Shadowing Practice: Start With Dostoevsky - Learn English Speaking with Video
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143 sentences
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It's funny that philosopher Kierkegaard, you don't usually hear a joke that starts like that,
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by the way, he wrote 150 years ago, and he was one of the first people who really wrote about anxiety.
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He was one of the first psychological philosophers.
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And he regarded himself as rather useless, all things considered.
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And he wrote a section in one of his books about all the industrialists that were operating in Europe at that time,
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and trying in every possible way to make life easier and easier and more efficient and productive for everyone,
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which was definitely happening during the Victorian period, and Europe was rapidly transforming into an industrial powerhouse.
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And he said, someone as useless as him, with an orientation towards being a student who liked to sit
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and contemplate ideas and talk in cafes and smoke cigars and drink,
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could never do anything to make anything easier for anyone than everyone was already trying to make it.
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And so he thought that his task would be to make things more difficult for people
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because there would come a time when what people wanted wasn't more ease but more challenge and more difficulty.
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And that's really smart, you know, and it's witty and it's true.
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And one of the things that I've come to understand, I believe, is that, and Dostoevsky knew this too,
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he wrote about this in Notes from Underground.
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It's a great book, very short book, brilliant, absolutely brilliant, compelling, dark read.
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It's the confession of a miserable,
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resentful, murderously genocidal bureaucrat who evaluates his own soul,
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I suppose, and confesses his sins.
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It's also a critique of the idea of utopia oriented towards security.
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And Dostoevsky, who was dealing with the set of ideas that are really tearing us apart culturally right now,
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this idea of a eventual utopia based on something like security and safety.
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Dostoevsky really objected to that back in this, like 1860, a long time ago.
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He said, you know, the thing about people that you don't really understand is that, he said, fundamentally we're ungrateful and we can curse.
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That's what distinguished us from the animals, which I thought was pretty damn comical.
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But he said something very interesting, you know, he said, that if you set up a utopia
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so that all people had to do was eat cakes and busy themselves with the continuation of the species,
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that, yeah, right, Russian humor,
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you know, that after a surfeit of that, after enough of that, which would happen quite quickly,
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people would just go mad just to break things, just so something unexpected and remarkable could happen, and that we're not built for security and safety,
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but for something, well, let's call it adventure, something like adventure.
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That's a good thing to know, you know, because you don't want to suffer unduly.
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That seems reasonable.
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And you might think because of that, that really what you want is happiness.
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But then Solzhenitsyn, for example, he wrote about what happened in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin and said, you know, if your goal is happiness,
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what are you going to do
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when the jackboots hammer down your door at two in the morning and haul you off to the prison camp?
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Because you're not going to be happy there.
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And so, you know, happiness is a boat that's easily capsized and the waves are always there.
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And so if your philosophy is one of, say, impulsive happiness, same sort of thing Dostoevsky was pointing at, and Kierkegaard,
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then you're not prepared when all hell breaks loose and all hell it will absolutely 100 % break
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through at some point in your life and you're lucky
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if it won't be decades you know it'll certainly be some of it
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and it might be a lot of it
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and for some of you it's gonna be damn near the whole thing
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and so if what floats your boat is happiness you're you're gonna be capsized by the first decent wave
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and so then you might ask yourself you know what do you have instead of happiness that might be even more reliable,
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and I do think that adventure is more reliable than happiness.
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In the Old Testament story of Abraham, founder of the Abrahamic faiths, and obviously, what would you call it,
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a crucial figure in the development of world culture, Abraham is presented as a late bloomer, to say the least.
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He's like 83.
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People lived longer back then, at least so the story goes and he had a very rich father by nomadic standards.
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He could just sit around in the tent all day and, you know, a doting mother and a rich father,
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he could just sit around in the tent all day
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and eat peeled grapes and busy himself with the continuation of the species.
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But, you know, God appears to him and says, get away, get out of your security, get out of your comfort.
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Leave your family, leave your community, leave your nation, go out into the world.
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And it's a very interesting story.
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It's very interesting to contemplate it from both a psychological and a religious perspective.
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Because what God is presented as in that book, which is a crucial book,
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as I said, for world culture,
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is God is presented as the manifestation of the spirit that calls even the too secure and pampered to adventure.
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And then Abraham has a pretty rough time when he goes out and has his adventure.
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It's not all, you know, skittles and roses from then on in.
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Quite the contrary.
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And he runs right away into like a conspiracy of elites to steal his wife.
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He runs into tyranny.
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He runs into starvation.
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He encounters war.
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It's like he goes out in the world and he has the whole tragedy of his life,
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both on the social and political front and individually, you know.
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But the promise of adventure and the implication is that if you have a sufficient adventure,
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then that cannot so much protect you from suffering because perhaps that is impossible, but to justify it.
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And because you kind of know this in your own life.
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When you look at your life, you might look back on travails that you've undertaken
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and they've done end -of -life surveys with people and asked them what they regret.
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And, you know, people don't regret what they did that didn't work.
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They regret what they didn't do that could have worked, you know.
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They regret the chances they didn't take.
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And, you know, even if you do an evaluation of your biography,
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one of the things that you want to be able to say to yourself is something like,
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maybe there's nothing better you can say to yourself than this.
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You can think about this for yourself and see if it's true.
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That was extraordinarily difficult, but it was worth it.
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And you know, it's not like you can have one of those without the other.
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Because you can't imagine that you could have some confidence in what you've managed to accomplish, right?
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The kind of confidence that would instill you with a genuine, a certain genuine sense of self -regard, despite your fundamental inadequacy.
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To have that fundamental sense of self -regard that's grounded in something real,
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it has to be based in a narrative that approximates that was extremely difficult, but it was worth it.
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You have to have both of those.
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And so that's interesting because one of the questions we always ask ourselves, this is the theodicy question, technically, you see the suffering in the world,
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you see the suffering of children, you see maybe your own children or your suffering, and you wonder, well, how can reality be constituted so
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that I can have faith in its essence when there is so much suffering?
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And one answer to that is something like, well, how much suffering do you want?
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And you might think, none.
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It's like, yeah, I don't think so.
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I don't think that's right.
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You want, at least you want something approximating optimized challenge.
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So you could say, at least you want to be pushed to your limit, And maybe you find the most exciting times in your life.
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In fact, you'll pay for this.
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You'll pay to have this experience.
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To be pushed to your limit.
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Not beyond it, or maybe even a bit beyond it, you know?
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And maybe not so far beyond it that you crumble and break and things fall apart.
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But, you know, could you be pushed to your limit optimally if there wasn't the possibility of falling apart and breaking?
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Like, that's an open question.
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How are you ever going to take something seriously if the consequences aren't actually serious?
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You know, and there's something delightful about dancing on the edge.
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That's why Hawaiians believed that surfing was sacred, you know.
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And it's because to surf you have to be on the edge, right?
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And the waves can come and take you out at any moment.
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But without the possibility of the waves rising to take you out, then you can't dance on the edge.
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And maybe that's exactly what you do, want to do, you know.
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And there's good evidence from the neuroscience literature that consciousness itself is something akin to dancing on the edge.
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So technically, when you're conscious, when you're awake, your brain is occupying a position between something.
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It's a position that's something like between chaos and order.
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And if your brain is maximally ordered, well, you're just bored, nothing is changing.
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And if you're chaotic, then it's anxiety and catastrophe.
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But you want to be positioned right between those two, and that's when your consciousness is optimized, you know on.
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When your consciousness is optimized, then you're deeply engaged in life and everything seems alive and meaningful,
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and maybe that's the solution, in some profound sense, to the problem of suffering.
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It's that you optimize your interaction with chaos, rather than being protected all the time from everything that could hurt you.
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You kind of know this too if you have kids, because you don't want to keep your kids in an infantile state,
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because when they're infants, pretty much what you do with them, say they're six months and younger is you just keep them secure
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and safe right you just provide everything
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that you can for them you have to do that
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because well what are they going to do they just lay there fundamentally
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and squawk now and then i mean they're it's not like they're
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ambulatory they can't go out and do things for themselves and
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so it's up to you and your goal is to keep them secure
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and safe but once they start being able to move around then increasingly it's sort of up to them.
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And if you have any sense, as a parent, the psychoanalysts used to say, the good mother necessarily fails.
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And what did they mean by that?
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They meant, well, if you're committed to your infant when you're a mother, for the first six months, it's like, it's all the kid,
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100%, full self -sacrifice devoted towards the infant.
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That's the right attitude.
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But even by nine months, child can crawl around quite a lot.
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They're developing something of an independent will, you start handing them challenges.
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You start handing them responsibility and you keep them on the edge.
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And some of your kids are going to be able to be pushed harder than others.
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And part of the reason you have to develop a relationship with your kids
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and your husband for that matter is so that, you know, you can keep them dancing on the edge, on the proper edge.
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And that's even better than the mere provision of security.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Start With Dostoevsky”. This video has 143 sentences and 1970 words to shadow. The speech runs for 11:55. The speaker talks at a natural 165 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 87% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| suffer verb | /ˈsʌfɚ/ | To undergo hardship. |
| adventure noun | /ədˈvɛn.t͡ʃə/ | A feeling of desire for new and exciting things. |
| happiness noun | /ˈhæpinɪs/ | The emotion of being happy; joy; elation. |
| regret verb | /ɹɪˈɡɹɛt/ | To feel sorry about (a thing that has or has not happened), afterthink: to wish that a thing had not happened, that something else had happened instead. |
| regard noun | /ɹɪˈɡɑːd/ | A steady look, a gaze. |
| consciousness noun | /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/ | The state of being conscious or aware; awareness. |
| anxiety noun | /æŋˈzaɪ.əti/ | An unpleasant state of mental uneasiness, nervousness, apprehension and obsession or concern about some uncertain event. |
| genuine adjective | /ˈd͡ʒɛn.juˌɪn/ | Belonging to, or proceeding from the original stock; native. |
| fundamental adjective | /ˌfʌn.dəˈmɛn.təl/ | Related to a foundation, base, or basis; serving as a foundation. |
| reliable adjective | /ɹɪˈlaɪəbl̩/ | Suitable or fit to be relied on; worthy of dependence, reliance or trust; dependable, trustworthy |
| crucial adjective | /ˈkɹuː.ʃəl/ | Essential or decisive for determining the outcome or future of something; extremely important; vital. |
| chaos noun | /ˈkeɪˌɑs/ | The unordered state of matter in classical accounts of cosmogony. |
| psychological adjective | /ˌsaɪ.kəˈlɑː.d͡ʒɪ.kl̩/ | Of or pertaining to psychology. |
| technically adverb | /ˈtɛk.nɪˌkəl.i/ | Based on precise facts, which, however, may be contrary to common belief or casual terminology. |
| tent noun | /tɛnt/ | A pavilion or portable lodge consisting of skins, canvas, or some strong cloth, stretched and sustained by poles, used for sheltering people from the weather. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| fall apart verb | To disintegrate, to break into pieces. | |
| get out of verb | To leave, exit or escape from; to become free of. | |
| go out verb | To leave, especially a building. | |
| get away verb | To move away (from). | |
| move around verb | To relocate to new homes repeatedly; to not live in any one place for long. | |
| set up verb | /ˌsɛt ˈʌp/ | To make ready for use. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Because you're not going to be happy there.
- It's like, yeah, I don't think so.
- I don't think that's right.
- In fact, you'll pay for this.
- You'll pay to have this experience.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be capsized · is presented · be based |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've come · you've undertaken · they've done |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who really · student who liked · book, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 45 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/, crucial /ˈkɹuː.ʃəl/, continuation /kənˌtɪnjʊˈeɪʃ(ə)n/, efficient /ɪˈfɪʃənt/, sufficient /səˈfɪʃənt/
- Long words — get the stress right: anxiety /æŋˈzaɪ.əti/, fundamental /ˌfʌn.dəˈmɛn.təl/, psychological /ˌsaɪ.kəˈlɑː.d͡ʒɪ.kl̩/, technically /ˈtɛk.nɪˌkəl.i/, philosopher /fəˈlɑsəfɚ/
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 suffer, adventure, happiness.
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.