Shadowing Practice: Links | HTML | Tutorial 8 - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Hey, welcome to Draft Academy.

My name is Mike.

In this tutorial, I want to talk to you about using links in HTML.

A link is one of the most popular HTML elements

and it's used to link your website to other websites on the internet.

So I could create a link that would bring my users to like google .com or facebook .com.

Or I could link to other pages on my website.

So if I wanted to build like a navigational list,

I could have links to the other pages of my website that users could click and then they go to those pages.

You can also link to files, things like images or PDFs.

And you can create those links.

And then users can look at those images or PDFs.

So I'm going to show you how to create a link,

we need to use a special HTML tag called a and after a we need to pass this tag some information,

we need to give it something called an href.

And the href is basically just where we want to link to.

So the easiest way to create a link would be to create like an external link.

So linking to a page that's not on our website.

Imagine we wanted to create a link that would go to like google .com.

Inside of this href, I can just type the address to google .com.

So I can say HTTPS colon forward slash forward slash.

And you need to make sure that you include this like HTTP or HTTPS part.

A lot of times when you will give someone a link like you won't include this, it would just be like www .whatever.

But when you're creating an href, and you're creating a link, you need to be very specific about where you want to go.

So you're going to need to include this part.

And then I can just type www .google .com.

So what we've effectively done is told this link attribute that we want it to link to this address, which is Google.

And now I'll close this and I can actually close off this entire tag.

So we can just make this closing a tag.

And now inside of here, I can put any text for this link.

So we could say, for example, Google's homepage.

Now, I also just want to point out that inside of these link tags, you can put more than just text.

So you don't have to just put text, you could actually put other HTML elements.

So I could put like a header one in here, for example.

So why don't we do that, we'll make this a header one.

And now when I refresh my page, you'll see that we have this big old link over here.

It's this big header one.

And when we click on it, it will link us to google .com.

So I'm going to click this.

And you'll see that we get transported over to Google's homepage, right?

So we're over here on Google.

So that's how you can create a link.

And basically, you can just go to any website that you want, come up here to the URL bar,

copy the URL, including this like HTTP or HTTPS part, throw it into the href of your link, and you'll be able to link there.

There's one other thing that we can do, though, one thing I want you to notice is when I click this link,

it navigates me away from the website.

So I click this, and all of a sudden, we're on Google.

In certain cases, though, you're not going to want users to navigate away from your website when they click a link, right?

In certain cases, you might want this to open up, for example, in a new tab.

And the way that you can do that is by giving this a tag another attribute.

So we can say, we want to say, target is equal to and now inside of these quotation marks,

we want to say, underscore blank.

Okay, so when you pass in this underscore blank value to this target attribute,

this is going to basically tell the browser to open up this link in a new tab.

So now when we open up Google, it's going to open up here in a new tab, and we still have our website open.

So that's one thing that you can do to make this better.

And so again, inside of this link, I can put any HTML elements that I want.

So I could put like an h1, maybe we wanted to like make this homepage bold, we could put a bold tag in here.

And you can really like get creative and like style these different links different ways you want to.

So don't be afraid to put HTML elements inside of these a tags, because it's definitely something that you're going to want to do.

Another thing that we can do is we can link to other pages on our website.

So I'm going to get rid of the text for that link, I'm also going to get rid of this target blank.

And if you look over here in my file explorer, like my little file tree,

you can see that in addition to this index dot HTML file, which is the file that we're using right now,

I also have this page two dot html and this page three dot html.

And these are both just like other web pages that are on my website.

So any given website is going to have a number of web pages, you might have like an about page,

a contact me page, if it's a blog, you might have a bunch of like blog articles,

you get the point, a lot of times you're going to have more than one html file for your website.

And we can actually link between those files.

And you can use this link attribute to do that so in here in this href, instead of linking to Google using this like absolute address,

I can link to those pages on my website using a relative URL.

So if I wanted to access this page two, for example, let's say that I wanted to link to page two,

because the page that I'm currently on and page two are in the same directory, I can just type out page two's name.

So down here, I can just say like, page two dot html.

And the browser will automatically know that we want to go here to page two.

So over here, I can just type page two.

And now in the browser, you'll see that we have a link to page two.

So when I click this, it'll bring me over here to page two.

And you'll notice that inside of page two, I've already set up a link inside of here.

So here in page two, I have another link, which is just linking me back to index .html.

And this is a way that we can create navigation on our site.

So now I'm over here in page two, and I can navigate back to the homepage.

So I can navigate between these two pages on my website.

I can also create another link to page three.

So let's do that right here below this page two, we'll make another link, link, this time to page three.

And one thing you want to notice is that page three is inside of this directory.

So page three is inside of a folder called der one, if I want to link to page three,

I can't just say page three dot html.

Because the browser is not going to know where this page three is supposed to be,

we have to tell it exactly where it is relative to the current file that we're on.

So I can say dir one forward slash page three.

And what this is going to say is, we want to go to directory one,

and we want to link to a page inside of directory one called page three dot html.

So now we should have a link to page three.

And you can see that showed up right here, I can click this, and it'll bring us to page three.

So that's a way that you can link to different pages on your website, you can also create links to files on your website.

So in our case, we just have this little cat picture.

And this is just kind of like a cute cat.

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And we could actually link to this picture of the cat on our website.

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So I'm gonna go over here into my index file.

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And we can access this picture the same way that we've been accessing these HTML files.

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So I can just say, instead of dir one, the cat pictures pictures at the same directory.

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So I can just say cat, and it's a jpeg file.

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So dot jpg.

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And we can change this to cat.

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And now I should have a link to this cat picture.

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So I click this, it will bring me to this picture of the cat.

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And I can look at the cat.

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So that's kind of how you can link to external websites, other pages on your website, and files on your website.

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So in addition to a jpeg, I can also link to like a PDF or a Word document

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if i had it stored on my website it doesn't matter

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and that's sort of the basics of using links in html hey thanks for watching

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if you enjoyed the video please leave a like

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and subscribe to draft academy to be the first to know

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when we release new content also we're always looking to improve

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so if you have any constructive criticism or questions

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or anything leave a comment below finally if you're enjoying draft academy

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and you want to help us grow head over to draftacademy .com forward slash contribute and invest in our future.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

The speaker keeps coming back to these words: link, page, website, html, file. This video has 119 sentences and 1693 words to shadow. The speech runs for 8:36. The speaker talks fast, about 197 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 86% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
directory noun	/dɪˈɹɛktəɹi/	A list of names, addresses etc, of specific classes of people or organizations, often in alphabetical order or in some classification.
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.
browser noun	/ˈbɹaʊ.zəɹ/	One who or which browses.
attribute noun	/ˈæt.ɹɪˌbjut/	A characteristic or quality of a thing.
navigate verb	/ˈnæv.ɪ.ɡeɪt/	To plan, control and record the position and course of a vehicle, ship, aircraft, etc., on a journey; to follow a planned course.
blank noun	/ˈblæŋk/	The white spot in the centre of a target; hence (figuratively) the object to which anything is directed or aimed, the range of such aim.
header noun	/ˈhɛdɚ/	The upper portion of a page (or other) layout.
relative noun	/ˈɹɛl.ə.tɪv/	Someone connected by blood, marriage, or adoption; someone in the same family.
tag noun	/tæɡ/	A small label.
bold adjective	/ˈbəʊld/	Courageous, daring.
sudden adjective	/ˈsʌd.ən/	Occurring quickly with little or no warning or expectation; instantly.
contribute verb	/kənˈtɹɪb.jut/	To give something that is or becomes part of a larger whole.
invest verb	/ɪnˈvɛst/	To spend money, time, or energy on something, especially for some benefit or purpose; used with in.
navigation noun	/nævɪˈɡeɪʃən/	The theory, practice and technology of charting a course for a road vehicle, ship, aircraft, or spaceship.
subscribe verb	/səbˈskɹaɪb/	To write (one’s name) at the bottom of a document; to sign (one's name).

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
open up verb		To open.
close off verb		To seal or block the entrance to a road, an area, or a building so that people cannot enter.
come up verb		To emerge or become known, especially unexpectedly.
go over verb		To look at carefully; to scrutinize; to analyze.
look over verb		To check quickly; to make a brief or cursory visual inspection of.
point out verb		To identify among a group of similar subjects, or in a scene where the subject might not be readily seen or noticed, with a gesture of the body.
set up verb	/ˌsɛt ˈʌp/	To make ready for use.
show up verb		To appear, arrive, or attend, especially suddenly or erratically.

Grammar in this video

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

Structure	In the video
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	address, which is · file, which is · link, which is
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	we've effectively done · I've already set
Possibility with “might / may” might/may + verb — something that is possible but not certain	might want · might have
Advice with “should” should + verb — saying what is a good idea	should have

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 39 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, you're, we're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: navigation /nævɪˈɡeɪʃən/, refresh /ɹɪˈfɹɛʃ/, quotation /kwoʊˈteɪʃn̩/
Long words — get the stress right: directory /dɪˈɹɛktəɹi/, navigation /nævɪˈɡeɪʃən/

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 directory, element, browser.

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: Links | HTML | Tutorial 8 - 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

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?