Shadowing Practice: The 15% Rule: How to Learn Faster | Andrew Huberman - Learn English Speaking with Video
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One of the biggest lies in public education about neuroscience is that every experience changes your brain.
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By the time I'm done saying this, your brain will be different.
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No, that's absolutely not true.
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That's a bunch of hooey.
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I studied neuroplasticity.
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I teach neuroplasticity.
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I'll tell you, you know what induces neuroplasticity?
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Being a baby who's trying to learn
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or being an adult who's forcing yourself to try and learn and you can't do the thing.
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The error is what stimulates the plasticity.
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And the appropriate level of difficulty, say the computational modeling is somewhere around 15 % on average.
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Now, what does that mean?
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You need to do a bout of work of 90 minutes to two hours.
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Like you got to strive and try and learn something.
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Do something hard every day mentally.
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This is critical for your ability to focus.
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And by the way, you asked about phones.
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Awesome study came out.
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They had people with their phone off, upside down on the table or in their bag,
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underneath their chair or in the opposite room, a separate room.
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And what they found is people can focus just fine in all three conditions.
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But if the phone is anywhere in the room, the amount of cognitive flexibility they have with the material they're focusing on is diminished.
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In other words, it requires more energy to focus, even if they're not getting calls and notifications.
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There's a subscript running in the brain, apparently, that's anticipating that this thing is going to reach for me.
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It's going to call me.
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So it's calling you even if it's not calling you, which is pretty cool.
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And so the way to increase focus and cognitive capacity is actually to just get the phone out of the room.
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That's a big part of it.
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Do some effortful learning bout, and it should feel like a fight.
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Keep in mind the friction you feel trying to learn something, that's adrenaline.
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Remember, how do we block learning?
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We block adrenaline, and it's downstream effects with propranolol.
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Being alert but calm or a little stressed and making errors through deliberate attempts to do something, not just throwaway errors.
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That's how you learn.
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Why?
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If I can reach out and grab this pen, my brain doesn't change.
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There's two kinds of practice.
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One is practicing doing things I already know how to do.
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There, you're aiming for 100 % performance, right?
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You're reinforcing what you already know how to do.
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Talk to a great dancer and they'll tell you they drill, drill, drill, drill the things they already know how to do.
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But when you're trying to learn the new language, the new emotional skill, the new physical skill, the new cognitive emotional skill.
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You need to make genuine attempts and you need to fail some of the time.
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And those failure signals are relayed to your cerebellum and your cerebellum propagates through networks that say change.
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So there's a set of conditions in the chapter on plasticity that say you need to be alert.
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So I talk about all the ways you can get alert, including pharmacology supplements and behavioral tools.
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Then you need to be focused.
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I talk about all the tools for focus, which you can devote to anything, not just learning.
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And then I talk about the conditions for plasticity.
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And you need to get this friction and these errors.
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And then you need to stop.
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You need to come back a day or two later, do it again.
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And then you need to make sure that you reinforce what you learned.
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Here's where AI is going to be a wonderful tool, already is a wonderful tool.
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The best way to learn is to not forget.
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Meaning if you test yourself mentally, or you could use any one of the LLMs, but I'll go into chat GPT and I'll just say,
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generate a short test of a graduate student at Stanford level, questions about neuroplasticity.
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And I go, oh, and I remember this, there's this one thing I don't remember.
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That's how you maintain and build knowledge over time.
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Self -testing, self -testing.
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People hear the word test, they think of external tester.
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You're the test taker, self -testing.
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That's a really interesting idea for this podcast episode, which we should definitely run.
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Should we generate a quiz?
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Yeah.
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So we can take the transcript and we can turn it into a test.
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Cool.
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Yeah.
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ChatGPT is great at doing this.
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You can change the difficulty and you can actually say, I'm a professor of neuroscience and I want a 15 % error rate on average.
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The study I love that really backs this up is
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that there've been a lot of studies of learning where they have students read the same passage one, two, three, or four times.
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And then they also have them highlight or take notes, or they just have them read it once and self -test.
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And they look six months and two years later.
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Reading it once, no notes, no highlighting and self -testing, you know, about a week later and looking up what you got,
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couldn't remember or got wrong led to much more stable learning over time.
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Awesome.
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Now this doesn't work so well for physical endeavors because there you have to like actually do the physical thing.
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You have to test yourself physically, but I love that set of experiments because it tells us everything we should be doing.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “The 15% Rule: How to Learn Faster”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: learn, test, error, learning, focus. This video has 79 sentences and 909 words to shadow. The speech runs for 4:40. The speaker talks fast, about 195 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| drill noun | /dɹɪl/ | A tool or machine used to remove material so as to create a hole, typically by plunging a rotating cutting bit into a stationary workpiece. |
| skill noun | /skɪl/ | A capacity to do something well; a technique, an ability, usually acquired or learned, as opposed to abilities that are regarded as innate. |
| alert adjective | /əˈlɝt/ | Attentive; awake; on guard. |
| cognitive adjective | /ˈkɑɡ.nɪ.tɪv/ | Relating to the part of mental functions that deals with logic, as opposed to affective which deals with emotions. |
| difficulty noun | /ˈdɪfɪkəlti/ | The state of being difficult, or hard to do. |
| generate verb | /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ə.ɹeɪt/ | To bring into being; give rise to. |
| highlight verb | /ˈhaɪˌlaɪt/ | To make prominent; emphasize. |
| mentally adverb | /ˈmɛntəli/ | In a mental manner; an idea thought out in one's mind, as opposed to an idea spoken orally. |
| bout noun | /ˈbaʊt/ | A period of something, especially one painful or unpleasant, like an illness. |
| friction noun | /ˈfɹɪkʃən/ | The rubbing of one object or surface against another. |
| reinforce verb | /ˌɹiː.ɪnˈfɔːs/ | To strengthen, especially by addition or augmentation. |
| adrenaline noun | /əˈdɹɛnəlɪn/ | Epinephrine, the hormone and neurotransmitter. |
| stable noun | /ˈsteɪ.bəl/ | A building, wing or dependency set apart and adapted for lodging and feeding (and training) ungulates, especially horses. |
| experiment noun | /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/ | A test under controlled conditions made to either demonstrate a known truth, examine the validity of a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of… |
| genuine adjective | /ˈd͡ʒɛn.juˌɪn/ | Belonging to, or proceeding from the original stock; native. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| come back verb | To return to a place. | |
| come out verb | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | To be discovered; to be revealed. |
| look up verb | /ˌlʊk ˈʌp/ | To have better prospects. |
| reach out verb | To extend one's hand(s) forward; to reach for something. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- I'll tell you, you know what induces neuroplasticity?
- It's going to call me.
- Remember, how do we block learning?
- We block adrenaline, and it's downstream effects with propranolol.
- Should we generate a quiz?
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 18 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'll, doesn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: friction /ˈfɹɪkʃən/, notification /ˌnoʊtɪfɪˈkeɪʃn̩/, computational /ˌkɑmpjʊˈteɪʃənəl/, diminish /dɪˈmɪnɪʃ/
- Long words — get the stress right: difficulty /ˈdɪfɪkəlti/, adrenaline /əˈdɹɛnəlɪn/, experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/, flexibility /ˌflɛksɪˈbɪlɪti/, notification /ˌnoʊtɪfɪˈkeɪʃn̩/
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 drill, skill, alert.
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.