Shadowing Practice: The SIMPLEST Way to Become Good at Learning - Learn English Speaking with Video
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It's surprisingly easy to become good at studying.
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as long as you build the three learning pillars.
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I've been a learning coach for the past 13 years
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and I've noticed that once students are able to master all three learning pillars, they're able to study much more to a much higher quality in a shorter amount of time,
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which ultimately means getting better results.
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Now the issue is that most people don't know about these pillars or they focus on the wrong ones, which means even though it can be easy to get good at studying,
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most people So in this video, I'm going to teach you what the three pillars are
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and what you need to do to master them to become a top learner.
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But let's make something very clear.
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Getting better at learning is not the same thing as making learning faster and easier.
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Effective learning takes effort it often feels uncomfortable.
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High quality learning involves thinking really hard.
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Most people think that you can get better at learning without doing the hard thinking
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and so they actually avoid that effort which means that they avoid getting better.
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So instead most people think about how they can just cover content faster
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but covering content fast doesn't mean anything unless you can retain what you've learned
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and then use it the way you need to.
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Even if you can retain and remember and needed it for was to solve problems.
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So getting better at learning is about knowing what type of thinking is effective and getting better at doing that.
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And then over time, you do get faster at doing that and it becomes more comfortable.
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But the way you get more comfortable is like how long distance running gets more comfortable for a marathon runner.
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It's not that it's become objectively easy.
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It's that you get used to the difficulty.
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Getting better at learning is also or finding the best technique.
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It's perfectly possible to have the best app and use the best techniques
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and still do terribly with your learning if you're not thinking in the right way.
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Getting better at learning means that you understand the right way to think
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so that you don't even need the best app or the best technique.
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You can do well even without it because you know how to use your brain and think in the right way.
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So with that out of the way, here are the three pillars and how you need to think about getting better at learning.
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is ultimately about getting information and then putting it inside
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our memory and the process of putting information inside our memory is something
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that we call encoding and then when we use
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that information from our memory we call this process retrieval retrieval helps us find gaps in our memory
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and it also strengthens and consolidates our long -term memory which means
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when you practice retrieving your knowledge your knowledge gets stronger on
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the other hand encoding is what determines how many gaps you have in the first place if your poor,
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it's very superficial, and so you have lots of gaps to find in your retrieval, and sometimes it's overwhelming to try to fill all of those gaps.
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This is the typical situation of the Anki grind or the flashcard grind,
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where almost all of the learning is just done through retrieval and testing yourself through flashcards, and the encoding is not being done at a high quality,
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which means that you're constantly forgetting almost everything and overwhelming yourself with These are the first two pillars.
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To be a great learner, you have to have good enough encoding so that your memory isn't full of holes,
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and you have to have good enough retrieval so that you're finding those gaps and you're deepening your knowledge.
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The third pillar is because learning doesn't happen in isolation.
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It doesn't matter if you have the best encoding and best retrieval technique.
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If, for example, you procrastinate so much that you never sit down to study, or you're so easily distracted that you can't focus for more than 20 minutes.
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These are things that I call enablers.
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Enabler skills are not your direct learning skills.
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They're the skills that allow you to show up and do the work you need to do consistently.
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And so when we think about, great really really effective learners then one of their biggest characteristics is
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that they have phenomenal encoding skills their encoding ability is
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so strong and their retention is so good
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that they barely forget anything they don't have many gaps to
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find they're able to achieve a really deep level of understanding
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and mastery in a very short period of time people with
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phenomenal encoding skills they often don't need to spend a lot
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of time studying they don't need to spend a lot of
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is actually the most important skill for you to develop to become a good learner, not just learning how to do more flashcards or writing pretty notes.
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But it is actually the last thing that you should learn how to get good at.
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And so here is how you get good at each of these three pillars, and the order that you should get good at them in.
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The first one you should try to develop is actually your enablers.
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And you can divide enabler skills into two different types.
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The first type is self -management.
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This includes things like your ability to stop procrastinating, your time management, how you prioritize your tasks, and how you can manage your focus and concentration.
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The other category is growth.
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skills.
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And this is one that most people don't think about.
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Growth skills are actually the skills that allow you to improve with time.
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Because not everyone gets better and develops skills at the same pace.
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And so if you want to get better at...
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I mean, basically anything, but especially something as complex as learning, you need to have really good growth skills.
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Otherwise, you're going to give up before you get good.
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And the two biggest growth skills are experimentation and critical reflection.
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If you imagine one person who learns a new learning technique and then they never use it, they're afraid of trying it, they're afraid of making a mistake.
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And then when they do use it, they don't know how to think about how well it went.
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Versus someone who learns a new technique is able to use it immediately.
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have that experience, able to reflect on it, see what went well, see what went wrong, what they could improve, and then create the next experiment immediately.
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you can imagine which person is going to improve more quickly.
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And I see this very clearly in the students in my program,
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where some students are learning skills literally 20 times faster than other students.
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And 99 out of 100 times when we look at the students that are
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improving very slowly and feeling frustrated and demotivated at the experience of learning to learn,
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it's because they are holding back on experimentation or they're not doing critical reflection often.
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And so this is why we need to work on the enablers first, because either self -management or growth skills are going to be rate limiters for you,
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which means it doesn't matter how good your encoding is.
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It doesn't matter how good your retrieval is.
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It doesn't matter what apps you use, how you write your notes.
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None of that matters if your self -management and your growth skills aren't good enough.
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And so the easy part to this is that if you know
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that you have an issue with your procrastination or with your time management or with your experimentation and your growth skills, then you know that you can work on that.
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And you should just work on that first and you will see great results in a short period of time.
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starting this learning skills journey, will ignore this stuff.
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They'll say, this isn't important for me, I just need to learn something else.
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I need just a new technique that's gonna fix my problem.
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And then they're gonna struggle.
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And they're gonna find learning to learn very, very hard.
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And they're probably gonna give up before they get good.
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So if you want learning to learn to be easier, Focus on your enablers first.
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And you don't need to become like a machine, a paragon of focus.
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You just have to be good enough.
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And once you are good enough with your enablers, you're ready to move on to the second.
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The second part is...
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retrieval so if we go back to this diagram here you remember
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that retrieval is whenever we use information from our memory we've already encoded it it's in our memory
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and now we're calling upon that and testing ourselves so for example
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when we do a quiz or answer some practice questions that's retrieval
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and there are many many ways of doing retrieval depending on how you need to use your knowledge
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if you need detailed factory call we've got techniques like doing flashcards.
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Or if you need to apply multiple concepts together, you can solve complex problems.
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You can use and apply your knowledge to build something like: develop an app, teaching someone, answering questions, making your own questions, answering questions and then making your own answer sheet,
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quizzing your friends, brain dumps, mind map brain dumps, writing practice essays, using AI to generate your own practice test.
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And it's not that one strategy is better than the other, each has their own purposes,
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it's about figuring out how you need retrieval strategies you use.
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And when you have a retrieval strategy, that is consistent and regular.
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and it's aligned to your knowledge needs it enhances your retention it enhances your fluency
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and recall speed and helps you to find gaps in your knowledge in advance
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so that you can fill them and
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so hopefully you can see why you need to start working
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on your enablers before you work on your retrieval skills
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because it's very hard to have consistent regular high quality retrieval sessions
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if you struggle with your time management if you can't prioritize your tasks but by locking in learning.
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Even if you didn't understand it the first time, even if it was a complex topic, even if you're feeling nervous about the exam,
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your retrieval strategy is there to catch any gaps and help you prepare and become confident before the exams.
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And speaking of safety nets, what happens if you're watching a video like this
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and you're finding it helpful and you're finding this advice useful
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and you want to make sure you apply it in your life, but you're worried that once you click off of this video, you're going to forget about it.
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Nothing's going to change.
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What if there is a way
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that every single week you could get a reminder about what
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you need to focus on? on delivered straight to your inbox written by me for free in the form of a newsletter.
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Well, what a great idea.
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I already thought of that.
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I have a free newsletter, which I send out every single week, which has tips like this.
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It's a distillation of the study techniques that I wish I knew 14 years ago when I first started this,
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covering what I think are some of the most important principles to help you become a more confident learner.
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The emails take a few minutes to read, but can potentially save you hours a week through efficiency.
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So if you're interested, again, it's completely free.
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There's a link to sign up to the newsletter in the description.
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Now, the third pillar, it's no mystery, is going to be encoding.
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I said encoding is arguably the most important change that you can make to become a better learner.
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This is the hallmark of a genius.
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So why is it the last thing for you to work on?
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Well, it's because encoding, the third pillar, takes a long time.
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Becoming good at encoding is not about learning how to do some mind maps, even though that is a great technique that can help you be better at encoding.
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It's not about reading a certain way.
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It's not about writing your notes a certain way.
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It is about how you think.
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encoding is basically a word to encapsulate all of your current habits of how you interpret
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and process new information these are habits
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that you've built up over years decades even some of those habits are working for you
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and some of those habits are outdated or hindering you and
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so it takes time to gain awareness of your current learning habits
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and it takes time to unlearn those habits sometimes a very long time
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and it takes time to replace those with new habits and
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mind mapping and certain reading techniques that help you think in new ways and build those new neural pathways.
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For some really experienced, already top achieving learners, this process might only take a few weeks.
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For students who have never experienced high quality encoding before, developing these habits can take several years.
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Even with guidance and feedback like in an intensive program like mine, it can take months.
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And unless you have just months of free time that you can be getting better at learning,
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encoding is not the thing that is going to make a difference for you in the short term.
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The reason we work on our enablers and our retrieval skills first is because once we have these locked down, it gives us the runway,
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the time, the safety to slowly start working on our encoding skills.
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And yes, once you do improve your encoding skills, it is legitimately life -changing.
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The amount and the efficiency that I can learn at now compared to when I was better.
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But if I just tried to work on only my encoding skills that entire time, I probably just would have failed medical school in the meantime.
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By the way, in terms of the specific process of what encoding actually looks like, I go through that in more detail in some other videos.
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But here's the thing, is that even though if you follow these steps and you learn it in this order, where you start with your enablers and then your retrieval and then you slowly work on your encoding skills,
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this is the easy way to get better at learning.
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Once you have all of these things, memory and then you have a great ability to find your gaps,
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you will walk into every exam for the rest of your life feeling confident.
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You will be focused and effective and in control of your learning process, not just for uni, but also in professional life.
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However, So there is still another part that can make this hard.
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These are not new ideas.
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If you've watched my videos before, I talk about this stuff constantly.
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I have videos that have received millions of views talking about each of these points.
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And yet I can promise you that millions of people have not become top learners after watching these videos.
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I wish.
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And a big reason it is
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so hard for people to just execute on these steps is because that many people are caught in the illusion of learning.
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Which is basically when you think you're learning, but you're actually not.
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Learning to learn is not about what you know.
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It is about what you know and can do.
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It is a skill.
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As much as I want you to, you know, go and watch another one of my videos and help my channel grow,
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the thing that probably is going to help you is to just take a technique that I teach and just do it.
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Apply it.
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Experiment.
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You know, critically reflect.
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Grow.
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But that is.. difficult.
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That's hard work.
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That's hard work that people aren't willing to do.
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It is hard work to actually do things and make mistakes and have experiences and learn from them.
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It is hard work to examine your habits and relearn habits.
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It takes
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time and practice and diligence and consistency
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and it is far easier just to fall into the illusion of learning and just keep watching videos
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scrolling through Instagram and TikTok reels, knowing more about how to be better at learning, without actually becoming better at learning.
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It took me years to learn what I know now, and to do that trial and error and figure it all out.
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And although I hope it will be faster for you
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because I'm uploading these videos and teaching you the things that I've learned, it's still not going to happen overnight.
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So I would love for you to watch this video and Take action.
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And by the way, If you are looking to try to do this a little bit more quickly with a little bit more guidance
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and feedback and things that I can't do over YouTube very easily, then I do have a step by step program that I've created on I can say it .com.
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It's designed to sequentially go through all the enablers
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and the retrieval strategies and the encoding strategies in the right order that you need to learn it at the right level.
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I will, of course, continue to upload videos on YouTube for free to try to help as many people as possible.
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looking for a faster path that is a little bit more guided, then you might be interested in checking that out.
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I'll leave a link to that in the description as well.
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Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.
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Why Practice Speaking with This Video?
This video is a goldmine for english speaking practice because it combines clear, conversational language with actionable insights—perfect for honing your skills. The speaker’s natural pace and logical flow make it ideal for shadow speech (repeating aloud in real time), a technique that trains your brain to mimic pronunciation, intonation, and rhythm. By practicing with this content, you’ll not only improve your speaking fluency but also absorb strategies for effective learning—killing two birds with one stone. It’s a practical way to learn english with youtube while building real-world communication skills.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
The video uses several key structures that English learners can master. Here are 3 to focus on:
- "as long as you build...": This conditional phrase is great for explaining requirements. Example: "You’ll see progress as long as you practice daily."
- "it's perfectly possible to...": Use this to highlight feasibility, even in challenging situations. Example: "It's perfectly possible to learn a language without expensive tools."
- "the process of [verb] is something we call...": A formal way to define terms, useful for clarity. Example: "The process of organizing ideas is something we call 'outlining.'"
Common Pronunciation Traps
Pay attention to these tricky words and sounds when using the shadowing technique:
- "encoding": The "c" is pronounced like "k," not "s"—say "en-KOH-ding," not "en-SEH-ding."
- "retrieval": Stress the second syllable: "re-TRI-val," not "RE-tri-val."
- "procrastinate": The "t" is soft, and the final "e" is silent—"pro-CRAS-ti-nate," not "pro-CRAS-ti-nat."
Practicing these with shadow speak will help you avoid common mistakes and sound more natural.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've been · I've noticed · you've learned |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | ones, which means · effort which means · memory which means |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is just done · are outdated · will be focused |
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.