Shadowing Practice: Study Tips - How to learn new content - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Hey guys, welcome back to the channel.
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If you're new here, my name is Ali.
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I'm a junior doctor working in Cambridge
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and in this video I want to talk about how you as a student can learn content for the first time.
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So if you're watching this video then hopefully you've seen two of my other videos on this channel about evidence-based study tips.
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The first one is about active recall
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and the second one is about spaced repetition and
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if you haven't seen those videos they'll be linked here and there and down below and everywhere.
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I'd really suggest you watch those videos first
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because I've had literally hundreds of messages from students all around the world who've said
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that those videos have changed their lives
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and changed their study techniques to the point that they're much more efficient and are getting much better marks.
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Active recall basically means testing yourself
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and spaced repetition is basically you know spacing your testing of
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yourself across you know intervals over over a period of time
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but in these two videos I talk about the evidence behind them
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and explain exactly how you can go about using active recall
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and using spaced repetition to supercharge your study techniques
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and to make yourself much much more efficient at getting information into your brain.
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But that's all well and good, it's all well and good knowing that we need to test ourselves
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and we need to space our testing of ourselves over time.
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But a question that I've got from a lot of people has been, how do you actually learn the content for the first time?
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And surely in order to revise the content you have to learn the content first.
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And that's the question that I'm gonna be trying to answer in this video.
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So the way I like to think about it is that there's essentially just two components
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learning and that is step one understanding and step two remembering.
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So understanding plus remembering equals good learning equals good exam performance equals good real-life performance at whatever job
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or whatever you're doing and saving lives if you're a doctor
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or you're working in that sort of trade
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or you know making money for a rich corporate banker if you're in the finance trade or whatever you like.
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Step one understanding, step two remembering.
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So I'm gonna talk about those in turn but first I want to make a point about about what not to do.
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And the biggest mistake that I've heard students make and
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that I certainly used to make back in the day and
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that I've seen loads of my friends make is that we are very quick to rely on memorization, especially when you first get introduced to flashcards or to active recall,
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are you testing yourself as a general concept?
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Then you start thinking, oh my God, I have no need to make notes because making notes is not efficient as we know from the evidence behind it, more in my previous videos.
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I know that making notes is not very efficient.
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I know that testing myself is very efficient.
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Therefore, I'm gonna rock up to my lectures
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and I'm gonna convert every single thing the lecturer says into a flashcard on Anki, the flashcard app, or Quizlet or whatever.
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And then I'm gonna make like a thousand different flashcards for each of my lectures, and then I'm just gonna go through those flashcards.
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There's a problem with that, in that firstly you get too many flashcards, and secondly you're relying on memorizing the stuff.
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You're relying on like rote learning it, rather than understanding the content and having kind of a mental model of your subject, of your content in your head.
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And that's really the key thing.
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The key thing is to not rely on memorization, but instead to rely on understanding the stuff and then only using rote memorization when you absolutely have to,
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to nail down those random arbitrary facts that you couldn't possibly understand.
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So if you find yourself making loads of flashcards for every single lecture, I think the key is to really ask yourself, do I really need a flashcard to remember this?
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And ideally you wanna try and remember it
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because you understand the subject rather than you're just trying to memorize bits and bobs of it.
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So let's now talk about understanding and what that actually means.
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Now how do you define understanding?
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I don't know what the dictionary definition is, I'll put it up on Wikipedia or whatever over here, but the way I like to think of it is
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that I know I understand something if I can competently explain it to a friend and answer their questions about it.
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So it's kind of like when you are able to teach something to someone then you know that you truly understand it.
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And that's partly why I love teaching so much because
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when I'm running a teaching session for students in the year below
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or you know fourth years or whatever I really have to understand the subject before I can competently run that session.
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And obviously I want to do a good job therefore it really incentivizes me to actively try
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and understand the subject in advance.
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And that's the key question, can you explain it to a friend?
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Or you know some people like to extend this analogy further, I think this is called the Feynman technique, can you explain it to a five-year-old?
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Like obviously not literally to a five-year-old
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but you know to a layman with you know reasonable competent
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command of your language can you explain the subject to them
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and when you can explain something to someone else then you really know you understand it.
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Alright so while editing this video I realized
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that there was one really important thing that I missed out
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and actually this is the one thing
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that I'd recommend everyone take away from this video and
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that is the active recall is not just for revising active recall is also the best way of learning.
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Now what do I mean by this?
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I mean when you're reading something in a book or through your lecture slides or whatever instead of passively reading it.
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What I would recommend and what all the research recommends and what the authors in that really good book, Make It Stick, recommend, what everyone recommends is
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that as you're reading stuff you are actively testing yourself on that content as you go along.
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So let's say you've read two paragraphs of something, you would stop, close the book metaphorically or look away and ask yourself, alright, what have I just learnt?
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What are the key ideas?
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Can I rephrase this in my own words?
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In medicine it's very easy.
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You would think, okay I've just read that we need, you know, to give anticoagulation drugs in someone with atrial fibrillation.
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Okay, why do we do that?
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Okay, so that's because atrial fibrillation means a quivering of your atria and that predisposes you to clot formation.
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Therefore, we need an anticoagulant to thin the blood to stop them from forming clots in their left atrial appendage
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and that will stop them from getting strokes.
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Wait a minute, why would a clot go from the left atrial appendage to give them a stroke?
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Okay, I'm not quite sure about that.
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Then you go back to the book and then you would read it and work it out and then you'd be like, okay, fine, I now get that a clot in the left atrial appendage is going to cause a stroke by
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embolising over to the brain or to the lungs or whatever
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and you're at like as you're going along you are actively testing yourself on the content.
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Active recall is not just something you do once you've learned the content, it is a fundamental part of actually learning the content in the first place.
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And actually there's a bit at the end of that really good book Make It Stick which you should definitely read.
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There's a bit at the end where the authors are showing like you know text interviews from students
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that have used techniques like active recall
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and spaced repetition to massively boost up their marks and
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And there's quite a good passage where they're interviewing a medical student who got into medicine by some weird route
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that meant he didn't have like the basic science background
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that all his classmates had and he ended up being bottom of the class.
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And he talks in this book like towards the end, he talks about how the only way he knew how to revise, how to study stuff, was to read stuff in the book.
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And when he didn't understand it or when it didn't stick, he didn't know what to do
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because all he'd been taught all he'd been using for his whole life was just reading the information over
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and over again and actually what he says is that
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when he started quizzing himself on the material as he went
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along in fact i'll read out a bit to you he says um i would stop
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and think okay what did i just read what is it
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what is this about i'd have to think about it well
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i believe it happens this way the enzyme does this
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and then it does that and then i'd have to go back
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and check if I was way off base or on the right track." And he goes on to say, the process was not a natural fit.
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It makes you uncomfortable at first.
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If you stop and rehearse what you're reading and quiz yourself on it, it just takes a lot longer.
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If you have a test coming up in a week and so much to cover, then slowing down makes you pretty nervous.
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But the only way he knew of to cover more material, his established habit of dedicating long hours to rereading, wasn't getting the results that he needed.
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As hard as it was, he made himself stick to retrieval practice long enough to at least see if it worked.
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And then the guy goes on to say you just have to trust the process
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and that was really the biggest hurdle for me was getting myself to trust it
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and it ended up working very well for me.
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Really well.
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By the time he started his second year, Young, the student, had pulled his grades up from the bottom of the class of 200 students to join the high performers
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and has remained there ever since.
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And then they talk about how this guy actually started mentoring students on effective study techniques
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and how you know people started coming to him to learn how to study.
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This guy who was literally bottom of his class in this
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medical school coming from a background where he didn't really have
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any basic science knowledge managed to get to the top to the extent
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that people were then asking him for help
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and all he did was quiz himself on stuff as he
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went along IE active recall retrieval practice testing yourself is not just for
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when you've learned the material it's actually a fundamental part of
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learning the material in the first place you're weaving this narrative
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you're building this mental model in your head you're telling yourself
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a story of your content as you're getting through it not just you know
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when it comes to the exam right at the end.
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So yeah let's go back to the scheduled programming.
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But of course anyone who's had
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that experience of understanding something like you can go to a lecture
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and you can think oh my god wow that actually makes sense
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and then you can revise it once
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and you can think oh my god yeah it makes sense I fully understand it
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but then you know a few weeks later you come across it again
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and you're like ah okay maybe I didn't understand it as well as I thought I did
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because I just can't remember any of it.
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And that brings us on to the second component of effective learning and that is the remembering component.
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And obviously if you've seen my previous videos you know what I'm gonna say here, the two absolute key pillars of remembering anything are active recall i.e. testing yourself
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and spaced repetition repeating that testing of yourself over a period of time.
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Right so active recall I talk much more about this in the actual video about it
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but you know just briefly it's all about testing yourself.
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You can do this in loads of different ways, you could write questions for yourself like I do, for example I've got a little spreadsheet where I write like loads of questions for myself that I I will then answer, and if I don't know the answer,
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then I'll just look it up.
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So that saves me from having to actually write out flashcards.
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You could write out flashcards if you want, takes a bit of time, but it's worth it if you can consistently maintain this flashcard habit every day, or however often you wanna do it.
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You can do that thing where you grab a blank piece of paper
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and make a spider diagram where you write everything you know about that subject in the spider diagram.
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There's loads of methods for active recall.
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It really doesn't matter what you do.
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The point is you need to be testing yourself
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because the more you try and retrieve
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that knowledge from your brain the stronger those connections are going to be encoded
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and therefore yeah you can understand something one day but unless you test your understanding of it, i.e. test yourself with questions or get someone else to test you, you're just going to forget it because there's
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that thing called the forgetting curve that over time you just forget everything
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that you've ever learned unless you actually revisit it by testing yourself.
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So that's active recall.
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Spaced repetition is, you know, if you do it one day then you'll do it the next day
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and then you know wait a week and you'll have forgotten some of it
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and then you test yourself again and then look up the stuff
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that you didn't know and then you know by
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that point you already know most of it
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so then a month later you might test yourself
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and the idea is that you're interrupting the forgetting curve at spaced intervals and the more you do this, after about three or four repetitions of this,
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over a period of let's say a month or two, you'll find by the end of it
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that your forgetting curve is very flat in
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that over time even though you're not testing yourself anymore you probably won't forget the information
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and that's kind of the key thing to spaced repetition is to interrupt our forgetting curve
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so that we keep stuff in our brains for a longer period of time.
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So yeah that's pretty much all there is to it.
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This is a very short video, if you're interested in like in-depth study tips firstly read the book called Make It Stick, it's a book I'd recommend to every single student anywhere
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because it explores all of the evidence behind you know all
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these effective study techniques in in a really engaging format and
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if you're interested in like diving more in depth into effective learning techniques watch my two videos about active recall
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and space repetition those are like 25 minutes long each
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and we fully go into the evidence
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but I just wanted to make this video to address this
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issue of how do we learn things in the first place
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and the way we learn things is not by jumping straight
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to making a flashcard it's by understanding it's by being able
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to explain it to a five-year-old being able to explain it to a friend being able to answer their questions
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and essentially forming within our brains this mental model of our subject
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and getting an idea of how everything fits together in our own words, ideally using simple language without having to rely too much on jargon.
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So yeah I can't state it more emphatically, the key thing is to understand.
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Screw memorization, memorization does not work consistently
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and over the long term in an efficient way but
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if you can understand something and then use active recall and spaced repetition to
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you know bolster your understanding and build you know maintain
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that foundation then you will truly understand your subject
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and you'll absolutely smash your exams and end up saving lives or whatever you want to do with your degree or whatever.
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So yeah I hope you found that useful.
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If you've got any other specific questions about study techniques let me know in the comments of this video
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and I'll be sure to do a more kind of shorter videos where I address these in depth.
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But yeah if you haven't seen the videos on active recall
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and spaced repetition they'll be linked down below and above there
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and everywhere so please watch those and I can pretty much guarantee
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that if you're currently not happy with the results
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that you're getting from your study techniques and you start incorporating more testing of yourself and more spaced repetition
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I can pretty much guarantee that your marks will improve almost overnight.
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So yeah I hope you found this video useful.
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If you liked it please give it a thumbs up.
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If you haven't subscribed to the channel yet then please consider doing so.
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Have a lovely day and I will see you in the next video.
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Goodbye.
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What You'll Learn
This video helps you build two key skills for effective English speaking practice: first, understanding how to break down complex ideas into clear, conversational explanations (like the speaker does with study techniques), and second, using natural pacing to emphasize important points. You’ll also pick up how to connect ideas smoothly, which is crucial for sounding fluent in real conversations.
Listen For These Sounds
The speaker uses lots of connected speech and reductions that native speakers often use. Notice how "you are" becomes "you're" and "gonna" instead of "going to" – these common reductions help the dialogue flow. Also, listen for linking, like in "test yourself" where the "t" in "test" connects softly to the "y" in "yourself." These small sounds make a big difference in how natural your English sounds, and they’re perfect to practice with a shadowing app or shadowing site.
Say It Like a Native
To mirror the speaker’s rhythm and stress, focus on emphasizing key words like "understanding," "remembering," and "active recall." The speaker slows down to highlight these terms, then speeds up slightly when explaining examples. Try the shadowing technique: pause the video, repeat short phrases, and match the stress and intonation. This helps you get used to the natural "bounce" of English. Also, pay attention to how the speaker uses pauses before important points (like before "the key thing is...") – this creates emphasis and makes your speech more engaging. Whether you use a shadowing app or practice with a partner, mimicking these patterns will make your English sound more confident and native-like.
Ready to level up your English speaking practice? Start with the shadowing technique today – it’s a great way to turn what you hear into what you can say. And if you’re looking for more tips, check out tools like shadowspeaks to keep improving your fluency!
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if you haven't seen those videos they'll be |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | you've seen · haven't seen · who've said |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be linked · is called · been taught |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | student who got · guy who was |
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.