Shadowing Practice: Oxford, How Many Languages Do You Speak? - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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How many languages do you speak?
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How many languages do you speak?
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How many languages do you speak?
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How many languages do you speak?
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How many languages do you speak?
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How many languages are spoken here at Oxford?
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Let's ask the students and find out.
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How many languages do you speak currently?
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I speak two.
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What are they?
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English and Mandarin.
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And how did you learn both those languages?
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Well, English is a compulsory language back home where I'm from, which is Singapore.
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Mandarin is also compulsory because it's my mother tongue.
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So everyone has different languages based on their ethnicity back in Singapore.
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So because I'm Chinese, so I do Mandarin.
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And do you speak Mandarin with your family still?
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Nah, not really.
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Mostly with my grandparents, but my family,
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no, mostly we speak English.
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One.
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And what's that language?
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English.
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How did you learn English?
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My parents spoke it growing up,
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so I went to English school.
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It makes sense.
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And are your parents from the UK?
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My mum is, my dad's from Nigeria,
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but he moved here when he was 12.
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How many languages do you speak?
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I speak English and probably basic to intermediate French.
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Basic to intermediate French sounds really fun.
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Where did you learn French?
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I learned French in primary school.
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Firstly, it started in year six,
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so I was about 11.
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And then I carried on all throughout high school.
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And then I took it for A-levels,
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which is an advanced level from the ages of 16 to 18.
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How many languages do you speak?
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I speak English, I speak ancient Greek,
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I speak German, and I speak Spanish.
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Ancient Greek sounds really fascinating.
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All of those are fascinating,
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but can you tell us a bit more about ancient Greek
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and if you've had any experience exploring that at Oxford or in your recent academic studies?
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I got into speaking ancient Greek because,
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I mean, it seems crazy,
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you know, it's a dead language or whatever.
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But in reality, if you're going for language acquisition for ancient languages,
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and if you're like me,
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like I started taking ancient Greek my first year of college,
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it actually is very, very important to have every part of language acquisition plateaus,
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whether it's reading, writing, or speaking,
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or reading, composition, or speaking.
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So if you're ever stuck on either of those two,
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it's because you need the third.
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And just because it's a dead language doesn't mean you can't apply the third principle there.
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How many languages do each of you guys speak?
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I speak three languages, English, Hindi, and Telugu.
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I'm from India, so I speak Hindi,
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and Telugu is where the language of the state I'm from, Telangana.
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I also speak three languages,
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obviously English and then I'm from Mexico so I speak Spanish and I went to French school so I speak French.
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How many languages do you speak currently?
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I'm only really fluent in English.
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I speak some Spanish, a really tiny bit of Japanese and Chinese,
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but I wouldn't say I'm fluent in those three languages.
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I speak 2.5.
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So English and Hindi are one and one,
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and a 0.25 to Sanskrit.
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That's really cool.
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So how did you learn each of those?
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Spanish, I first went to some classes in India,
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and then I got this Chrome extension called Toukin.
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Whenever you did a Google search or you were on any website,
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it would replace some of the words on the web page with Spanish words so you learn from context.
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Sanskrit I'm just beginning to learn.
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What I'm doing is watching this YouTube channel called the Sanskrit channel.
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They go through old books,
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explain the meanings and Sanskrit.
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How many languages do you speak?
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One and a half.
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Which are the one and a half?
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Spanish.
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And English I assume.
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English and Spanish.
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And how did you learn each of those languages?
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Well, I was born in England,
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so I've grown up speaking that.
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And then Spanish, I did it for A-Level.
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And then I've done a couple of language courses on it since coming to Oxford.
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I really like the way it sounds.
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And then it's really fun to speak,
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even though I can't roll my R's.
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I think it's so cool to know another language and Spanish is a great sounding one.
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If you guys could each wave a magic wand and become fluent in one additional language,
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what language would you choose?
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I would go for Japanese.
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Japanese, why Japanese?
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Yeah, beautiful language great culture love the food yeah definitely i would say chinese
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or arabic because those are the hardest languages to learn
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so it's that at the top
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and slowly he kind of moved downwards yeah exactly i i want to go for a latin language
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which would be easier for me just japanese would be impossible
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at this point is portuguese a latin language yeah yeah portuguese
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and italian like i can pretty much understand italian fairly well
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and portuguese as well so yeah i'd like to do chinese
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because it's the hardest also
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so many people speak chinese be pretty useful the phonetics are quite different to anything I'm used to.
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I felt a really strong sense of connection to Japan growing up.
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I traveled there a number of times,
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lived there four months when I was four years old.
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So many of my first memories are from Japan.
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Do you have any that you hold fondly?
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Honestly, there are some smells that you only smell in Japan.
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I can't describe it right now,
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but it would have to be that actually.
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Japanese homes are very different from Western homes.
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Like there are no beds, for example.
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You sleep on a tatami,
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which is basically like a little futon or a mattress directly on the floor.
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They don't have traditional bathtubs in Japan or Western bathtubs.
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Like you have like a giant,
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it kind of looks like a hot tub more than a bathtub.
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Mm-hmm.
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And the amazing food, obviously.
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Probably choose Portuguese.
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And also I heard like Spanish people can understand you as well
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so I feel like it wouldn't be as hard to learn Spanish from that.
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Plus I really like Brazil culturally.
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I think it's really interesting.
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I love the music culture there.
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I'd want to go there one day.
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I've never actually been but I think it'd be a good place.
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I feel like French would be most useful.
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France?
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Yeah.
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Why France?
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I live really close to it and also my mum speaks French
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so So it'd be nice to take little trips to France with that.
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I really would like to have a biblical Hebrew because biblical Hebrew is somewhat different,
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I've been told, grammatically from the modern Hebrew that spoke in Israel today.
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I mean, it's a classical language for sure.
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There's a lot of detail.
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There's like cantillations in Hebrew that help you understand how to recite it,
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how to sing it.
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It's very similar to ancient Greek with the accentuation and the rhythms in the meter.
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It's just overall like a very information rich language and not to mention the mythological aspects of it.
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German.
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I think it's useful and like a lot of like the languages in Europe,
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especially in Switzerland and Scandinavia,
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some roots are from Germanic languages,
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so I think it would be quite useful as a language to learn.
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If you could teach us a word in a non-English language that you know.
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Thank you, I guess that's also a really useful word which is Csie.
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Csie.
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Yeah, you got it.
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I like buddhi.
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It's the same word from which we get Buddha, Gautam Buddha, like Buddhism.
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Because Buddha means the awakened one or the enlightened one.
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And Buddha is just a certain type of intelligence that your brain contains that becomes active when you're enlightened,
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when you're the Buddha.
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Does it have a direct translation in English?
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So I think Buddha means awake.
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Buddha probably doesn't have a direct translation in English because all of the faculties,
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so Sanskrit has a lot of words for different aspects of the mind and they just have sentence-like translations.
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I would say buddhi is just deep awareness.
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I would go with itadakimasu which is the Japanese word for bon appetit.
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And use that whenever you're about to eat?
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Yes, yeah exactly.
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So every time you sit down for a meal, you say itadakimasu.
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I would like to teach Hindi because most of Indians speak Hindi.
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You just go up to someone and say kaise ho which means how are you.
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Kaise ho.
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Kaise ho, yes.
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Wow, I like that.
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Okay, then I'm gonna do something in Spanish.
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I'm gonna go with Viva Mexico,
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which means we're at Mexico.
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Yeah, very selfish there.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Vive la France also.
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So yeah, there you go, there you go.
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I like the word mignon in French.
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It means cute.
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Mignon.
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Mignon.
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And it's kind of nice to say as well.
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I like the word aitor in Greek.
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Aida, tau, omicron, rho.
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Aitor is one of the Greek words for heart.
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Yeah, for heart.
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But fascinatingly enough, the Greeks never,
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ever mentioned the heartbeat until the 4th century BC.
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Prixagoras of Kos, C-O-S, is the first person to mention it in a medical text.
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Of all Homer, all Hippocratic writings too, right?
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So medical writings.
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Nobody ever mentions and they're big cyclical people.
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They never mention the heartbeat.
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So I like eotor because it's one of these many,
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many words that the Greeks describe the chest, the heart.
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Do you think it's still important for people to study languages today?
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Oh yeah, definitely.
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Languages are the way we communicate.
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Super useful if you know.
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The more languages you know,
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the more people you can communicate with.
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That's the best, yeah.
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I think language learning can be so fun and so rewarding.
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Everyone should give it a shot.
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I think it,
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helps you realize how flexible your mind is
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and how much you can change the way you think just by changing the words that you use.
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And I do think that people should do that.
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I think that it is very important to learn other languages because when you travel to places like Japan,
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you realize how few people actually speak English.
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And sometimes Google Translate really does not come to the rescue, actually.
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There are still like big barriers when it comes to talking to people.
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I think so definitely.
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I feel like if you go to like Poland or like Sweden,
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then you start speaking at least saying phrases and stuff.
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I know a lot of people get really appreciative of that,
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that you've actually cut the effort in.
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It can just be good for a general connection.
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This is a personal mission for us all.
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I think it's crucial
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that you think of language as a key to help perhaps unlock parts of yourself that maybe you don't understand fully.
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Learning a language is very important because it's more than the language.
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It's about the culture itself because usually languages also culture shape languages and languages shape culture.
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So I think that way is super important.
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and the business school has been so nice
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and I don't know how to say it sometimes it could get overwhelming
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but 99% of the times it's just a beautiful experience we
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have people from 60 different countries in our cohort yeah
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and then we're all so close to each other as a cohort
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so I think this experience I won't get anywhere else English is not my first language I wouldn't be here
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if I didn't know it so yeah life-changing absolutely and yeah it's It's undescribable.
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The whole Oxford experience is just very magical.
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We're here in Merton College,
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one of the oldest, if not the oldest.
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I would say the oldest.
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There's two other colleges fighting for it.
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This college was built in 1264,
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one of the best Oxford colleges.
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If any of y'all ever come to the University of Oxford,
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do visit Merton College, the best and the oldest.
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So yeah, there you go.
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Context & Background
The video "Oxford, How Many Languages Do You Speak?" features a lively dialogue among students at Oxford University discussing their language abilities. With diverse backgrounds, the speakers share their experiences of learning multiple languages, including English, Mandarin, French, ancient Greek, German, and Spanish. This context highlights the rich multicultural environment at Oxford, where language acquisition is not only encouraged but also celebrated. Each student's story offers insights into the methods of language learning and raises awareness about the importance of spoken communication in different cultural contexts.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
Here are five useful phrases extracted from the transcript that can enhance your English speaking practice:
- How many languages do you speak? - A great opener to engage someone in conversation about their language skills.
- What are they? - This encourages the other person to elaborate on their language abilities.
- How did you learn [Language]? - An excellent question to know more about someone's language learning journey.
- Do you still speak [Language] with your family? - This phrase helps to understand language use in familial contexts.
- That sounds really fascinating! - A phrase that allows you to show interest in someone's unique language experience.
Step-by-step Shadowing Guide
To effectively improve English pronunciation and speaking skills, consider the following shadowing techniques while watching this video:
- Choose Your Shadowing App: Select a shadowing app that best fits your needs. Several apps provide features for playback speed adjustments and repetition, which are crucial for effective practice.
- Listen Carefully: Play the video and listen to one segment at a time. Focus on the intonation and rhythm of the speakers as they discuss their language skills.
- Repeat Out Loud: Pause the video after each sentence, then mimic the speaker’s pronunciation and intonation. This method, known as shadow speech, helps enhance your speaking skills.
- Record Yourself: Use your shadowing app to record your attempts at repeating the phrases. Listen back to identify areas for improvement.
- Engage with Others: Use the top phrases in conversations with friends or language partners to practice. Asking how many languages they speak can spark interesting discussions.
By following this guide, you will not only practice your speaking abilities but also gain confidence in using English in a conversational context. Whether you are focusing on basic phrases or exploring more complex linguistic structures, shadowing is a valuable method to shadow speak and refine your language skills effectively.
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.
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