Shadowing Practice: The Bloody Origins of the Number Zero - Learn English Speaking with Video
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The ground shakes as thousands of Mauryan elephant riders thunder toward the coastal kingdom of Kalinga.
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It’s 261 BCE.
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Emperor Ashoka already rules most of India and now moves on to crush Kalinga and seize their ports.
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The Kalingans stand ready to defend their home with swords, javelins and war elephants of their own.
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But they are outnumbered and don’t realize how badly until it’s too late.
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A trumpeting avalanche rolls toward them.
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Blades on tusks cut through bodies while the rest are crushed underfoot.
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Those who survive run for the Daya river.
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But on the far bank, Mauryan cavalry is already closing in.
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Panic spreads and soldiers jump into the water, only to be met by arrows raining down from Mauryan archers.
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The water turns red as the slaughter continues leaving 100,000 dead and even more forcibly deported.
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Families are erased and villages destroyed.
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Yet, this devastation does not fuel more war.
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Instead of violence, a different kind of power rises, built on knowledge and reason, spreading outwards in ripples that still reach us today.
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Monasteries and Merchants When the Kalinga war ends, the Mauryans control nearly all the land between the Himalayas and the ocean, home to roughly a third of the world’s population at the time.
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The successful conquest of emperor Ashoka pushes his rule to the eastern coast, but the triumph comes at a cost.
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Confronted with the scale of the suffering he caused, Ashoka is overwhelmed with guilt and sorrow.
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For months he is desperate to repent, until he encounters Buddhism.
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At the time, it’s still a small movement carried along roads by begging monks who speak of non-violence and tolerance as a release from suffering.
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Ashoka converts and becomes a patron, spreading belief without enforcing it.
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Pillars are carved with his edicts on kindness, religious tolerance and social welfare.
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They read like ancient good-life quotes: To do good is difficult.
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One who does good first does something hard to do.
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Ashoka practices what he preaches.
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He upgrades imperial roads, plants shade trees and builds wells for travelers and cattle.
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These roads double as trade routes, linking inland markets to ports bound for Southeast Asia.
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Caravans carry vast amounts of Indian riches like ebony, sandalwood, cotton and pepper.
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Buddhism also starts taking off and monks crowdsource support to cut caves into cliffs for simple monasteries.
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They offer shelter to travellers and position themselves as guardians of the trade.
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This resonates with a rising merchant class which donates generously, gaining both protection and spiritual merit.
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The Buddhist monasteries grow bigger.
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Now not just spiritual centers but engines of wealth.
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Monks manage land and run mines and mills.
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They lend money to farmers who invest in trading voyages.
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Basically, monasteries become the first banks of South Asia.
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It’s a perfect system: faith funding trade, trade carrying faith.
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The Mauryan empire collapses a century after Akosha, but the monasteries endure and merchants keep moving.
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They turn westwards, where a new superpower is stretching its limbs with a growing demand for Indian goods.
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We’ll take a quick break from ancient trade systems and focus on today’s business.
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Thanks to our partner Odoo for sponsoring this episode.
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You can for example create and send your invoices in seconds: you just select your customer, add your products and quantities, define the billing terms and you can already send it all via email.
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The Golden Age of Trade 6000 kilometers west, Roman dominance has been rising through marching legions and territorial takeover.
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In 30 BCE, having conquered Cleopatra’s Egypt, the empire grips the Red Sea ports.
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This opens a direct corridor to the Indian world and ship traffic increases.
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It helps that the Indian peninsula sits inside a massive wind machine.
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For half the year, the monsoon blows towards the Arabian sea, and for the other half, it flips direction.
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This predictable rhythm lets Indian sailors ride the wind straight across the ocean and glide safely home months later.
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They build enormous and tough ships that can easily carry 1000 people or a few hundred tons of cargo.
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In Rome, Indian goods sell for up to a hundred times their original price.
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If you’re lucky the profit from a single voyage can buy 2000 acres of the best Egyptian farmland or pay 10,000 Roman soldiers for a year.
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In this trade, a successful merchant doesn’t just get rich.
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They can rival the wealth of senators.
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Above all, the Indians bring pepper.
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It pours into the markets and rewires Roman taste itself.
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Nearly 80% of their recipes now demand it.
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Even soldiers freezing at Hadrian’s Wall order pepper, to make their rations edible.
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Words like pepper, ginger and sugar travel with the spice, moving from Sanskrit into Latin and almost every European language.
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But the biggest ships aren’t loaded with spice.
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They are animal transports, vast floating stables carrying elephants, tigers, leopards, even occasional rhinoceros.
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All kept alive through an almost 2 month journey for Rome’s gladiator games.
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Indian imports into Egypt surge past 1.3 billion a year in today’s dollars.
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And Roman tax collectors skim off over a quarter of that flow.
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Enough to finance a third of the empire’s budget.
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Older accounts emphasized the overland Silk Road from China, but when historians re-examined maritime trade, the volumes of goods travelling along these routes told a different story.
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Goods do travel overland from China, but the Silk Road is slow, costly and hard to control.
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Most Chinese goods reach Roman markets through Indian sea trade networks.
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All this makes India Rome’s largest trading partner.
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For more than 300 years, the system works.
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Until the Roman Empire starts to weaken.
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Commerce slows, fleets shrink and ports fall silent one by one.
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Indian merchants redirect their massive ships toward Southeast Asia’s rising kingdoms.
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And with them travel ideas that will reshape how humans understand the universe itself.
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Ground Zero Trade fuels prosperity across the subcontinent.
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By the 4th century, most of it is ruled by the Gupta Empire.
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Wealth flows into art and science fueling a boom in centers of learning.
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Among them rises Nalanda, the elite MIT of ancient India.
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10,000 monks live and study there, crowned by a vast nine-storey library known as the Sea of Jewels.
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India begins to build one of the richest mathematical traditions on Earth.
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Scholars start writing nine numerical symbols in a radically new way.
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A digit’s position now defines its value.
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Around 628, the mathematician Brahmagupta takes on a revolutionary idea.
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He defines zero, lays out its rules and gives it real power.
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Suddenly, any number, no matter how big, can be expressed with just ten symbols.
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They call the new number shunya - the void.
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It draws directly from the Buddhist idea that emptiness is not absence but something meaningful.
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By the 7th century, Buddhism is still tightly linked to scholars and new ideas but has begun to fade from everyday life.
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The Gupta Empire backs Hinduism instead, which celebrates warrior kingship at a time of northern Hun invasions that leave many Buddhist monasteries in ruins.
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So Buddhist communities pack their manuscripts and flee, drawn by new patrons for Indian monastic knowledge.
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In China, Indian monks and scholars help the first and only female emperor, Wu Zetian, to rise to power.
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Monasteries flourish throughout the empire and Indian culture comes into fashion.
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For more than a decade, Buddhism even becomes a state religion.
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South of China, across the Bay of Bengal, Buddhism is absorbed into the local culture.
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Stone temples rise, while religious texts and literature take shape after Sanskrit models.
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Across Southeast Asia, local traditions are blended with Indian culture, creating a vast and powerful Indosphere of influence.
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But the final expansion of Indian ideas turns west.
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From the 7th century, with the rise of Islam, Arab and Persian merchants expanded the Indian Ocean routes, linking South Asia and the Middle East by sea.
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Over the next century these networks converge in Bagdad, the heart of the Abbasid Caliphate – and what travels there is not faith or culture, but something more practical.
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The Journey of Numbers In the 8th century, a young Islamic world stands between Europe and India.
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From Baghdad, a family of administrators called the Barmakids helps run the caliphate.
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Their bloodline runs from Buddhist scholars who once led Central Asia’s greatest monastery.
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And that legacy doesn’t vanish, even embedded in a different culture.
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They establish the House of Wisdom, designed to rival India’s Nalanda.
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By commissioning translations and gathering manuscripts, the Barmakids fill libraries with Indian texts.
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First paper mills follow, enabling mass manuscript production.
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Over the next two centuries, Arab scholars translate, copy and carry Indian knowledge west toward the far edge of the Arab world.
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When the manuscripts reach Spain, Europe is deep in the Middle Ages.
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The next centuries see Europe shaped by growing kingdoms, population growth and a hunger for knowledge.
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But merchants still struggle through trade with clunky abacuses and every multiplication is a slow-motion disaster with Roman numerals.
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Until now, Indian maths lives mostly in monasteries and early universities but doesn’t reach the street.
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But change is on the way.
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In 1225, Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, arrives in Pisa.
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He is part ruler, part nerd, part showman.
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He speaks five languages, debates math and philosophy with Arab scholars and thinkers of every kind.
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Muslim bodyguards in turbans flank him, followed by a procession of exotic animals and wagons stacked with manuscripts.
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To some in Europe, his open mind is deeply unsettling.
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He’s here to meet Fibonacci, the mathematician who has just written The Book of Calculation on the nine Indian numerals and the strange new symbol the Arabs call zephir.
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Frederick encourages him to expand the book, transforming abstract knowledge into practical tools for merchants.
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It’s an instant bestseller.
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It shows how to convert currencies, calculate profit and interest but mostly replace the abacus with pencil and paper.
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Indian numerals spread across Europe, adopted by bankers funding explorers and voyages.
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But as Indian mathematics spreads west, its homeland falls apart.
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Turkic armies sweep through northern India.
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Nalanda is destroyed and its great library burned to ash.
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Old trade routes collapse, scholars scatter and waves of Persian migrations reshape the north.
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At court, Sanskrit fades, now replaced by Persian.
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By the 13th century, the language that carried a thousand years of knowledge begins to slowly disappear from centers of power.
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When a Portuguese ship reaches India in 1498, history closes a cruel loop.
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India had given Europe the mathematical tools that the West now weaponizes.
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Navigation uses them to open new sea routes, allowing the Portuguese to violently attack the spice trade.
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Finance takes over, enabling wealthy London merchants to run the East India Company and turn India into a balance sheet.
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Other European powers follow and India is gripped tightly within their claws for nearly five centuries.
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Universal Language At its peak in the late 7th century, the Indian sphere of influence shapes nearly half of humanity.
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Carried by faith and trade, it embraced curiosity and tolerance.
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By improving everyday life, Indian culture spread by being both useful and beautiful, enriching every society it touched.
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The legacy is still visible.
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Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, carries India in its name.
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Thai kings are still crowned in Sanskrit ceremonies.
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China now has the largest Buddhist population on Earth.
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And the Buddhist temple Angkor Wat in Cambodia remains the largest temple ever built.
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But the most enduring legacy is simpler.
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A way of counting and calculating, the closest thing humanity has to a universal language.
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The soft power of Indian knowledge never disappeared.
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It still helps us to measure, understand and reshape reality itself.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 149 sentences and 2081 words to shadow. The speech runs for 14:30. The speaker talks at a steady 143 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. Only 71% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| merchant noun | /ˈmɝt͡ʃənt/ | A person who traffics in commodities for profit. |
| scholar noun | /ˈskɑlɚ/ | A student; one who studies at school or college, typically having a scholarship. |
| monk noun | /mʌŋk/ | A male member of a monastic order who has devoted his life for religious service. |
| manuscript noun | /ˈmæn.jəˌskɹɪpt/ | A book, composition or any other document, written by hand (or manually typewritten), not mechanically reproduced. |
| vast adjective | /væst/ | Very large or wide (literally or figuratively). |
| emperor noun | /ˈɛmp(ə)ɹə/ | The male monarch or ruler of an empire. |
| pepper noun | /ˈpɛp.ə/ | A plant of the family Piperaceae. |
| everyday adjective | /ˈɛvɹiˌdeɪ/ | Appropriate for ordinary use, rather than for special occasions. |
| legacy noun | /ˈlɛɡəsi/ | Money or property bequeathed to someone in a will. |
| define verb | /dɪˈfaɪn/ | To determine with precision; to mark out with distinctness; to ascertain or exhibit clearly. |
| symbol noun | /ˈsɪmbəl/ | A character or glyph representing an idea, concept or object. |
| enable verb | /ɪˈneɪ.bəl/ | To make somebody able (to do, or to be, something); to give sufficient ability or power to do or to be; to give strength or ability to. |
| elephant noun | /ˈɛlɪfənt/ | A large mammal of the family Elephantidae in the order Proboscidea, having a trunk, and native to Africa and Asia. |
| tolerance noun | /ˈtɑ.lə.ɹəns/ | The ability or practice of tolerating; an acceptance of or patience with the beliefs, opinions or practices of others; a lack of bigotry. |
| spouse noun | /spaʊ̯s/ | A person in a marriage or marital relationship. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| cut through verb | To take a shortcut through. | |
| fall apart verb | To disintegrate, to break into pieces. | |
| lay out verb | /ˌleɪ ˈaʊt/ | To expend or contribute money to an expense or purchase. |
| take off verb | To remove. | |
| take over verb | To assume control of something, such as a business or enterprise, and sometimes by force. | |
| try out verb | To test (something) to see how it works or whether it is suitable. |
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 | are outnumbered · are crushed · be met |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has begun · has just written |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | Those who survive · One who does |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 8 contractions and reduced forms, such as doesn't, you're, aren't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, mathematical /ˌmæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪ.kəl/, gather /ˈɡæðɚ/, wealthy /ˈwɛl.θi/, thunder /ˈθʌndɚ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: crush /kɹʌʃ/, establish /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ/, sheet /ʃit/, interaction /ˌɪn.təˈɹæk.ʃən/, shelter /ˈʃɛltə/
- Long words — get the stress right: universal /ˌjunəˈvɜɹs(ə)l/, humanity /hjuˈmænɪti/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, mathematical /ˌmæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪ.kəl/, interaction /ˌɪn.təˈɹæk.ʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like merchant, scholar, monk.
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.