Shadowing Practice: Phonetics and Phonology: Introduction - Learn English Speaking with Video

Most Intro to Linguistics classes start with phonetics and phonology.

There are good reasons for that, it has everything we like.

Awkwardly trying to recreate sounds, silly recordings and vast charts of scary looking lettery things.

But probably the most important reason is that when we think about language, most of us probably first think about speaking.

That's just what we do naturally.

We produce a variety of sounds using our lips, tongue, mouth and some bits in our throat.

If you want to make a P sound for example, you close your lips and then release the air all at once.

If you want to make an M sound, you also close your lips and then you kind of hum, and so on.

This is what phonetics and phonology deal with.

Human speech sounds.

All the plops and hisses and trills we make to show other people what's going on in our heads.

It would be hard to get by without those.

Phonetics and phonology look at what sounds we make, how we make them and, at least phonology, looks at if there's a system behind that

or if we're just stringing random sounds together and in the end something comes out that makes a bit of sense.

But why do we need two disciplines to deal with that?

Well, because they approach the stuff really quite a bit differently.

Phonetics is very very precise.

It really matters if your A is a bit lower or higher, or if you push out lots of air with your P's and T's and D's or not,

and if you pronounce the T's in butter as T,

butter, D, butter, or just kind of tap your tongue against your gum ridge, butter.

Phonetics is interested in how we make sounds, how we hear those sounds, how we can describe them to deal with them empirically in a scholarly setting,

and how we can make those sounds visible in a way that's actually practical to write down in print.

on the other hand, doesn't sweat those little details very much.

It's not like a Londoner wouldn't understand butter, and vice versa.

Phonology says it's the same idea of a sound, they just say it a bit differently.

This may sound a bit silly, but think of the L sound for example.

English has two of those.

In words like law or light, where it's at the start, it sounds a bit different than in words like fall or ball.

Those sound much, much darker.

But you can't really mix them up because in English, light elves only come in the beginning of a syllable and dark ones at the end.

So phonologists say that because they can't come in the same spots, the difference doesn't matter.

They don't ever change the meaning of a word.

That is what phonology is interested in – systems.

Clearly the two L sounds don't make much of a difference.

Pan and can, though.

Those P and K sounds change whether you're frying something or drinking it.

A result is that in phonetics, what language you're investigating doesn't matter very much.

A B in Libyan Arabic is the same as a B in English.

But when you look at the systems, it's a different story.

In English, there's a p sound, and bin and pin are not quite the same thing really.

Arabic speakers mostly don't make a difference between those sounds, so their difference doesn't matter to a phonologist.

It's a bit like the elves in English.

You can see that it may be quite important to know whether someone is giving you a phonetic transcription of a word,

which is very precise, or a phonological one which only tells you what you need to know to figure out the rest.

That's why we use square brackets for phonetic transcriptions and slashers for phonological ones.

We also have different names for the sounds, depending on whether we are thinking about them phonetically or phonologically.

In phonetics we call them phones.

No, not that kind of phone.

In phonology we call them phonemes.

The difference between those is a story for another time though.

Let's have a quick recap of what we went over today.

Phonetics and phonology, those are both linguistic disciplines that are all about speech sounds.

Phonetics describes the sounds we actually make as precisely as possible, while phonology only looks at what really makes a difference in any one given language

and it tries to find the implications of that.

As a quick side note, there's also phonetics and phonology for sign languages, even though sign languages obviously don't have sounds in them.

For this series though we'll be dealing with oral languages only, but we may dive deeper into sign language linguistics at a later point.

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124 sentences

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “Phonetics and Phonology: Introduction”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: sound, phonetic, phonology, language, difference. This video has 56 sentences and 802 words to shadow. The speech runs for 4:41. The speaker talks at a natural 171 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 80% 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
phonetics noun	/fəˈnɛt.ɪks/	The study of the physical sounds of human speech, concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds (phones), and the processes of their physiological…
phonology noun	/fəˈnɑləd͡ʒi/	The study of the way sounds function in languages, including accent, intonation, phonemes, stress, and syllable structure, and which sounds are distinctive…
linguistics noun	/lɪŋˈɡwɪstɪks/	The systematic and scholarly study of language.
phonetic adjective	/fəˈnɛt.ɪk/	Relating to the sounds of spoken language.
phonological adjective	/ˌfɑnəˈlɑd͡ʒɪkəl/	Of or relating to phonology.
phonologist noun	/fəˈnɑləd͡ʒɪst/	A person who specializes in phonology, the functional use of sounds in language.
transcription noun	/tɹænˈskɹɪpʃən/	The act or process of transcribing.
elf noun	/ɛlf/	A supernatural being or spirit associated with illness, mischief, and harmful or dangerous magical influence; in later Norse sources, sometimes divided into…
awkwardly adverb		In an awkward manner; with discomfort or lack of coordination.
empirically adverb		Based on experience as opposed to theoretical knowledge.
phoneme noun	/ˈfoʊ.nim/	An indivisible unit of sound in a given language. A phoneme is an abstraction of the physical speech sounds (phones) and may encompass several different phones.
phonetically adverb	/fəˈnɛtɪkli/	In the way it sounds, particularly: written to describe the sound rather than the dictionary spelling.
phonologically adverb		In accordance with phonology.
slasher noun		One who slashes.
syllable noun	/ˈsɪl.ə.bəl/	A unit of human speech which often forms words corresponding to one opening of the mouth; a vowel and its surrounding consonants.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
come out verb	/ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/	To be discovered; to be revealed.
figure out verb		To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
go over verb		To look at carefully; to scrutinize; to analyze.
push out verb		To force (someone) to leave a group.

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 15 contractions and reduced forms, such as doesn't, don't, can't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: transcription /tɹænˈskɹɪpʃən/, implication /ˌɪmpləˈkeɪʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: phonology /fəˈnɑləd͡ʒi/, phonological /ˌfɑnəˈlɑd͡ʒɪkəl/, phonologist /fəˈnɑləd͡ʒɪst/, phonetically /fəˈnɛtɪkli/, implication /ˌɪmpləˈkeɪʃən/

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 phonetics, phonology, linguistics.

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 →

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