Shadowing Practice: Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: Explanation and Analysis - Learn English Speaking with Video
Choose a practice mode
Each mode opens a full-screen practice room.
311 sentences
If sentences are too short or too long, click Edit to adjust them.
1
Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 is by far his most famous sonnet,
2
so I thought it might be nice to give you a detailed explanation of what it means
3
and how you might read it.
4
Now the main message of this sonnet is fairly obvious, so the poem starts with a question, shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
5
And as the poem proceeds we do get this comparison.
6
We have the beloved, Shakespeare says hey, I love you, and then we have summer, and the question is which is better?
7
And of course the answer is the beloved.
8
But there is a problem with this, which is the fact that the beloved and summer are both subject to decay.
9
Both of them face time.
10
Summer ends and the beloved's gonna get old, and that produces a new problem.
11
And so at the end of the poem the answer, the solution to all of this, is to say well, poetry can solve this because
12
if I write this poem and make you famous then you will continue to live on in this,
13
in this particular poem, and this poem will give life to you.
14
You're going to be famous forever, and we refer to this as poetic immortality.
15
That is the gist of the poem, but as we'll see there's quite a bit more to it as Shakespeare makes this argument.
16
Now before we get too deep into the weeds, I just want to say a few things about the form of the poem.
17
This is a fairly typical Shakespearean sonnet, which means that it has three quatrains.
18
A quatrain is a four -line stanza and then also a rhyming couplet at the end.
19
It also has a unique rhyme scheme, and as you compare these two sonnets you can see that there are some major differences.
20
That said, this poem does have one thing in common with the Petrarchan sonnet, which is that the volta,
21
as it's referred to, also known as the poetic turn, happens right here after the eighth line.
22
And that's typical of a Petrarchan sonnet, whereas with Shakespeare the poetic turn tends to happen with the final rhyming couplet.
23
What is a poetic turn?
24
Well this is where we get the solution to the problem.
25
This is where suddenly the poet turns things around, goes in a different direction, and provides a kind of startling and interesting conclusion.
26
We can also say something about the rhyme scheme, and the rhyme scheme here is what we call iambic pentameter,
27
which means that we have these units where we have two beats.
28
One is stressed, one is not stressed, so I'm not sure if it makes sense to call them beats,
29
but we have an unstressed syllable followed by a stress syllable, and then we do that five times and we get iambic pentameter.
30
Penta means five.
31
The rhythm is generally quite smooth, which is what adds to the appeal of the poem and why the poem is justifiably famous,
32
but there are a few awkward moments.
33
Well, they're not necessarily awkward, they're just different.
34
So with line three we have rough winds.
35
This is where we have two stresses in a row.
36
This is called a spondy.
37
There we go.
38
And it makes sense to have a spondy here
39
because of course the winds are rough and so we can't have this smooth nice meter here.
40
But generally speaking we do have a very nice rhythm in the poem,
41
and you have to restrain yourself from following the rhythm too much when you read it.
42
So don't read it like, Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
43
That's gonna get really annoying.
44
Just read it naturally shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" And that's totally fine.
45
If you want to be more dramatic you can emphasize one of those words, but I would hesitate to do that.
46
I would just let the line reach the listener as a whole.
47
Okay, so that's a little bit about the rhythm here.
48
Now occasionally Shakespeare also includes some interesting sound effects in the middle of a line.
49
So if we look for instance at this line,
50
line eight, we have by chance the ch sound or nature's changing course.
51
So you have these three ch sounds kind of interesting there.
52
At the end you have this internal rhyme with lives
53
and gives which creates a nice symmetry and it adds to the effect, the point that the poet is making there.
54
We also have this nice balance of fair and fair.
55
Shake and has a nice internal kind of a sound.
56
Lots of other examples could be mentioned, but it gives you a little bit of a sense of how Shakespeare creates
57
this very pleasing effect through the form of the poem.
58
Before we jump in any further by reading the individual lines, I should also say something about how this poem fits into the larger sonnet sequence.
59
So you might know that Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets,
60
so 154, of which the first 126 are to a young man,
61
and the last ones all the way to the end are to a dark lady.
62
And there's been a lot of dispute about well
63
which is more controversial and does it mean that Shakespeare was gay and questions like that.
64
I'm not going to get into that in this particular video.
65
Now in terms of these first 126 sonnets,
66
the first 17 are actually referred to often as the procreation sonnets, and Shakespeare's argument to the young man here is,
67
hey, you should get married at some point, be a good idea, then you're gonna have kids and offspring, they will look like you,
68
all these little mini -me's running around, and you're gonna be famous through them.
69
Your reputation, your fame will live on.
70
So that point when you read those sonnets you see that poetry as an argument, as something that is worth something,
71
is held in fairly low esteem.
72
So in sonnet 16, for instance, Shakespeare refers to his barren rhyme.
73
My rhyme is like infertile, it cannot give you kids, but you should have kids and that will be to your advantage.
74
Then in sonnet 17 things start to change a little bit because at the end in the rhyming couplet,
75
Shakespeare writes, but were some child of yours alive that time, you should live twice in it and in my rhyme.
76
So we start to see the idea that, hey, you could also live in rhyme, not just in a child.
77
But even in this sonnet the main option is procreation, and rhyme poetry is seen as inferior.
78
So sonnet 18 then marks a shift by saying, wait a second, maybe poetic immortality is better, that gets repeated in sonnet 19
79
and then it comes back sporadically throughout the rest of the sonnet sequence in sonnets like 55 and so on.
80
So that gives you a bit of a sense of the context then in terms of what
81
Shakespeare is trying to do here.
82
And I should mention that sonnets 18 and 19 are sometimes included in the procreation sonnets,
83
but it's better not to do that, they are quite distinct.
84
Let's now jump into the poem then, and as you can see it starts with a question, which is quite interesting.
85
Why does he start with a question?
86
Well, there are a few possibilities.
87
One, of course, is to provide an easy way to set up the comparison.
88
Shall I compare you?
89
Well, let's compare.
90
You might compare here another very famous poem by Elizabeth Bear Browning writing in the 19th century.
91
Her sonnet 14 starts with, How do I love thee?
92
Let me count the ways.
93
Very famous opening as well.
94
So that's one reason to start with a question just to create the comparison.
95
In the second place the question is interesting because it makes us think, well, is the poetic comparison even necessary?
96
Do we need to compare you to a summer's day?
97
You're so obviously better.
98
Is this comparison even necessary?
99
So that provides a sort of implicit praise for the beloved.
100
You are so beautiful, so handsome, do I even need to do this?
101
In the third place, and this is perhaps more interesting, we tend to focus here on the comparison between the beloved,
102
the, and the day, but there's also this pronoun I, and if we focus on that we we start to wonder,
103
well, is the poet not also drawing attention to himself?
104
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
105
Is the Beloved dependent on the poet for being remembered?
106
I might not compare you.
107
Do I really feel like this?" So if that's the case, it really points out that the Beloved owes something to the poet as well.
108
And then finally, very briefly, the word shall makes us think about the future and it starts to make us think about the question of time.
109
There's lots of references to time in this poem.
110
Sometime, often, right?
111
Chance, nature's changing course.
112
Time is going to be a problem and somehow the poet needs to deal with this particular issue.
113
The second line reads, thou art more lovely and more temperate, so you are more beautiful, more handsome than summer.
114
Notice the play on words on the word temperate.
115
Temperate can mean self -restrained or even temperate.
116
It can also mean having a mild climate, and this is what allows us to bring these two things together.
117
In other words, the summer has to do with the climate, and we can't really say about summer that summer is self -restrained,
118
but a person can be self -restrained.
119
and a person can also be mild, you know, not too hot, not too cold.
120
So the fact that two things refer to a person, whereas only one thing refers to the summer,
121
also shows that there's something more to a person.
122
A person can also be self -restrained, can have this character aspect that a summer cannot.
123
Then we read, rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and you might have noticed that May is technically not in summer,
124
it's in the spring, but the idea seems to be here
125
that in May we have these very cute little closed buds on the flowers.
126
They're beautiful and they're adorable, but eventually in the summer they will open, those darling buds of May,
127
then the winds come by and they shake them and the petals fall off.
128
It's very sad, but this is not going to happen to you.
129
You're so much more dependable, and you last longer, and you are also not rough.
130
You are even keeled and even tempered.
131
The fourth line introduces a legal image, so it says, and summer's lease hath all too short a date.
132
If you lease a car, for instance, you don't own it forever,
133
you make payments maybe, but your lease has a date to it, an end date, and the idea here is that date means allotted time.
134
It's the time given.
135
So summer is gonna pass into autumn, and then summer is over.
136
Summer cannot cling to its possession.
137
It's gonna lose its lease.
138
It's interesting that in the original, if you look at the original text here, the S here is a long S,
139
and what that means is that visually this looks a little bit like the word leaf, which kind of fits as well, right?
140
Like if you think of summer's leaf hath all too short a date, the leaves of the summer are going to fall off in the fall.
141
So that seems to fit beautifully.
142
In the 1920s somebody actually suggested that we should change the editing here, that leaf was a mistake and leaf is the intended meaning.
143
That has not been accepted for a good reason, but more recently in the last decade
144
somebody has made the argument that at least visually we should be aware of this potential pun.
145
The main meaning is lease, but if you look at it in the original it does remind you a little bit of leaf as well,
146
and the word leaf can also mean page.
147
So if you think of the final conclusion here that you're going to live on in poetry,
148
well, you're gonna live on on the leaf, the page.
149
So maybe of interest, but definitely a bit of an obscure play on words.
150
The next quatrain continues the comparison, so it says sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines.
151
The eye of heaven, of course, is the Sun, and the fact that we're referring to the eye, the metaphor here for the Sun,
152
this should be a U, it's a bit hard to read,
153
The fact that we're using this metaphor makes for a beautiful comparison with the person as well,
154
because you can say your eye is not too hot, right?
155
You're not too disdainful or hot -tempered, you're much more even -keeled.
156
It says, and often is his gold complexion dimmed.
157
The idea here is that you have a cloud in front of the sun, so the sun is trying to shine out,
158
there you go, but it can't because it's dimmed by the clouds.
159
Sometimes it's too hot in the summer, sometimes it's too cold because the sun goes into hiding, and this inconsistency does not apply to the beloved.
160
This word complexion, critics have also noted that this word has a double meaning as well.
161
So it can mean your face or your appearance, your countenance, that's the main meaning here that the face of the sun is dimmed.
162
But in the Renaissance people talked about the four humors, and then they used the word complexion to mean your character, your inner makeup.
163
You could have a sanguine complexion or a phlegmatic complexion.
164
You're dominated by a different humor which is going to affect who you are.
165
That relates back to the word temperate, which refers to character as well.
166
So let's go on then.
167
The next line reads, and every fair from fair sometimes declines.
168
Now the first fair here means fair thing, and the second fair here means beauty or fairness.
169
In other words, every fair person or thing is gonna lose its fairness, its beauty.
170
You're gonna get old, you'll get gray hair, not to say that gray is not beautiful, but things will change.
171
so every fair is going to move away from, decline from, get worse from its initial fairness, its initial beauty.
172
And this word decline may help us to understand this
173
because in the Renaissance decline often referred not just to getting worse but to moving away from.
174
Originally the word really had this idea of turning away from, bending away from, and it was often used for the sun as well.
175
So if the sun is sinking in the sky, it's declining.
176
In this case what you could say is that the standard of beauty, so we could say the standard of beauty,
177
there we go, is going to remain.
178
This is what we're striving for, this is what's beautiful, but the actual person is going to decline,
179
so their beauty will not be the same as the standard anymore, but will decline from it.
180
Kind of sad, isn't it?
181
The next line gives us a couple of reasons why this happens.
182
So the first is chance.
183
Imagine that you're walking along on the sidewalk and you walk into a lamppost, you get a cut on your face, now you have a scar,
184
and you're like, oh well that was too bad, now I'm not beautiful anymore,
185
unless scars are beautiful, and there you see how a chance random event can suddenly make this happen.
186
But we also have nature's changing course untrimmed, and we can talk about how nature over time is going to,
187
through its changing course, make you grow old as well.
188
Your life goes up and down, it changes, one day you're gonna wake up and you're not the same person that you were before.
189
Maybe you some wrinkles.
190
So that's another reason why this decline is happening.
191
The difficulty is with this word untrimmed.
192
The main meaning here is taking away something that was ornamental.
193
So before we have this fair thing, a beautiful thing, and now it is untrimmed.
194
So the beauty has been taken away.
195
That's the primary meaning here.
196
Untrimmed means not put in good order, having the ornamentation removed.
197
Some people, though, and Shakespearean critics are like this, they like to read every possible pun into a word.
198
Some critics have suggested another possible meaning, and they point to the fact that when it comes to ships we sometimes
199
or people sometimes use the word untrimmed as well.
200
So think of a ship going along here.
201
We'll draw a little picture there.
202
There we go.
203
The ship is going along and you can do two things to trim it.
204
One is to balance the ship by moving cargo to one side or the other, so that's to trim the ship.
205
The other one is to change the sails, adjust the sails, so that you can go in a particular direction.
206
But in this case we have this word untrimmed, so we don't get a boat being steered,
207
we get a boat that is completely random, completely uncontrolled.
208
If that's the meaning we're going with, then we should not apply untrim to the word fair, but we should apply it to nature's changing course.
209
And what it means then is that nature, as it's changing its course over time, is out of control.
210
It's like a boat that is not being steered, not being controlled.
211
So we could translate this word then as unchanged.
212
We haven't changed the ship, we haven't affected it to make sure it goes where we want it to go, it's simply unchanged.
213
It is as it is, and it's going all over the place.
214
That does lead to a kind of oxymoron, though, because then we're saying nature's changing unchanged course.
215
But that makes kind of sense, because nature's course is both random and predictable.
216
You can predict that it is random.
217
It's an unchanged changing course,
218
or changing unchanged course, because the fact that nature is full of change is unchanging.
219
Okay, if your head is spinning at this point, not to worry.
220
The main meaning here is removing the ornamentation, and that's the easiest way to read this.
221
You can always just read it as referring back to fair and having the sense of at some point, whether by chance or by nature,
222
you're gonna lose your ornamentation, your beauty, and you're gonna be untrimmed.
223
Let's turn then to the final six lines, to the volta, and now the poet says, but thy eternal summer shall not fade.
224
So you are going to last.
225
Now the word summer is no longer in contrast to the beloved but is being applied to the beloved,
226
which is a kind of rhetorical technique here to shift the comparison.
227
You're going to last because your beauty, your summer, is not going to fade.
228
You're not going to lose possession of that fair thou oased.
229
All right, oased is another tricky word.
230
It can mean one of two things.
231
It can mean to own or to owe.
232
And because this apostrophe kind of hides the real meaning, we have to guess what the actual meaning might be.
233
The easiest and most sensible option is own, so what this would say then is you're not going to lose possession of that beauty,
234
that fairness, that you own.
235
You own a great beauty, through my poetry you're going to keep it?
236
There you go, that's the meaning.
237
Not very difficult.
238
I should also add that there is a play here on the contrast between possession and ownership.
239
We tend to say that possession is nine -tenths of the law.
240
In other words, if you're a squatter staying in somebody else's property and they're never there, after a while somebody might be like,
241
or the judge might be like, well you stayed there long enough, maybe you have some rights to this place.
242
At least in some countries this is the case.
243
But usually we say ownership is more important than possession.
244
If you have a legal document and you say, hey look, I have title to this land, get off, then that's more important than possession.
245
So he's saying in a sense you own your beauty, and that is a little bit ironic because can you own your beauty?
246
Aren't you going to lose it over time?
247
Aren't you going to get old and die?
248
Is it really something that you own in that sense?
249
And the second meaning here, owe, kind of plays with that ambiguity.
250
So let's try to understand what it means to say that you owe your fare, whatever that means.
251
All right, well the word fare can also be a pun.
252
If you pay the fare, then you pay somebody to get on the bus, let's say here's my ticket, I owe you this.
253
If we talk about beauty, you could say beauty is something that was just given to me by chance.
254
I happen to be good -looking, you're not as good -looking as me.
255
It's too bad.
256
But you know, I feel sorry for you, and so I'll point out that this was just by chance.
257
That's all it is.
258
But when time comes, you know, you have to pay the piper, you have to pay the fare, you have to give back what you owe,
259
and you're gonna lose your beauty.
260
So that's the second sense of this, the other way to read this.
261
And it also fits in nicely, of course, because if we think of the poem itself, the poem with all its different lines,
262
it's saying, hey, you're gonna be remembered in this.
263
People are gonna know who you are.
264
But now we can see the poem almost as a legal document as well to say, this poem gives a kind of ownership forever,
265
and so in a sense we could even say, you owe me.
266
As a poet, you're gonna owe me.
267
That's not really the sense directly here, but you can kind of play with this pun.
268
All right, maybe reading too much into this,
269
but I'm just trying to give you all the different perspectives on this poem so you can really make sense of it.
270
Just to sum up what we've seen so far.
271
We've seen that Shakespeare started with a comparison by saying, hey, should I compare you to a summer's day?
272
He does do that.
273
He says you are much better than a summer's day, but we do start to get this problem, which is that beauty fades and decays,
274
and then Shakespeare turns it around and says, but your eternal summer, your beauty, is not going to fade.
275
I will remember it through my poem.
276
There's one more enemy here, not just time but also death, and of course they're kind of the same.
277
Nor shall death brag, thou wanderest in his shade.
278
This is likely a reference to Psalm 23, to the valley of the shadow of death,
279
but in Psalm 23 God provides the rescue.
280
Here it's the poet who provides the rescue, maybe a little bit tongue in cheek.
281
But this word shade as a result is kind of ironic,
282
because given everything we saw before about temperate climates and beautiful places to be, shade sounds rather pleasant.
283
But it's death saying, hey come into my shade here, come and enjoy the shade, and what it really means is you're gonna die.
284
The poet then is using this word ironically, and we're gonna see a lot of irony in these final lines.
285
And as he goes on, here's another irony, he starts to brag.
286
He says, well, death can't brag, but I can.
287
In eternal lines to time thou growest.
288
lines here is no longer bloodlines, like your offspring, but it's poetic lines.
289
And over time you're gonna grow in your fame and your reputation.
290
But this word is somewhat ironic as well, of course, because can a person really grow through poetry?
291
Does poetry really grow?
292
Doesn't this remind us more of those biological children?
293
They will grow.
294
They will literally grow.
295
So you can see here that these natural metaphors are being applied in a different context.
296
And the same thing is true for gives life at the end, which we talked about before, the sense that the poem,
297
the poet, gives life to the beloved now.
298
Gives birth, you might say.
299
So long as men can breathe, their eyes can see, so long lives this, this poem, and this gives life to thee.
300
That is quite a boast, isn't it?
301
And it ironically mixes this biological natural metaphor with something more artificial,
302
which of course is poetry.
303
So an incredibly intricate sonnet.
304
The critic Helen Wendler has pointed out
305
that Shakespeare is very clever here in moving gradually outwards as he starts with the and a day,
306
very specific, and then moving towards a month in May, then we have the summer, the season, then we move to the heavens,
307
we move to nature, we move to death, we move to eternity, and it just gets bigger and bigger
308
and bigger as Shakespeare very cleverly kind of moves us to these bigger questions about what actually matters.
309
And that's another reason why the sonnet is often remembered and treasured.
310
I hope this helps you a little bit then to make sense of Sonnet 18.
311
I went on a little bit longer than I thought I would, but hopefully this gives you a really detailed understanding of the poem.
Download App
Everything you need to speak fluently
AI PronunciationScore every sentence
IPA PracticeMaster every sound
VocabularyBuild your word bank
Vocab GameLearn while playing
✨ Recommend Video
C151
29 sentences
Shakespeare: Hamlet
British AccentDaily ConversationUniversity Students
C11
282 sentences
The 7 Poems that Haunt Me the Most
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C11
148 sentences
The SYMBOLISM, MEANING, and BEAUTY of La La Land | EXPLAINED
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
167 sentences
This Book is The Reason Persian Still Exists | Shahnameh (Epic of Kings)
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
63 sentences
Unit 6: ANTHROPOLOGY/BIOLOGY: The Science of Love (Note-taking)
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
B23
25 sentences
Ulysses and the Sirens Explained: The Hidden Meaning Behind Waterhouse’s Famous Painting
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
43 sentences
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
73 sentences
Paterson: The Key to Understanding the Film
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
188 sentences
The Victorian Language of Flowers, Explained
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
8 sentences
Tom Hiddleston, The Love Book app (available at your app store). Shakespeare's Sonnet 18
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
C13
242 sentences
Hamlet Act 1 Scenes 1-5 Summary and Analysis: Piper's Paraphrases
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
B22
67 sentences
Taylor Swift Tells Us How She Wrote 'Lover' | Diary of a Song
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: Explanation and Analysis”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: word, sonnet, poem, summer, beauty. This video has 25 sentences and 4329 words to shadow. The speech runs for 27:11. The speaker talks at a natural 159 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 84% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start. 28 of its 25 sentences are questions, so it is good practice for question intonation and short answers.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| poem noun | /ˈpoʊ.əm/ | A literary piece written in verse. |
| rhyme noun | /ɹaɪm/ | Rhyming verse (poetic form). |
| compare verb | /kəmˈpɛɚ/ | To assess the similarities and differences between two or more things [“to compare X with Y”]. Having made the comparison of X with Y, one might have found it… |
| poet noun | /ˈpoʊ.ət/ | A person who writes poems. |
| beloved adjective | /bɪˈlʌvd/ | Much loved, dearly loved. |
| decline verb | /dɪˈklaɪn/ | To move downwards, to fall, to drop. |
| poetry noun | /ˈpoʊ.ə.tɹi/ | Literature composed in verse or language exhibiting conscious attention to patterns and rhythm. |
| refer verb | /ɹɪˈfɜː/ | To direct the attention of (someone toward something). |
| possession noun | /pəˈzɛʃn̩/ | A control or occupancy of something for which one does not necessarily have private property rights. |
| poetic adjective | /poʊˈɛtɪk/ | Relating to poetry. |
| lease noun | /liːs/ | An interest in land granting exclusive use or occupation of real estate for a limited period; a leasehold. |
| shade noun | /ʃeɪd/ | Darkness where light, particularly sunlight, is blocked. |
| unchanged adjective | /ʌnˈt͡ʃeɪnd͡ʒd/ | Not changed or altered; remaining in an original state. |
| rhythm noun | /ˈɹɪð.əm/ | The variation of strong and weak elements (such as duration, accent) of sounds, notably in speech or music, over time; a beat or meter. |
| critic noun | /ˈkɹɪt.ɪk/ | A person who appraises the works of others. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | |
| go along verb | To participate, cooperate, or conform. | |
| take away verb | /ˌteɪk əˈweɪ/ | To remove something and put it in a different place. |
| come back verb | To return to a place. | |
| fall off verb | To become detached or to drop from. | |
| get off verb | To move from being on top of (something) to not being on top of it. | |
| give back verb | To return, restore (a thing to its original owner or location etc.). | |
| go up verb | To move upwards. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
- Do we need to compare you to a summer's day?
- Shall "I" compare thee to a summer's day?
- Aren't you going to lose it over time?
- Doesn't this remind us more of those biological children?
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 | there's been · has not been accepted · has made |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is stressed · is called · could be mentioned |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | this, which is · sonnet, which means · sonnet, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 65 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, they're, we're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: rhythm /ˈɹɪð.əm/, smooth /smuːð/, breathe /bɹiːð/, eighth /eɪtθ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: possession /pəˈzɛʃn̩/, shade /ʃeɪd/, ownership /ˈoʊnɚʃɪp/, shake /ˈʃeɪk/, reputation /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: reputation /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/, biological /ˌbaɪ.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪ.kəl/, ironically /aɪˈɹɑnɪkli/, visually /ˈvɪzju.əli/, naturally /ˈnæt͡ʃ.(ə.)ɹə.li/
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 poem, rhyme, compare.
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.