Shadowing Practice: The Concept of Language (Noam Chomsky) - Learn English Speaking with Video

The following program is a UW -TV classic.

From the University of Washington in Seattle, upon reflection with Al Page.

Our guest is Professor Noam Chomsky from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a guest lecturer at the University of Washington.

What determines how language in a particular country evolves?

Why is French, for example, so different from German?

Well, first of all, you're assuming that French is different from German.

The French would probably say so.

There's no simple measure of how different languages are from one another.

In fact, if you look at the languages structurally the way a linguist would look at them, French is different from the other Romance languages in a variety of ways,

which make it more similar to German and other Germanic languages.

There are a number of features of French which are sort of Germanic in character.

Give us some of those features.

Well, just to take a simple one, in all the Romance languages,

except for French, you can delete the subject of a sentence.

You can say the equivalent of walks to the store, meaning he walks to the store.

We can't do that in English, but you can do it in Italian or Spanish.

In fact, it's common romance, because right back to Latin, French is the only romance language in which you can't do that.

It's like a Germanic language, pretty much, in that respect.

In what they call clitics, small pronouns that you attach to verbs.

So you say the equivalent of I, him, saw.

That's common romance.

But in the other Romance languages, you can do things like, I, him, want to see.

You can do that in all meaning, I want to see him, but not in French.

And for a variety of constructions, actually, there are quite a number of respects in which French is different from the other Romance languages.

Incidentally, Old French, Middle French, French in the medieval period was not.

It was like the other Romance languages.

So something happened to it that made it less like the Romance languages and more like the Germanic languages.

How does language change over time?

How did 18th century French change compared to 12th century French?

Well, you know, when we talk about language change, that's very misleading.

I mean, there is no such thing as a language in France.

I mean, up until, say, the turn of the century, you could find people in nearby villages in France who couldn't understand one another, virtually could not understand one another.

The idea of a national language is a pretty modern phenomenon.

It has to do with the rise of nationalism and communication and so on, or take, say, Italy today or Germany today.

I mean, the differences among the things that we call German are enormous, so enormous as to lead to non -mutual intelligibility.

You have to learn the national language when you go to school.

It's a different language than the one you spoke at home.

And when we talk about language changing, what's actually happening is that there's some—it's kind of like species changing.

There's a mixture of all sorts of dialects, and the mix changes over time,

either because of conquest or some political change

or boundaries are drawn in a different place or some kind of commercial interchange or whatever.

The mixture of these things changes over time, and you take a look at it a few centuries apart, it looks like there's a different language.

But what happens is that between generations, there are usually small changes having to do with other influences from the outside and so on.

And these things are cumulative.

Sometimes they lead to pretty dramatic changes.

I mean, within a couple of generations, the language can change structurally in quite dramatic ways.

And of course, in, say, lexicon, you know, the words of the language, well, that's a different matter altogether.

So when technology develops, you get a whole new vocabulary.

But if you were in France in the 12th century and you understood all the nuances of language, could you have predicted how these various languages would have evolved over time?

No, it's totally impossible.

But is it partially random?

It's not so much that it's random.

It's not actually random.

For all we know, it might be completely deterministic.

There's just too many factors involved.

It's like predicting the weather.

There's just too many things going on.

Human life is a pretty complicated affair.

And now our culture, speakers of English can be misled by this.

English is relatively homogeneous.

You can go a long way in the United States.

I mean, I just came from Boston, and I understand everybody in Portland and Seattle and so on.

But that's not true of most of the world.

Most of the world, language areas, you can get very different languages pretty close by.

And much of the world is what we would call multilingual.

Thank you.

The closer I get to the border between France and Germany would the closer the languages become.

Yeah, well, in particular, if you go from, say, Paris to Rome, as you go toward the Italian border, it starts to sound more like Italian.

And at some point it becomes Italian.

And there isn't, in fact, I mean, by now there's, you know, there's enough national unity and so on so you can really find the border.

But if you go back a little ways, there was no border there was just a, I wouldn't say a continuum, there's just constant changes and fluctuations and variations,

and you started speaking one thing in one place and another thing in another place, and they're not mutually intelligible often, but along the way there's just all sorts of changes.

Now, with the rise of national states, and especially national communications and national education systems and all of these things, which is a pretty modern phenomenon,

then you get what we call national languages.

Now, as I say, English is unusual.

The reason, after all, you go to pre -colonial times, there were just hundreds of thousands, probably, of different languages spoken in what's now called the United States.

Well, through the destruction of the indigenous population, and it was real destruction,

kind of genocidal, and the conquest by speakers of basically one group you ended up having a large homogeneous language.

But how could anybody have predicted that?

I mean, it had to do with the invention of guns and, you know, political conquest and all sorts of things.

And that's pretty much what human history is.

There are some French theorists, for example, who argue that they must work very hard to keep the French language pure.

What does that mean?

It doesn't mean anything.

I mean, there's an old...

I mean, virtually every national language, every national culture, or at least the European ones, maybe others, has a mythology that that's the only real,

pure language, and all the others are corrupt.

In France, this position is kind of extreme.

In fact, if you go back to its origins, it's even a little bit comical.

I don't know if anybody's actually studied it, but if you go back to, say, the 18th century, and you read,

say, Diderot, he explains Diderot very seriously that...

He says, here's a prediction for you.

He says, France is going to be the language of science, and German and English will be the languages of literature.

And the reason for this is that French is very clear.

In France, the words follow the order of the thoughts, whereas if you listen to German and English, the words don't quite follow the words of the thought.

So, France is good for telling, French is good for telling the truth because of its, what later came to be called its Gallic lucidity and clarity.

Whereas German and, I think his examples were German and English, maybe Italian, they're good languages for telling fantasies and falsehoods,

so they'll be the languages of literature.

Now you can, it's a sort of naive point of view, but you can see what was going on in his head.

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I mean, for him, the words in French follow the order of thoughts.

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When you hear German, it seems all confused, I mean, thinking of some other way.

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Speaker of German looks the opposite, of course.

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And I suspect that the mythology of the purity and lucidity and clarity of French goes back to ideas of that kind.

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After all, French culture had a certain dominance and appeal for a long time, so these attitudes get established.

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But what does it mean for the language to be pure?

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Or when people say they want English to be pure, what are they talking about?

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Was Shakespeare pure?

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In fact, every stage of history, languages are...

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First of all, there is no such thing as a language.

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There are just lots of different ways of speaking that different people have, which are more or less similar to one another.

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And some of them may have prestige associated with them.

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For example, some of them may be the speech of a conquering group, group or a wealthy group or a priestly caste or one thing or another, and we may decide, okay,

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those are the good ones and some other one is the bad one.

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But if social and political relations reversed, we'd make the opposite conclusions.

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Let's take black English today.

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Black English is considered not quite proper English.

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On the other hand, if blacks happened to have all the power

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and own all the corporations and whites were working for them, it would be the other way around.

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Black English would be the language of culture and science and so on, and the stuff that you and I speak would be considered a degenerate dialect, which you have to get people out of so that they'll be able to think.

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But that raises an interesting question.

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Why does language have rules?

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Why were we taught these rules in grade school?

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Why is bad grammar bad grammar?

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Well, when you're taught rules of your own language in grade school, the chances are very strong that what you're being taught is false.

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Otherwise, you wouldn't have to be taught it.

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but I can see every grade school teacher about to throw an orange at you on the screen.

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There's, unfortunately, well, we have to, let me be a little more nuanced.

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One of the things you learn in grade school is the literary language.

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Now, in English, the literary standard is not so radically different from what, say, you and I grew up with, but it's somewhat different.

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The literary standard is not what I learned in the streets.

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It's not very different, but it's a little different.

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And when I went to school, I was taught the literary standard.

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Now, the literary standard has some principles associated with it, some of which are those of a real language, some of which are completely artificial.

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They were made up by people who had crazy ideas about language.

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And they're all given names you never heard of before.

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And in fact, the reason you have to teach them is because they are not the person's language.

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Your actual language, nobody teaches you.

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Your language just grows in your head.

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You can't stick a young child in an environment where people are speaking language,

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and that child can no more help knowing that language than the child can help growing.

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It's just part of human growth is for some component of the brain to pick up the language.

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You can't learn it, and you don't learn it anymore than you learn to see.

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Now, the fact is that the system that grows in the brain is sometimes different from a system which is regarded,

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for whatever reason as necessary or appropriate or approved or something, some prestige dialect.

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And it may be different from what grew in your brain.

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It typically is.

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Or it may be a way of trying to get us to have a common bond through language.

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Well, it's possible.

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I mean, I think that's a problem in places like, say, Italy.

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In Italy, if somebody grows up in the Piedmont area and somebody else grows up in the Naples area,

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They're speaking totally different languages.

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They can't, neither can understand a word the other's saying.

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So there, when you teach what they call Italian, which is the language roughly of the area of Florence, of Tuscany, you're teaching people what amounts to a second language,

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and it's the national language.

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Same is true in Germany and China.

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Well, China's even worse, because what we call Chinese is a set of languages

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which are as different from one another as the different Romance languages.

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They just happen to be all yellow on the map or something, and they happen to be a unified political area, but there's no sense in which they're the same language.

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We call them Chinese dialects, but that would be like calling French and Romanian two different dialects of the same language, Latin or something.

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I mean, these terms have no linguistic meaning.

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They have only sociopolitical meaning of a very complex sort, and the way in which they interact with authority structures is crucial.

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So what we call good English is a system which is partly artificial, I should say, which is taught to people because it was legislated to be good English.

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Now, some of what it's taught, it breaks the rules of any conceivable human language.

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That's why it has to be taught over and over again.

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So I don't know if people still do it in school, but when I was in school, you had to learn all sorts of complicated nonsense about shall and will, which nobody could ever remember.

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I mean, I forget what it was, I shall, you will, or some strange thing.

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That violates...there's no...I mean, there are certain principles of human biology which determine what a language can be, and no language can be like that.

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So that had to be...in fact, you can trace that back and you can find out who invented it.

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You know, some bishop in the 17th century or something invented it and decided that's the way it's supposed to be.

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Now, that kind of thing, of course, has to be taught because it's totally artificial.

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Or you have to teach people how to say, he and I, instead of him and me.

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Well, English sort of works the other way.

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I mean, if nobody was bothering you in English, you'd probably say him and me are here or something like that.

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But you're taught in the standard language not to do that.

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There's some other invented language, which is called the literary standard, in which you don't do it.

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And you ask the question, why do you have to teach people?

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Well, you have to teach them because it's artificial.

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It's not their language.

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And often it's not just not their language.

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Sometimes it's not even any possible language.

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Why is pronunciation and intonation so important to language?

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Why aren't words themselves sufficient to convey meaning?

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Well, you have to understand somebody else's words.

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I mean, if you go to central London and somebody's speaking cockney

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and the words happen to match errors at some abstract level, you still may not understand them.

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The pronunciation may be different enough so

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that part of your knowledge of language is a way of decoding noises

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that you hear and converting them into a system that matches your own representations.

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Sometimes, in order for that decoding system to work, the systems have to be close enough.

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You and I can do it.

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Actually, if you listen to us closely, we're speaking different languages, but they're close enough so that we don't have any, I don't have a problem decoding you and you don't have a problem decoding me.

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But again, that's a little artificial.

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That's because of the artificial unity of the English language.

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spoken in the United States.

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I happened to be in England last week

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and I confine myself in places in England where I don't understand what they're saying.

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I mean, if I listen to them for a while, we can establish communication, but you have to kind of retune your system in some manner that's not understood

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so that you can begin to decode what you're hearing.

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What role does slang have in language?

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Why does slang exist?

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Well, people are, why, I don't know, but the fact is people are very innovative and they like to do things differently, and especially teenage cultures.

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Why do teenagers wear different clothes?

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Well, you know, whatever the reason is, they want to be different.

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They like to be innovative.

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They're creative.

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So there's a lot of fashions in language?

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Oh, sure.

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And in fact, there are styles of different groups.

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Some of them change very rapidly.

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The words that are in one era are archaic, and in another era can be three years or something like that.

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And people are playing with their languages often.

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Again, this is not too common in our societies.

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Our societies, remember, are basically technological societies.

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Our intelligence and creativity and so on goes into other things.

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But if you go to, say, Central Australia, where you're finding basically Stone Age tribes, there's a lot of innovation in language.

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A lot of the cultural wealth has to do with playing games with languages

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and constructing elaborate kinship systems and things which probably have no or little functional utility.

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It's just the creative mind at work.

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So you get very complex language games, a special language system taught as a puberty rite, and only a particular group of people speak it, and nobody else understands it.

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How does language differ in the way that it's used in the arts?

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First of all, there's a variety of conventions,

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of formal conventions that are humanly created but undoubtedly reflect our aesthetic capacities.

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that set a framework within which they set a framework of rule, humanly imposed rule, within which people create.

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So if you find an extreme case, if you write a sonnet, you have to come pretty close to a fixed frame.

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And while that's an extreme case, the same is true of other literary conventions.

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I mean, part of human creative intervention has been to create forms,

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aesthetic forms, which are somehow either appealing to us or challenge our intelligence or whatever, and you work within them.

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I mean, after all, painting on a piece of canvas that has a boundary, that's pretty recent in human history,

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and that itself imposes a framework which determines the kind of art

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that you can produce

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and in the literary use of language is just everything from

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the structure of a novel to the metric character of a poetic form is one or another human invention.

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Do you respond to poetry? Do I?

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Sure.

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I have time to read it.

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Does it make you think differently?

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What goes on in your thought process?

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Well, you know, I don't feel competent to say, but it's a topic that has been discussed quite intelligently.

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So, for example, if you read, say, not by me, I have nothing to say about it, no one will pretend to, but if you read, say, William Amson's Seven Types of Ambiguity,

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you get an intriguing account of why poetry makes you think, in part because it's so compressed, and you only get hints,

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so the reader has to impose a lot of structure You have to put your own self into it.

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And in part because the formal structure itself imposes a challenge to the intelligence.

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If you're just throwing paint around randomly, it's not a work of art.

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But when it's done within the framework of a humanly constructed system of rule,

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at least you've got the prerequisites for a work of art, it still may not be.

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whatever it takes, whatever creativity is, and that's not understood, that has to be there too.

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But I, certainly I have nothing to say about these topics.

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I wouldn't pretend to.

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We bring up another area you can claim you have no expertise in, and that's the use of humor.

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We respond to people who use humor in communication, yet it's not taught in grade school.

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We don't, we're not taught how to be comedians, but we respond to it, and that seems to be the case in almost every language.

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Well, see, I don't think that has too much to do with language.

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We can be humorous in other ways, too.

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A clown can be humorous without using language, and nobody teaches a child how to laugh at a clown.

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Now, I think we're going here to interesting topics, but topics where nothing is understood.

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There's no doubt in my mind that there's something about human nature the basic structure of the human mind -brain,

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which makes certain things comical and other things not.

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Just as there are certain things about the human brain

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that make some things come out to be a human language and others not, although they could be a Martian language or something.

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And at its root, it's, I don't think, fundamentally different from the fact that we grow arms and not wings.

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Now, we don't know why we grow arms and not wings, but you assume that it's got something to do with the human genetic endowment.

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And I think the comparable assumption is true in all these cases.

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Part of the fascination of the study of language is

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that it's one of the few examples where you can really get some insight into how it works.

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These other topics that you're mentioning, say humor, should be subjected to the same kind of study, but so far it hasn't been clear how to do it.

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Words are endlessly fascinating, I think, because it's amazing how somebody can walk in a room,

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hear a few words and walk out crying or angry or this whole series of emotions simply with a few words.

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Doesn't that constantly amaze you?

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It's not just words again.

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It could be a fleeting picture.

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Take a caricature.

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You see a few lines and it brings to your mind a person in a situation,

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maybe a tragic situation or a comical situation or whatever.

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I mean, the human mind is a very marvelous thing.

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It's got an extremely intricate and complex structure, which, at least at a scientific level, we understand very little about.

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But what you're pointing to is a central part of it.

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Little hints here and there succeed in evoking in us very rich experience and interpretation.

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And what's more, it's done surprisingly uniformly for different people.

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And it's, of course, done without any training or very minimal training.

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Nobody would know how to train people to do this.

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So it somehow must be the only logical possibility, aside from angels or acts of God, is it's something rooted in our nature.

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I mean, qualitatively speaking, these phenomena are very much like physical growth.

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The nutrition that's given to an organism, to an embryo, is not what determines that it's going to be a human or a bird.

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What determines that it's going to be a human

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or a bird is something about its internal structure and what determines

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that we are going to be the kind of creature

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that can speak and that can interpret a sign

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or a couple of lines or something as evoking an emotional experience or whatever, that's something in our nature.

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But it's so far beyond what we know how to study

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that you can only wave your hands at it at the moment.

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How should parents react with respect to exposing their children to language? should they expose them to all aspects of language, or should they simply let them develop any way they develop?

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I suspect there's very little that parents can do to change the course of language development.

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I mean, you can, we know from experience.

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Again, let me say I'm not speaking about this from any expertise.

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I don't have any more expertise than personal experience.

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There's nothing in linguistic theory that gives answers to this question.

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but experience suffices to indicate, in no cases, that you can create an environment in

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which a five -year -old will sound like a college professor and it's kind of comical, but they'll use big words and, you know, complicated sentences and so on.

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I suspect you're probably harming the five -year -old, but it's possible to do that.

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Children can be molded.

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On the other hand, if you just leave them alone, they're going to pick up the language of their culture.

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Typically, they'll pick up the language of their peers.

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Quite typically, there are exceptions, but typically children will learn the language they heard in the streets.

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So take me, my father spoke with a Ukrainian accent

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and my mother spoke with a mixed New York -Lithuanian accent

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and I spoke urban Philadelphia because that's what the kids were talking in the streets.

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And undoubtedly if you really took my speech patterns and

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so on aside you'd find influences from the parents and the uncles and so on, but overwhelmingly it's you pick up the peer culture.

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Why this happens nobody knows, but there's something about humans,

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children, that gets them to grow the language that's roughly that of their peers.

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And it's a very rich system.

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It's an extremely rich system.

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They don't try.

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They can't prevent themselves from doing it.

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They can't make it happen.

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The parents can enrich the.. anyone who has a two -year -old knows that

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the kid is running around all over the place trying to find out what the name of everything is.

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What's that?

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What's that?

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What's that?

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And you can help them.

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And you can read the children and show them pictures.

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And they're all fascinated with it.

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They're periods very rapid language growth where you just can't satiate the curiosity fast enough.

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Amazingly so.

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It's unbelievable, in fact.

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What actually happens is really astonishing.

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I mean, there have been, for example, at the peak periods of a, forget the structure of language, which is complicated enough, but just take vocabulary acquisition, the simplest part.

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At peak periods of acquisition of vocabulary, learning new words, children are picking them up at maybe a rate of one an hour or something,

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which means that they're essentially learning a word on one exposure.

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And the adults go into adult education and die trying to learn a new language.

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Oh, yeah.

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But, you know, if you think what it means to learn a word on one exposure, the way to understand how amazing an achievement this is, is to try to define a word.

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So suppose you had an organism that wasn't equipped to learn the words of human language, and you really had to teach it those words by training.

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Well, you'd first have to define a word.

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What is the meaning of table, for instance?

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Nobody can do that.

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You have to define the definition you're using to define the word.

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But, you see, what we call definitions are not definitions.

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They're just hints.

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If you take the Oxford English Dictionary, you know, the one you read with the magnifying glass, and they give you a long, detailed thing, which they call the definition of a word.

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In fact, it's very far from the definition of a word.

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It's a few hints that a person who already knows the concept can use to understand what's going on.

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But remember, the child is picking that up not from the Oxford English Dictionary with its whole array of hints.

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The child is picking it up from seeing it used once or twice.

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Now, that can only mean one thing.

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It can only mean that the concept itself, in all of its richness and complexity, is somehow sitting there waiting to have a sound associated with it.

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Now, that can't be quite true, but something very much like that is probably true.

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That's why you and I will have essentially the same concept of table and the same concept of person and of,

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you know, nation or all sorts of things.

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And not complicated things.

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I mean really simple things like person, for instance, or thing.

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We'll have that even though we all have very limited experience because basically we started with those concepts.

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We're getting down to the end of the show.

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Do you ever see a time when the study of language and linguistics will not fascinate you?

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Well, I suppose it must come sometime when your mind deteriorates to the point where you can't deal with hard questions, I guess that'll happen.

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Professor Noam Chomsky from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a guest lecturer at the University of Washington.

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Upon reflection.

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To see more UW -TV classics, visit uwtv .org slash classics.

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17 sentences

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “The Concept of Language”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: language, word, French, English. This video has 359 sentences and 4878 words to shadow. The speech runs for 27:41. The speaker talks at a natural 176 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 86% 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

The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
hint noun	/hɪnt/	A clue.
comical adjective	/ˈkɑmɪkəl/	Funny, whimsically amusing.
decode verb	/dɪˈkəʊd/	To convert from an encrypted form to plain text.
humanly adverb	/ˈhjuːmənli/	In a human manner.
invent verb	/ɪnˈvɛnt/	To design a new process or mechanism.
conquest noun	/ˈkɑnkwɛst/	An act or instance of achieving victory through combat; the subjugation of an enemy.
vocabulary noun	/vəˈkæb.jə.lə.ɹi/	A usually alphabetized and explained collection of words e.g. of a particular field, or prepared for a specific purpose, often for learning.
humour noun	/ˈhjuːmɚ/	The quality of being amusing, comical, funny.
expertise noun	/ˌɛkspɜːˈtiːz/	Great skill or knowledge in a particular field or hobby.
evoke verb	/ɪˈvoʊk/	To call out; to draw out or bring forth.
homogeneous adjective	/ˌhoʊ.moʊˈd͡ʒi.ni.əs/	Of the same kind; alike, similar.
lucidity noun	/l(j)uːˈsɪdɪti/	The property of being lucid; lucidness.
sling noun	/ˈslɪŋ/	An instrument for throwing stones or other missiles, consisting of a short strap with two strings fastened to its ends, or with a string fastened to one end…
structurally adverb		In terms of structure.
pronunciation noun	/pɹəˌnʌn.siˈeɪ.ʃən/	The formal or informal way in which a word is made to sound when spoken.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
pick up verb		To lift; to grasp and raise.
go back to verb		To stem from; to originate in.
find out verb		To discover, as by asking or investigating.
bring up verb		To mention.
end up verb		To bring to a conclusion.
get down to verb		To start focusing on doing something serious
go back verb		To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time.
make up verb	/ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/	To constitute, to compose.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

Why were we taught these rules in grade school?
Do you respond to poetry?
Does it make you think differently?
What goes on in your thought process?
Doesn't that constantly amaze you?

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 social and political relations reversed, we'd make
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	are drawn · can be misled · be called
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	French which are · things, which is · have, which are
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	have predicted · has been · has been discussed

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 78 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, they're, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: mythology /mɪˈθɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/, aesthetic /ɛsˈθɛ.tɪk/, altogether /ɔl.tuˈɡɛð.ɚ/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: pronunciation /pɹəˌnʌn.siˈeɪ.ʃən/, invention /ɪnˈvɛnʃən/, nationalism /ˈnæʃ(ə)nəˌlɪzəm/, prediction /pɹɪˈdɪkʃən/, assumption /əˈsʌm(p).ʃ(ə)n/
Long words — get the stress right: vocabulary /vəˈkæb.jə.lə.ɹi/, homogeneous /ˌhoʊ.moʊˈd͡ʒi.ni.əs/, lucidity /l(j)uːˈsɪdɪti/, pronunciation /pɹəˌnʌn.siˈeɪ.ʃən/, organism /ˈɔɹ.ɡəˌnɪz.əm/

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 hint, comical, decode.

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.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Sentences worth repeating

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?