Shadowing Practice: Stop Start in Love - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Let's try to understand one of the oddest, most painful, most widespread phenomena in love.
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It's going on right this moment between a couple, let's say he a dentist, she a nutritionist in Rio de Janeiro.
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Two teenagers are at it in Canberra, there's a pair involved in the rigmarole in downtown Dakar, another in Svalbard, another still in Winnipeg.
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If every time it happened a light went on, most of the earth would be a glow from space.
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We can refer to the phenomenon as push-pull or stop-start or sometimes distance management.
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The structure is identical and fairly predictable.
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Growing intimacy, then retreat.
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Altitude, then a drop.
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Two good days, then a fight.
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Five warm messages, then silence.
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A weekend away, then a call for time alone.
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It can seem like a horrible, but ultimately mysterious curse.
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It is, in fact, an almost logical phenomenon with a singular purpose – to protect one
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or both of the parties from a generally unconscious but violent fear that love might work out, that happiness might become real,
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that a true partnership could build, that vulnerability might be created and then, when the shield was lowered, when one had grown to depend on someone completely,
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that everything might go catastrophically wrong.
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The other party could change their mind, they might abscond, they could die.
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To prevent such worries, the mind of the stop-start lover looks around for ingenious solutions
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and finds one in a committedly dispiriting game.
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Older than chess, more harmful than poker, this game would have been played in ancient Egypt.
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The Aztecs were at it.
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The rules state that love can happen, but that it must never pick up velocity.
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There can be intimacy, but always within bounds.
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The exits must remain forever open.
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can't be too much security that would paradoxically generate an untenable impression of danger.
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In practice, the game requires a vigilant monitoring of every exchange and repeated quiet injections of disappointment.
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If last night was beautiful, this morning has to be moody.
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Tuesday was good, Wednesday must be awful.
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If the dialogue is getting very cosy, there has to be some disappearance.
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What cannot be allowed to occur was what almost certainly once occurred a very long time ago.
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An unprocessed, unexplored letdown, in which cosiness was achieved and then torn away.
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Mummy was the best mummy in the world, before the doctor said she wasn't well.
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Daddy was the sweetest, then Jill came on the scene.
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The holidays were nice, except for when the drinking began.
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Let's believe that someone interested in stop-start love isn't doing it on purpose.
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The lover who keeps needing to pause isn't aware, as they put down the phone and decides not to answer a message for four hours,
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that they are interrupting the flow of affection in the name of self-protection and along the way, devastating a fellow human being.
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The most potent players of this stop-start game have no real insight into their tactics.
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They just register an overwhelming need not to type anything back, not to be free tonight
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and not to say I love you too at the end of a call or evening in bed.
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What can we, the victims of stop-start, do?
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For a start, feel extremely sorry for ourselves in our misery.
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We don't need to compound our pain by making light of it, or indeed hoping it can ever easily end.
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It would be hard to explain all this to a group of six-year-olds.
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When you're older, you're going to form something called relationships.
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You'll meet a nice person, a special friend.
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Some days your special friend will call you and on others they'll just vanish.
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One might not want to make it to adulthood after a class like that.
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The sole effective weapon we have against stop-start game playing is knowledge.
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To describe the phenomenon accurately the moment it appears, to provide a succinct explanation as to why it might be doing so,
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to give the other party a few chances at reform, and then to walk away, because we know what we're up against,
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and we recognise that lonely calm truly is better than continually agitated togetherness.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “Stop Start in Love”. This video has 52 sentences and 707 words to shadow. The speech runs for 4:24. The speaker talks at a natural 160 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 81% 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 |
|---|---|---|
| mummy noun | /ˈmʌm.i/ | An embalmed human or non-human animal corpse wrapped in linen bandages for burial, especially as practised by the ancient Egyptians and some Native American… |
| intimacy noun | /ˈɪn.tɪ.mə.si/ | Intimate relationship. |
| abscond verb | /əbˈskɑnd/ | To flee, often secretly; to steal away. |
| agitate verb | /ˈæ.d͡ʒɪ.teɪt/ | To disturb or excite; to perturb or stir up (a person). |
| catastrophically adverb | In a catastrophic manner, or to a catastrophic extent; disastrously. | |
| committedly adverb | In a committed manner; with commitment. | |
| cosiness noun | The state or quality of being cosy. | |
| devastate verb | /ˈdɛv.ə.steɪt/ | To ruin many or all things over a large area, such as most or all buildings of a city, or cities of a region, or trees of a forest. |
| dispirit verb | To lower the morale of; to make despondent; to dishearten. | |
| ingenious adjective | /ɪnˈd͡ʒiːnjəs/ | Of a person, displaying genius or brilliance; inventive. |
| nutritionist noun | /njuːˈtɹɪʃ.ənɪst/ | An expert or specialist in nutrition. |
| overwhelm verb | /ˌoʊ.vɚˈwɛlm/ | To engulf, surge over and submerge. |
| paradoxically adverb | /ˌpɛɹəˈdɑksɪkli/ | In a paradoxical manner; so as to create a paradox. |
| rigmarole noun | /ˈɹɪɡməɹoʊl/ | A long and complicated formal procedure. |
| togetherness noun | The state or quality of being together. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| pick up verb | To lift; to grasp and raise. | |
| put down verb | To insult, belittle, or demean. | |
| tear away verb | To remove (oneself or another person), overcoming that person's reluctance to be so removed. | |
| walk away verb | To withdraw from a problematic situation. | |
| work out verb | /ˌwɝk ˈaʊt/ | To calculate. |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 10 contractions and reduced forms, such as isn't, you're, can't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: nutritionist /njuːˈtɹɪʃ.ənɪst/, vanish /ˈvænɪʃ/, affection /əˈfɛk.ʃən/, unconscious /ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəs/, injection /ɪnˈd͡ʒɛk.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: intimacy /ˈɪn.tɪ.mə.si/, nutritionist /njuːˈtɹɪʃ.ənɪst/, paradoxically /ˌpɛɹəˈdɑksɪkli/, vulnerability /ˌvʌln(ə)ɹəˈbɪlɪti/, disappearance /dɪsəˈpɪəɹəns/
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 mummy, intimacy, abscond.
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.