Shadowing Practice: The Story of a Garden - Learn English Speaking with Video
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63 sentences
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1
This is a red cardinal.
2
This is a dogwood in bloom, a Japanese maple in full spring color.
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And this is Murphy, a nine-year-old Australian Shepherd.
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This is the story of a garden.
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And while it would be easy to show it as it exists today, its story begins with a continental divide divide of before and after,
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when our world overnight became painfully quiet.
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Like so many others, I began gardening that spring.
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For a few months, I stayed within a couple miles of my home in Tennessee.
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And for the first time, I saw my backyard as a place where I could escape.
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The garden didn't begin with planting of flowers or digging a hole for a tree, but instead with this pond.
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When I moved into this house, I hid the remains of a koi pond.
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A cracked liner, piled up rocks, and just enough water for my then puppy Murphy to use as his personal swimming pool.
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I got it up and running again, added a few water lilies and koi, and eventually the frogs showed up.
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One month later it seemed like this slowed down world wasn't speeding up any time soon.
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So I decided it was time to rip up the rotten deck
16
that overlooked the pond and create something that would serve as the cornerstone of my backyard.
17
I began drawing idea after idea, scouring books and websites for the perfect design.
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But nothing I found perfectly matched the vision I had in my head.
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With some help from my 14-year-old neighbor Eli, we spent two months in the hot sun creating a little corner of paradise.
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The porch took shape, and with hardly any building experience, I finished it up by the end of the summer.
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But I still didn't have any semblance of a gardener.
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One day when I was up on the roof finishing the porch, my neighbor Duke came by to check it out and said, This kind of has a Japanese kind of vibe.
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And that's when everything clicked.
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I remember childhood days in my front yard, climbing a towering maple tree.
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When I caught up with my mom that summer, she reminded me this tree that changed colors throughout the year and had a low, wide, inviting branch structure.
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It wasn't just any maple tree.
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It was an Acer palmatum, a Japanese maple.
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With the porch complete that summer, I planted my first Japanese maple behind the pond, where it would be on full display from this green porch.
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Little by little, with every job I worked, I started buying plants for the garden and and trying to create a design.
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The backyard felt big, almost too overwhelming to control.
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It needed a vision.
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If I wanted my backyard to become a real garden, I needed to take a trip.
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The next fall, I visited one of my best friends in his hometown in Portland, Oregon.
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The first morning there I visited the most beautiful garden I had ever seen.
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This garden had mystery and flow.
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You could never see the whole space from a single vantage point.
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I knew then that this is what I wanted my garden to look like, even in my own small way in a less forgiving climate in the southeast.
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And after I got home, I couldn't stop thinking about it that entire winter.
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In 2022, with the tea houses of Japanese gardens as my inspiration, I got back to building for the next phase of the garden.
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From the screen porch, I looked out at a dividing line to create a garden section
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that was somewhat hidden from everything I had created so far.
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The shed offered a landing spot, a distant view from the first structure.
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I cut its doors into an otherwise rectangular shape, which would look down a path directly to the pond and screen porch.
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Over the next three years, I slowly built up the garden intended to it, bringing in flowers and conifers,
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ferns and grasses, stones, and over 35 Japanese maples.
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Half of the Japanese maples came from a new friend named Khaled, who was retiring from 40 years owning a nursery.
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It took quite a few trips back and forth from his farm to bring those trees home.
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I promised him I would take good care of them.
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On rainy evenings, the garden turns Tennessee into a Pacific Northwest dream.
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The rain brings out the smell of cedar, reminding me of the exact day I started building my screen porch.
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On sunny days, water lilies unfurl and reach up to the sky.
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Our neighborhood birds visit the pond taking their daily baths.
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Murphy and Phoebe watch over it in their own unique way.
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In the fall, the maple leaves burn red and orange before the garden takes its rest in the winter.
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This garden is far from perfect.
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It's far from complete.
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Some days I try to sit back and enjoy it, but most of the time I'm tinkering, making my morning and evening laughs.
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This is six years of carving out my own special corner in the world.
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It's hundreds of holes dug in the ground, five winters endured wondering if everything would survive.
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For now, it's a delicate blend of chaos and harmony.
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Layers and layers of textures and color.
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This is the story of a garden.
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Thank you.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “The Story of a Garden”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: garden, maple, porch, Japanese, pond. This video has 63 sentences and 898 words to shadow. The speech runs for 6:41. The speaker talks at a steady 134 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. Only 77% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| maple noun | /ˈmeɪpl̩/ | Any member of any species of genus Acer, characterized by (usually) palmate, five-lobed leaves and winged seeds, and often grown for syrup or wood |
| porch noun | /pɔɹt͡ʃ/ | A covered entrance to a building, whether taken from the interior, and forming a sort of vestibule within the main wall, or projecting without and with a… |
| pond noun | /pɑnd/ | An inland body of standing water, either natural or man-made, that is smaller than a lake. |
| backyard noun | /bækˈjɑːd/ | A yard to the rear of a house or similar residence. |
| divide verb | /dɪˈvaɪd/ | To split or separate (something) into two or more parts. |
| neighbour noun | /ˈneɪbɚ/ | A person living on adjacent or nearby land; a person situated adjacently or nearby; anything (of the same type of thing as the subject) in an adjacent or… |
| conifer noun | /ˈkɒnɪfə(ɹ)/ | A plant belonging to the order Coniferales; a cone-bearing seed plant with vascular tissue, usually a tree. |
| cornerstone noun | /ˈkɔɹ.nɚ.stoʊn/ | A stone forming the base at the corner of a building. |
| dogwood noun | /ˈdɒɡwʊd/ | Any of various small trees of the genus Cornus, especially the wild cornel and the flowering cornel. |
| overwhelm verb | /ˌoʊ.vɚˈwɛlm/ | To engulf, surge over and submerge. |
| painfully adverb | /ˈpeɪnfəli/ | In a painful manner; as if in pain. |
| semblance noun | /ˈsɛmblən(t)s/ | The outward appearance or form of a person or thing. |
| unfurl verb | /ʌnˈfɝl/ | To unroll or release something that had been rolled up, typically a sail or a flag. |
| vantage noun | /ˈvæntɪd͡ʒ/ | A place or position affording a good view; a vantage point. |
| carving noun | /ˈkɑɹvɪŋ/ | A carved object. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| bring out verb | To elicit, evoke, or emphasize (a particular quality). |
| build up verb | To erect; to construct. |
| get back to verb | Return to (an activity) |
| look down verb | To lower one's eyes; to direct one's look downwards. |
| pile up verb | To form a pile, stack, or heap. |
| rip up verb | To destroy by ripping. |
| show up verb | To appear, arrive, or attend, especially suddenly or erratically. |
| sit back verb | To recline while still in a seated position, with one's back on the frame of the seat. |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 6 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, wasn't, couldn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
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 maple, porch, pond.
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.