Shadowing Practice: Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart PS5 Performance Review - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Once a generation, a team comes along with a game

that within minutes you know would not be possible on the previous generation.

Not just prettier graphics, not just better sound, not just more immersive and tactile controls, of which it has all of them.

No, core gameplay elements, presentation, interaction and above all experience are something new and without even knowing the technology behind it,

you can feel the difference.

Next Generation has arrived in Ratchet and Clank, both a showcase for the PS5 and a landmark for Insomniac.

They are not just a step above, they are a ripped apart.

This sequel to the 2016 reboot itself is a brand new adventure, but it does follow a very similar style.

Camp villainous humour, kooky strangers aplenty, and huge doses of action, combat, puzzling, and platforming.

Now all this hijinks and planet hopping sets the stage for some ingenious use of the host platform,

and the leap up from the last is staggering.

Ray -traced reflections, industry -leading PBR materials, dual rendering modes, and the poster child for that SSD and core memory subsystem of the PlayStation 5.

It's not just a gimmick, but it offers entirely new gameplay mechanics, impossible without it, and the results are out of this world.

Literally.

Until now, we have seen faster loading times and not much else.

But here Insomniac have pushed the ability to keep the GPU fed with data in a just -in -time approach.

But due to the sheer speed and efficiency they have, it means you can be fighting a giant robot in a city one second

and then be smashed onto another planet the next.

From smacking your hammer in Thor style and warping to another dimension like a chirpier version of the legacy of Kane,

rail grinding through a planet to flying a dragon, this game is constantly pushing and pulling data in

and out of existence and to think in Spider -Man just going into a building had a fate to black.

The sheer amount of throughput at times must be into the multiple gigabytes per second at this very early stage,

pandemic included, the potential shown here just builds so much hype for what will come next.

I just hope it all comes as fast as the results we're seeing here.

Games always aspire to movie rendering, and now thanks to Insomniac's skills and the potential of the PlayStation 5,

we are now at that point when a Pixar movie is now a real -time game,

a proper bona fide game that blurs the lines between offline movie render and real -time game one.

Obviously, if you dig into the details, you can see areas of sacrifices and it doesn't hold up to the scrutiny,

but if you're comparing the cinematics like for like with CGI movies such as Pixar and DreamWorks,

then on face value, it does fool the majority of people with the expense

and the quality that they are delivering in real -time games.

It really is beyond reproach at this point.

Now the reasons are numerous for why I'm so impressed.

The seamless integration of set pieces, the camera shifts and story moments, to the intricate details rendered in the game world,

from giant earwig -like robotic insects to densely packed neon cities and huge self -doubting robots.

The materials in this game are right at the bleeding edge, helped immensely by the quantity and quality of those ray -traced reflections.

With the PS5's RDNA 2 -based GPU enabling hardware -accelerated ray tracing, triangle -based ray tracing if you want to be fancy,

the team have embraced it full -on, and in a world of robot and metal sheets, it works wonders.

Shiny flaws now reflect objects and alpha effects even when occluded by other objects or off screen.

Characters even self -reflect on themselves.

Materials play a huge part in this.

Using a dramatically improved physically -based composited system, you can get a variety of surfaces that all react to light

and energy consumption and refraction properties far more accurately to real life.

As light hits a surface depending on its micro -facet makeup, it can absorb most of it, become dull, a matte -like finish,

or be very uniformed and refract the light with a high shine and reflective surface.

These high quality materials are the backbone for the variety we see here.

contact hardening with drop -off as you can see here with the red post reflection being clear

and then becoming more stochastic and noisy as it runs further away from the contact,

being just a diffused colour on the rougher surface nearer the camera.

You can see the same on Clank's chin.

From his self -reflecting body, his jaw is dirtier, rougher than the bottom layer of his head, so the reflection becomes more stochastic,

noisier as his chin moves over and then away.

These are an expensive technique and only possible on the PS5

but they deliver some amazing results

which due to spoilers I cannot even show you some of the best parts in the game.

All of these reflections material types and surfaces are used interactively in the gameplay

and the cinematics and they all sample from a BVH a bounding volume hierarchy almost like an octree

which then allocates proxy versions of objects in the game

and then the ray trace is then intersected back out

or into the screen to work out which objects are in the reflection and then draw that, a lower polygonal construction of that object.

This works immensely well in the title and even in gameplay

and cinematics they shift smoothly and seamlessly and it just creates a very encompassing and convincing looking world.

Some of the best materials I've ever seen.

And the level of improvements and the quality doesn't end there combined with the advanced

and equally as expensive hair rendering from Insomniac's own spline -based hair technology that they originally used in Miles Morales.

Here the individual strands of fur can be seen on ratchet and rivet, and when wet they clump together and increase in specularity and anisotropy reflectance,

giving a silky look.

These are also rendered with very small primitives, meaning they self -shadow adding depth to them, with subsurface scattering as light bleeds through,

it achieves some of the best hair in games, and incredibly convincing materials that,

like I say, would not look out of place at points in a DreamWorks movie.

Astonishingly good.

Hopefully, some of these examples show.

But all of this would be fruitless without something the game has in spades.

Character and characters.

Motion capture is not an option, so some old -school keyframed and vertex -based animation is front and centre.

This gives the game

that cartoon offline comedic look as movements are extreme exaggerated yet

smooth nefarious is a perfect example of this with delayed sudden facial changes using those morph target animations

they stretch something like metal

but make it look believable they define multiple fixed states of model vertices

and then they morph or blend between these shapes to give life

and movement to the characters now it can reduce the cost on skinning

and cpu but it's lightly done here for aesthetic reasons of the game, Hyper Real is their target.

But they manage to bring character to inanimate robots like they came from Lost in Space, instilling more life and energy than an Olympic athletics team.

From large hulking bosses, hairy workmen or French pirates, each has a distinct personality that shines through their design,

materials and animation, and everything makes a significantly strong impact. Did I do it?

Oh, what is this?

What's with all the neon?

And then all these elements are capped off into the title.

All the animation and materials carry over.

That elongated vertex stretching for that cartoon animation, procedural destruction on barriers and armor of shooting down enemies,

long collision lifespans as objects bounce and create a very busy and interactive sequence.

And then it's all topped off by all those effects, that cracking depth of field as you aim down the scope

or that beautiful per -object motion blur that Insomniac are famous for.

And then they wrap it all off with particle effects, alpha effects, volumetric light, atmospheric scattering,

some of the best ambient occlusion I've seen as a screen space variety, making everything look solid and beautiful.

And they enhance this interaction and believability of the world by using decals heavily in the title.

It's got lots of rocky terrain and it uses POM, parallax occlusion maps on a lot of objects hitting the ground

and breaking objects which gives density

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and depth to scenes then it fades back into a standard texture map

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and the lighting

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and shadow throughout the title is very impressive it seems to be mixing up cascaded shadow maps here

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and also using proxy capsules to render shadows on the heroes themselves these are lower quality

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or lower lod versions of the characters broken down into smaller chunks such as head arms

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and legs and these are then blended with

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that render of the shadow maps and therefore they use

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that to contact feet hands on the ground and then they can have

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that soft penumbra edge and then they blend

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and merge in between the shadow maps

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and shift between different light sources to give more grounding to the characters in the game.

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This along with all the other light sources and shadow maps

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that are cast across the entire title gives everything a very solid and grounded look.

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so let's talk about performance now just before launch the sony team insomniac themselves managed to get a patch out

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which has been great because i've been able to patch this version in

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so i can now discuss two modes of the three

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that are available there is a performance ray tracing mode at

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60 fps a performance mode with no ray tracing at 60 fps

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and then the fidelity mode at 30 with all the bells

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and whistles turned on this is what you can see at the moment

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and is the one that looks the best shock horror.

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It's the highest resolution coming out at 3840 by 2160 using Insomniac's Temporal Injection Anti -Aliasing TIAA.

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Now in all tested sections it comes out at a fully native 3840 by 2160.

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It may be dynamic but I didn't count any points where I saw

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that but if it is that TIAA injects that image back anyway so you always get a crisp sharp and overall all.

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Impressive looking title.

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And equally as impressive is that performance metric to go alongside it.

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15 minutes of tested footage in this mode, 38 drops, less than 0 .1%.

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It really isn't anything to worry about.

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And most of those come from those real -time cinematics where it holds a frame or two.

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So it stops things like textures and physics just jumping around, which can be disconcerting if that did happen.

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You don't get any of that.

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So therefore I would hardly say

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that you would notice any of these drops at all because jumping from one shot to the next, it's just not apparent.

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In gameplay, if it does drop, it tends to be the next 16 millisecond refresh cycle, which means 50 milliseconds.

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So overall, it's as solid as it is impressive to look at.

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And now we come to that other mode that's available thanks to the patch they've just released, the one that most will choose,

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and as I call it, the best of both mode.

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Performance RT delivers 60 FPS, but all the bells and whistles I just mentioned, with some minor cutbacks.

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Obviously resolution is one of them, now targeting 2560 by 1440.

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Again, it could be dynamic, but I didn't count any points where it was, but I haven't had much time to look at this version,

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but I have played quite a bit of it.

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And overall performance, other than when you're warping between worlds here, where it can drop up to 50 milliseconds,

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and that's very minor when it's loading all

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that data from RAM back out from the SSD back into RAM in real time as you play.

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It's absolutely incredible what they're doing here, and it just impresses me every time I see it.

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And the performance is just the same.

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It's better than even the 30 FPS mode, targeting 16 milliseconds now half the time.

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And aside some later sections, which I can't show you for spoilers, it can dip down probably to the mid 50s outside of

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that 99 % of the time it's like you're seeing

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now a locked 60 fps unless it's those real -time cinematics where it holds onto

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that frame or two where it jumps between scenes again just to hold

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that consistency and like I say

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when you're jumping between worlds you have those little stutters of maybe 50 milliseconds most of the time 33

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and you wouldn't notice it

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because you are jumping from one place to the next the overall impressions from the title

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I've got are this from a technical perspective

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and certainly just from a gameplay

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and fun perspective all of these elements look great they sound great

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and they're excellent to talk about but they also add a lot to

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that gameplay it doesn't reinvent ratchet and clank

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and not everything's perfect in the title nothing truly is there are some minor areas of quibbles

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and again these are minor but i will point you out

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so these areas of warp gates where you can transition within

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combat to certain fixed points on certain parts of the level

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they look good they feel good they're a great technique

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but they don't really add a great deal to the gameplay and feel a little gimmicky,

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certainly in comparison to the larger traveling between universes and warping between areas.

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All of that feels much more impressive and more flamboyant.

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These are good, like I say, but they don't feel like they add a lot to the combat.

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And on the combat, the AI and the construction of the enemies that could be better, I would like to see more variety in enemy types,

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certainly in the bosses and their attack patterns, just to add a little bit more variety in combat

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but I can't really get away from the impressive area of all this travel

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and the kind of speed we're getting in terms of the minimal impact on performance

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and visually there's a few quirks and issues here

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but it is pre -launch code

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so some of those might be fixed later on on the screen space reflection fallback

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that they use for their ray trace reflections can stand out sometimes as it draws in more detail

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and characters and certainly on the foliage and alpha effects

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that get drawn in which are not as abundant in

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that bvh so they cut some of those areas back

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because obviously they're very very expensive but again like I say I'm being very very nitpicky here.

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Ultimately Insomniac have delivered a true next generation title on the PlayStation 5.

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Everything from the visual quality, the use of HDR, the 3D audio and interaction of the world,

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the mixing up of that SSD and that data transfer in and out of existence, the use of those haptic feedbacks,

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that half and full depress of the trigger so you know different weapon types in combat, that full depress when you run out of ammo and

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that click click click that comes from it so you don't even need to look at the screen.

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All of these

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and much more besides makes the game feel completely impossible on anything other than the PlayStation 5 and that is exactly what

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Next Generation is all about and Insomniac have certainly brought the goods.

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But with that, I'm out.

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But if you like all these kind of game -related deep dives into tech, performance, and everything else, keep it IGN and IGN Games,

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and I'll catch you on the next one.

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372 sentences

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart PS5 Performance Review”. This video has 192 sentences and 2669 words to shadow. The speech runs for 15:20. The speaker talks at a natural 174 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 78% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

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

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
trace noun	/tɹeɪs/	An act of tracing.
reflection noun	/ɹɪˈflɛkʃən/	The act of reflecting or the state of being reflected.
gameplay noun	/ˈɡeɪmˌpleɪ/	The totality of player experiences during a game, such as the gaming environment and the competitive interaction with other players; often with reference to a…
render verb	/ˈɹɛn.dɚ/	To cause to become.
shadow noun	/ˈʃædəʊ̯/	A dark image projected onto a surface where light (or other radiation) is blocked by the shade of an object.
impressive adjective	/ɪmˈpɹɛsɪv/	Making, or tending to make, a positive impression; having power to impress.
cinematic adjective	/sɪnəˈmætɪk/	Of or relating to the cinema.
robot noun	/ˈɹoʊ.bɑt/	An intelligent mechanical being designed to look like a human or other creature, and usually made from metal.
animation noun	/ˌæn.ɪˈmeɪ.ʃən/	The act of animating, or giving life or spirit.
reflect verb	/ɹɪˈflɛkt/	To bend back (light, etc.) from a surface.
interaction noun	/ˌɪn.təˈɹæk.ʃən/	The situation or occurrence in which two or more things act upon one another to produce an effect; the effect resulting from such a situation or occurrence.
alpha noun	/ˈæl.fə/	The name of the first letter of the Greek alphabet (Α, α), followed by beta. In the Latin alphabet it is the predecessor to A.
patch noun	/pæt͡ʃ/	A piece of cloth, or other suitable material, sewed or otherwise fixed upon a garment to repair or strengthen it, especially upon an old garment to cover a…
warp noun	/ˈwɔːp/	The state, quality, or condition of being physically bent or twisted out of shape.
technique noun	/tɛkˈniːk/	The practical aspects of a given art, occupation etc.; formal requirements.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
back out verb	To reverse (a vehicle) from a confined space.
carry over verb	To transfer (something) to a later point in time.
drop off verb	To fall asleep.
hold up to verb	To physically lift another person to the same height as something.
jump around verb	To move erratically by jumping.
mix up verb	To mix or blend thoroughly and completely.
move over verb	To move (oneself, or someone/something else) so as to free up space.
rip apart verb	To be destroyed due to the malevolent actions of others.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

Some of the best materials I've ever seen.
Did I do it?
What's with all the neon?
You don't get any of that.

Grammar in this video

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

Structure	In the video
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	has arrived · have seen · have pushed
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	be smashed · are used · is then intersected
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	around, which can · cycle, which means

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 33 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, I've, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: smooth /smuːð/, athletic /æθˈlɛt.ɪk/, aesthetic /ɛsˈθɛ.tɪk/, smoothly /ˈsmuːðli/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: reflection /ɹɪˈflɛkʃən/, shadow /ˈʃædəʊ̯/, animation /ˌæn.ɪˈmeɪ.ʃən/, interaction /ˌɪn.təˈɹæk.ʃən/, sheer /ʃɪɚ/
Long words — get the stress right: cinematic /sɪnəˈmætɪk/, animation /ˌæn.ɪˈmeɪ.ʃən/, interaction /ˌɪn.təˈɹæk.ʃən/, efficiency /ɪˈfɪʃ.ən.si/, incredibly /ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/

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 trace, reflection, gameplay.

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: Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart PS5 Performance Review - Learn English Speaking with Video

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