looks like a unicorn horn.
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Very cool.
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Hmm, well, you know.
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Right, we've got our shells.
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Now we're going to head home.
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And to do that, I need to cross the roads.
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But before we do, this is white paint on the trunk of a tree.
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And that is to protect the trunk from the midday sun.
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Now, very carefully, I'm crossing the road.
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And I made it safely.
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Now it's time to make coffee.
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Ah, my favourite time of the day.
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Now I've got my coffee.
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It's time for today's top tip.
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Anchor your habits with time words such as in the morning, every day, or around 7 o'clock,
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make your sentences sound complete, even if your grammar is simple.
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For example, every morning I drink a nice hot coffee, and this is my favourite time of the day.
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But is drinking coffee a good habit or is it a bad habit?
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Well, it is a hot topic.
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It's debated.
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Personally, drinking coffee has to be a good habit.
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The next habit of the day is to make breakfast.
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And seeing as today is a Sunday, I want to make a special breakfast.
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Milk.
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Eggs.
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A box of eggs.
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And some mayonnaise.
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No. Flour.
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The cupboard.
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Flour.
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There we go.
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Flour.
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I am cracking the egg into the metal bowl.
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I am pouring 100 milliliters of milk into the plastic measuring jug.
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Yes, this is a whisk.
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I am sieving the flour into the bowl.
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And this is a sieve.
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Whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk.
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Okay.
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My pancake batter is ready.
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This is pancake batter and I'm about to fry it in the frying pan.
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The butter is sizzling in the frying pan.
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I am pouring the pancake batter into the frying pan.
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While the pancake is cooking in the frying pan, the next good habit of the day is to clean as you go.
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Just to do the washing up. as you cook.
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I used to work in a kitchen, and the one good habit that I got from that was to clean as you go.
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All chefs know, if you clean as you go, your workstation's clean, you don't have to clean up afterwards, and it feels better.
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So the water is coming out of the tap.
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This is the tap.
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And I am doing the washing up.
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I am washing up the metal bowl.
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This is a cloth, which is different to a scourer.
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I've taught you guys this before.
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This is the scourer, the rough part, and this is the sponge, the smooth part.
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Wiping the sink.
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Okay, and I'm going to rinse off those suds, the soap suds.
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To rinse off is to remove the soap from something, to wash it away.
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Okay, let's check the pancake.
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Right, this pancake is ready to flip.
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The next verb for you guys, flip.
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And I hope I can do it right.
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She won't release.
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Turn that, turn you off.
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Alright, let's pretend that that didn't happen.
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It's too, it's too fucking sticky.
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Ah, mother fucker, I'm gonna f*ing bare myself.
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Come on.
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Ready?
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I just flipped the pancake.
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Now I've flipped the pancake, it's time to slice the banana.
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First, I will peel the banana.
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Oops.
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I'm peeling the banana.
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And these bananas are very ripe, which means they're ready to eat.
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When they are green, we say they're not ripe, or they are unripe.
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Look at that, it's a bit mushy.
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The texture is kind of mushy, so it's ready to eat.
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Perfect for a pancake.
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Now I'm slicing the banana.
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Pressing the bin, opening the lid, and putting in the banana skin.
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So the final step is the chocolate, and this is Cadbury's dairy milk.
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Cadbury's is around 120 years old and it is a British chocolate.
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It's a very common chocolate to eat in the UK.
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It's not too fancy but everyone loves it.
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It's a classic.
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I'm going to slice this Cadbury's into chunks.
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These are chunks of chocolate,
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three chunks of chocolate, and I'm going to put them on the pancake so that it melts and folding the pancake
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Breakfast is served I have my fork my knife and I'm going to dig in.
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To dig in is to begin eating Mmm That's good.
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But, is eating chocolate banana pancakes a good habit or a bad habit?
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If you ate chocolate banana pancakes every day, then it's not great.
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I'm going to say it's a bad habit.
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When talking about bad habits or negative habits, I have another top tip.
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Instead of framing it in a negative way, instead of saying, I eat unhealthily, you can say, I don't usually eat unhealthily,
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but this morning is an exception.
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Instead of saying, I don't drink enough water, instead you can say, I'm trying to drink more water.
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If we relate this to English, instead of saying, I'm bad at pronunciation, you could say, I'm working to get better at pronunciation.
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I'm working to improve my pronunciation.
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Just by changing that phrasing from a negative to a positive, it changes the energy and it changes how you see yourself.
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The next habit is reading.
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And for me, reading is a good habit.
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I like to read for around 10 minutes on a morning while my mind is fresh.
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I was just talking about improving your pronunciation as an English learner, and my next top tip to do that is to read out loud for one minute a day.
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Here's how it works.
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Take a book, any book, and read out loud.
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But when you read, I want you to overdo your mouth movements, exaggerate your mouth.
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This is going to strengthen your mouth muscles,
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your tongue muscles, and it's going to improve your pronunciation and your articulation, which will help you sound more clear,
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more natural, and more confident when you speak.
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Coffee.
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Now, back to reading in my head.
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I just got distracted by my phone.
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I stopped reading, I started using my phone, and it turned into mindless scrolling, which is my next bad habit.
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Checking our phones too much or scrolling mindlessly unaware.
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This is something that I used to have a big problem with.
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I would sit and scroll for hours every day, but then I replaced it with reading.
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They say that you can't just stop a bad habit, you have to replace it with a new habit, otherwise you'll fall back into the same routine.
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So if you also use your phone a bit too much, then starting to spend some time each day picking up a
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book might be a lot more beneficial for you in the long run.
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The next good habit of the day is to brush my teeth.
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This is my electric toothbrush and this is a tube of toothpaste.
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I'm unscrewing the lid and squeezing the toothpaste onto the bristles of the toothbrush.
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These are the bristles.
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Now in me go.
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After I've washed my face, I usually do some skin care.
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And there I just said, I usually do.
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Usually is a time phrase, like normally, often, or sometimes.
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We can use these time phrases to talk about our habits and how often we do those habits.
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I usually take care of my skin.
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I didn't used to in the past, I didn't used to, but now I do because Chang, the one behind the camera,
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has taught me that our skin is important and so we should take care of it, just like we take care of our diets and our sleep.
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I'm tapping on my face.
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Apparently this is good for the moisturiser to go inside your pores.
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Your pores are the little holes in your skin.
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Next is some serum and this is in a glass pipette.
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Now I'm massaging my cheeks.
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These are my cheeks.
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My cheekbones.
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We call this moisturizing.
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I'm moisturizing my skin.
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The next good habit of the day is to exercise.
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This is a pull-up bar and these are my gymnastics rings.
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They are adjustable, meaning I can adjust the height up and down.
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They are wooden, they are made of wood.
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You can hear it when I knock.
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And they are circular, they are round.
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I grip them like this and I can either hang or do pull-ups.
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This is skin the cat. And you go through. To the floor.
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Upside down.
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Right now, I'm hanging upside down.
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And all the blood is rushing to my head.
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And I feel like I'm going to pass out.
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Front lever.
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Exercise done.
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Time to work.
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My favorite place to work is outside here on the terrace.
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I've got my laptop, my computer mouse, my Van Gogh mouse pad,
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and I like to work out here because I have a view of the ocean.
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To be able to see the ocean when I'm working is an absolute pleasure and I'm very fortunate, I'm very lucky and I'm grateful.
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What am I working on?
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Well, as some of you may know, for the past five months, I have been building a business, an English platform called Sprouts.
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And I've been working on that with a guy called Blake, my business partner.
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We have been working on this together, and he is responsible for the beautiful website and very soon a brand new app.
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We're going to have an app that's going to be launched on Apple and Google Play.
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So I'll let you guys know when the app is gonna drop so you can check it out.
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It's exciting It's a dream
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that I've always had since I was young to create my own app
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If you want to check out sprout then I'll leave a
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link in the description for you guys to immerse yourself in English and build a positive habit Now for me
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It's time to get back to work A few moments later
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I've exercised and I've worked and I think these are good habits, as long as we take regular breaks.
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Speaking of taking breaks, in between my working sessions I like to take a short break,
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sit down for two minutes and I set a timer on my phone just to make it even easier.
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Now set a timer for two minutes and in this time I like to close my eyes and hum.
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Hum.
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I hum because that stimulates my parasympathetic nervous system which is basically a fancy way of saying that it reduces stress, anxiety, it lowers your heart rate,
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lowers your blood pressure and generally enhances your focus and improves your emotional well-being.
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Two minutes of humming, very easy.
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Time is up.
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I feel good, I feel relaxed.
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By the way, I'm sitting cross-legged, my legs are crossed, I'm sitting cross-legged on a rug.
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This is a rug, not a carpet.
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So now we've looked at my daily routine, my habits, I want to go outside,
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take an evening walk and look at people around us.
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What do Vietnamese people do on a daily basis?
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What are other people's habits?
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I'm curious, don't know about you.
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On the other side of the road, you can see people exercising.
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That man is swinging his arms on the beach.
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That's a habit I see a lot of Vietnamese people do.
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They swing their arms to get the blood flow and some exercise.
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It's a very common sight I see in Vietnam.
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People love to exercise on the exercise equipment.
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They rotate their arms around like that, do pull-ups, sit-ups, that kind of thing.
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And it's usually at sunrise and sunset because in the day it's very hot.
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Here again you can see the man exercising.
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He's spinning the wheels round and round.
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Riding the boat.
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Yeah he's practicing riding a boat.
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Coming past now is a man on a bicycle.
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He's on a mountain bike and he's riding his bicycle along the road towards Sun Cha mountain.
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This lady is sitting down on the bench looking out to sea.
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And look at the light guys, it's a beautiful sunset.
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This area is really lively.
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Over there you have the people exercising, doing dips and pull-ups.
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Here we have Chang resting, looking in the sea.
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In the distance, on the background, there is an old man and an old woman exercising on the exercise machines.
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And here in front of us you have families with kids playing in the sea.
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Everyone is having a good time.
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Hello.
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In the distance, there is a speedboat zooming across the water.
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The kid is playing in the sea while the parents are on their phones, chilling, taking a break from parenting.
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Alright, we've checked out some interesting people at the beach, it's always fun.
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Now let's go do a habit that is probably a bad habit, but I like it.
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Ice cream.
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Snacking.
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Snacking is the next bad habit of the day.
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To snack is to eat little bits of food in between meals.
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And it's alright if you snack healthily, but ice creams are not so healthy.
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So right now I'm snacking on this ice cream, and that is a bad habit.
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Those kids behind me, they're also snacking on some crisps after school.
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Snacking is a universal habit.
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It might be bad, but you know, you've got to do some things that are bad for you to feed the soul.
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After snacking on the ice cream, I want to balance that with a good habit, and that is staying hydrated.
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Drinking plenty of water to keep my brain active keeps me alive.
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I'm thankful for that, and yeah, water is refreshing.
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There's one final idea I want to leave you guys with is that habits are like ice cubes.
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Imagine an ice cube in a cold room.
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You start heating it up.
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Minus three degrees.
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No change.
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Minus two, minus one, still nothing.
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But at zero degrees, the melting begins.
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Your English is the same.
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You might not see the change today or tomorrow, but every step you take is adding up to a big difference.
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If you're ready to see that change, join us today on Sprout, 15 minutes a day to watch, learn and speak.
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Because small things make a big difference.
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this crowd is here to stay a new beginning starts today a new beginning starts today
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B1 speaking lesson is built on the video “Learn English: Good Habits vs Bad habits”. This video has 256 sentences and 2550 words to shadow. The speech runs for 21:11. The speaker talks at a steady 120 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. Only 77% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| habit noun | /ˈhæb.ɪt/ | An action performed on a regular basis. |
| pancake noun | /ˈpæn.keɪk/ | An thin batter cake similar to a crepe, typically unleavened. |
| snack noun | /snæk/ | A light meal. |
| banana noun | /bəˈnænə/ | An elongated curved tropical fruit of a banana plant, which grows in bunches and has a creamy flesh and a smooth skin. |
| whisk noun | /ˈwɪsk/ | A quick, light sweeping motion. |
| pronunciation noun | /pɹəˌnʌn.siˈeɪ.ʃən/ | The formal or informal way in which a word is made to sound when spoken. |
| fry verb | /fɹaɪ/ | To cook (something) in hot fat. |
| flour noun | /ˈflaʊ.ə/ | Powder obtained by grinding or milling cereal grains, especially wheat, or other foodstuffs such as soybeans and potatoes, and used to bake bread, cakes, and… |
| flip verb | /flɪp/ | To throw so as to turn over. |
| stroll verb | /stɹoʊl/ | To wander on foot; to ramble idly or leisurely; to rove. |
| batter verb | /ˈbætə/ | To hit or strike violently and repeatedly. |
| chunk noun | /t͡ʃʌŋk/ | A part of something that has been separated; a generally squat, thick, irregular piece of something, e.g. wood or stone. |
| scroll noun | /skɹoʊl/ | A roll of paper or parchment; a writing formed into a roll. |
| slice noun | /slaɪs/ | That which is thin and broad. |
| minus | /ˈmaɪ.nəs/ | Made less or reduced by (followed by an expression of number or quantity). |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| wash up verb | To clean the utensils, dishes etc. used in preparing and eating a meal. | |
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). | |
| read out verb | /ˌɹiːd ˈaʊt/ | To read something and say the words to inform other people; to call. |
| add up to verb | To have a particular effect in combination. | |
| clean up verb | To make an area or a thing clean; to pick up a mess; to tidy. | |
| fall back into verb | To return to old habits; to return to an unhealthy or unhappy situation. | |
| get back to verb | Return to (an activity) | |
| pass out verb | To faint; to become unconscious. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- For me, it's a logical choice.
- Right, we've got our shells.
- I've taught you guys this before.
- Alright, let's pretend that that didn't happen.
- What am I working on?
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 | I've been working · have been working |
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to work · used to have |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've taught · I've flipped · I've washed |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | cloth, which is · ripe, which means · articulation, which will |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 66 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, I've, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: toothbrush /ˈtuːθ.bɹʌʃ/, toothpaste /ˈtuθpeɪst/, parasympathetic /ˌpɛɹ.ə.sɪm.pəˈθɛt.ɪk/, thankful /ˈθæŋkfəl/, cloth /klɒθ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: pronunciation /pɹəˌnʌn.siˈeɪ.ʃən/, mushy /ˈmʌ.ʃi/, toothbrush /ˈtuːθ.bɹʌʃ/, shore /ʃɔɹ/, articulation /ɑɹˌtɪk.jəˈleɪ.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: pronunciation /pɹəˌnʌn.siˈeɪ.ʃən/, articulation /ɑɹˌtɪk.jəˈleɪ.ʃən/, exaggerate /ɛɡˈzæd͡ʒ.ə.ɹeɪt/, parasympathetic /ˌpɛɹ.ə.sɪm.pəˈθɛt.ɪk/, adjustable /əˈd͡ʒʌstəbəl/
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 habit, pancake, snack.
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.