Shadowing Practice: This True Story Will Change How You See Reality - Robert Greene - Learn English Speaking with Video
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that story about the russian explorer and the siberian tiger yeah that's one of my favorite stories.
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And they made a great movie out of it.
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The Japanese director Kiro Kurosawa, I believe in the 80s, did a movie.
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It's called Dersugusala.
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I highly recommend you see it.
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This Russian explorer at the turn of the 20th century, his name is Arseniev, he's exploring the Siberian taiga,
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which is this vast kind of wasteland of snow and,
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you know, it's just, there's indigenous tribes, et cetera.
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And he's exploring because they're parts of the Tiberian Saiga, the Siberian Taiga, sorry.
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It's Tiberian Saiga.
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Got that wrong.
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I'm getting a little punch drunk.
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The Siberian Taiga that had never been seen before.
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So he's sent out there to map it, right?
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He's a scientist, right very good scientist a cartographer
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so he's out there and he's going through this area that's that's very wild
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that no russian has been before
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and he's there's this man they're having a camp they're sitting by the campfire
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and this indigenous man named dersuzula asks
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if he can sit by the fire with them
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and smoke his pipe and he was a trapper a hunter who's by himself he belongs to this tribe called the Gold,
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but he lives mostly on his own.
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And, you know, occasionally he meets other members of his tribe, but he's basically a hunter, a trapper.
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And Arsenio invites him to sit by the campfire and they share a meal.
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And slowly he falls under the spell of this man.
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And he says, will you join us on our expedition?
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We need somebody like you.
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And the man agrees, okay?
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He'll be their guide.
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He'll show them, you know, where to go.
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And slowly he realizes that this man with his pagan beliefs is so much more powerful than they are.
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His body, first of all, he's in his 50s or 60s.
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He has 20 times the energy that they have.
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He can do feats that they can't even imagine, right?
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Because his consciousness isn't telling him, you can't do this, you can't do that.
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He's just open to everything.
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He knows every little detail of the forest.
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He can read like you can read a book.
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He knows by the tracks on the ground what animal passed, what kind of mood they were in, whether they were in heat or not,
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and whether they were hungry.
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He can read everything by how branches are broken.
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He can see the sky and say a storm is coming, even though it's like two days beforehand.
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He smells the temperature, the weather.
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He says that the forest breathes and is alive and he knows how it breathes and he can feel it.
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One day they encounter a tiger.
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They hear the roaring of the tiger and Arseniev is terrified.
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He can't believe it.
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The tiger's going to bout the pants on them.
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And a Siberian tiger is, believe me, is something you don't want to encounter.
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So he picks up his rifle and he's about to shoot it and the indigenous guy gets, put that away.
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And he walks right up to the tiger and he starts talking to it.
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And he starts telling it, He says that the tiger is the soul of the jungle.
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And if you mess with the soul of the jungle, you're going to pay a price.
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Nothing in this forest will ever cooperate with you.
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And he goes up and he talks to the tiger and says, Amba, which is the name of the tiger to his group, don't be mad.
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We're here just walking around.
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We're not going to bother you.
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Please be okay.
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The tiger walks away.
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And Arsenio is like, my God, weren't you terrified?
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He goes, no, no, never, never.
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If you shot him, I would never be your friend.
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You would have violated.
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Anyway, he comes to realize that this man has an intelligence and a spirit that humans have lost.
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That we once were so close to the environment that we could read everything, that our senses were so alive.
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We could feel the weather.
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We could feel animals.
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We knew the spirit of everything around us.
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and it ends up that Dersu is murdered a few years later by people who rob him.
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And he's so sad that this is a world that's disappearing.
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And he speculates if only we had kept some of this with our scientific spirit, because he was a scientist, how powerful it would be,
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because this man taught me everything about the jungle, about the Siberian taiga.
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So that's the story.
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How much do you think of what humans call supernatural abilities are actually just natural to humans,
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but we've lost touch with our subconscious so much that we don't have access to them anymore?
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Well, we are capable of so much more than we think we are.
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So I have stories in there of people kind of stretching the limits.
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So there's a story about a mountain climber, because I'm kind of very interested in mountain climbers in the sublime.
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and he climbs this mountain in Colorado
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and he gets to the top and he's elated
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and now he has to go back down he can see
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that a storm is brewing but he decides to go back down the other side
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and find some new areas that he hadn't climbed before so he's descending,
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the storm's coming it's getting a little bit sketchy out there suddenly he's on this ledge and he falls
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and as he's falling his knee hits the rock
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and he cracks his knee open and he lands on a ledge that's like a foot wide, maybe a foot and a half wide,
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and he lands on his crampons.
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So he's bleeding.
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His knee is cracked.
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He's sitting on this tiny ledge.
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He's somehow very lucky that he landed there.
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He fell about 30 feet.
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The storm is coming.
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He's alone.
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He's going, I'm about to die.
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And he starts crying.
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He starts sobbing.
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And then a voice instead of says try to get to your feet just try to get to your feet
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and it's really painful his as i said his knee is cracked
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he somehow manages to get to his feet then all of a sudden as he looks he can see
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that there is a slight way that the ledge can lead to another ledge it's very precarious
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but then suddenly he feels this rush of energy this like he doesn't know what it is and he starts
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descending onto these tiny ledges, you know, whatever the word is, he finally finds his way back down the mountain.
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And he's ecstatic.
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He's like, my God, I was like a mountain goat the way I was suddenly able to descend this mountain.
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What happened to me?
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What were these powers that suddenly came to me?
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Right?
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I can't make sense of it.
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And then he goes to a hospital and it takes and months to recover.
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And he's going, what was that?
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What was that experience?
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I have to have it again, because it was so ecstatic.
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He spends the next 20 years of his life trying to have that experience again, and he fails, and he fails, and he fails.
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He climbs Mount Everest.
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It doesn't work.
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It's just, you know, leeches are eating it, hit his knees, and he's miserable, and there's,
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you know storms etc he tries long distance long distance running he gets moments where there's some kind of ecstasy
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but it's not the same he reads about the neurology of the human brain
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and he goes into indigenous cultures and he realizes
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that shamans back then people who had these initiation rituals would put people to the brink of death
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and then bring them back and
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that they would then have these experiences like he had
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and he decided that they had mastered the neuroendocrine system they could control their no their own hormones
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because what happened to him on
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that mountain was his body his hormones were creating these dopamines
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and these adrenaline effects that gave him that mountain goat power okay so anyway the the lesson here is he finally
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discovers that he creates this his own what he calls a mountain run that's not the word
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but he creates these runs he takes a map
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and he makes a circle and he's going to run
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that circle no matter what comes into his path right in these wooded areas even
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if a mountain or stream he's got to create that circle
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and doing this he comes upon a cliff
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that he has to climb he gets that experience again okay
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but the point is our bodies have these insane powers
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that we have a lot of it is from our physiology
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right from our our own hormone system for how things
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when we're in a sense of danger so
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if you took any stockbroker on wall street as rigid
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and tight and conservative and limited as anything else as unsublime as any creature you can imagine on our planet
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And you dropped him in the middle of an island alone, and he had to survive.
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His senses would start waking up.
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Some of these effects would happen.
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And he would discover some of these quote -unquote supernatural powers that he possesses.
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Because when your senses are dead, you're not connected to your own body.
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You're not connected to these immense powers that we have, right?
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And I sensed a little bit when I was this close to death,
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and I could feel like death inside of me.
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It was like something really powerful and really strong, not like anything else.
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And it was like a power that I can't even verbalize, but it's out there somehow, and it's going to happen to everyone when they die.
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You're going to feel that.
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You're going to feel like you're connecting to something cosmic, right?
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And so there's something, and then when you emerge from that, your physiology and your brain is slightly altered, and you don't have supernatural powers,
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but the world looks different.
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And that, you know, it's not without, I'm not taking LSD.
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I'm not taking, you know, Wiosca or whatever you call it again.
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It's just there.
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It's my own brain.
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Your brain has these weird, weird, weird powers that you're not even accessing because you're not even connected to your body anymore.
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You're not connected to your own mortality.
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You're not connected to your senses.
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A quick note.
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Lots of people tell us that YouTube unsubscribes them from the channel, even though they already pressed it.
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So just check down there and see if the subscribe button is pressed.
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You get access to episodes before anybody else.
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If you do, it supports me and the show, helps me to bring you bigger and better guests, and it makes me very happy.
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So just go and give it a tap for me.
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Thank you.
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Tell me if this sounds familiar.
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You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “This True Story Will Change How You See Reality - Robert Greene”. This video has 190 sentences and 2113 words to shadow. The speech runs for 12:14. The speaker talks at a natural 173 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 84% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| tiger noun | /ˈtaɪɡə/ | Panthera tigris, a large predatory mammal of the cat family, indigenous to Asia. |
| connect verb | /kəˈnɛkt/ | To join (to another object): to attach, or to be intended to attach or capable of attaching, to another object. |
| knee noun | /ni/ | In humans, the joint or the region of the joint in the middle part of the leg between the thigh and the shank. |
| wisdom noun | /ˈwɪzdəm/ | An element of personal character that enables one to distinguish the wise from the unwise. |
| climb verb | /ˈklaɪ̯m/ | To traverse a slope or contour, either upwards (ascending) or downwards (descending). |
| indigenous adjective | /ɪnˈdɪd͡ʒənəs/ | Native to a land, especially before colonization. |
| hormone noun | /ˈhoɹmoʊn/ | Any substance produced by one tissue and conveyed by the bloodstream to another to effect physiological activity. |
| crack noun | /kɹæk/ | A thin and usually jagged space opened in a previously solid material. |
| scientist noun | /ˈsaɪəntəst/ | One whose activities make use of the scientific method to answer questions regarding the measurable universe. A scientist may be involved in original research… |
| jungle noun | /ˈd͡ʒʌŋ.ɡ(ə)l/ | A large, lush, undeveloped, humid forest, especially in a tropical region, thick with vegetation and wildlife; a tropical rainforest. |
| supernatural adjective | /ˌsu.pəɹˈnæ.tʃə.ɹəl/ | Above nature; beyond or added to nature, often so considered because it is given by a deity or some force beyond that with which humans are born. |
| descend verb | /dəˈsɛnd/ | To pass from a higher to a lower part of (something, such as a flight of stairs or a slope); to go down along or upon. |
| discover verb | /dɪˈskʌvə/ | To find or learn something for the first time. |
| hunter noun | /ˈhʌntɚ/ | One who hunts game for sport or for food; a huntsman or huntswoman. |
| explore verb | /ɪkˈsploɹ/ | To examine or investigate something systematically. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| go back verb | To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time. |
| back down verb | To take a less aggressive position in a conflict than one previously had, or has planned to have. |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. |
| fall under verb | To belong to for purposes of categorization. |
| go off verb | To explode. |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. |
| go up verb | To move upwards. |
| pick up verb | To lift; to grasp and raise. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- I'm getting a little punch drunk.
- He'll show them, you know, where to go.
- We're here just walking around.
- We're not going to bother you.
- What were these powers that suddenly came to me?
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 | been seen · are broken · is murdered |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been · have lost · we've lost |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | Amba, which is · people who rob · people who had |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 43 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, can't, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: breathe /bɹiːð/, bother /ˈbɑðɚ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: rush /ɹʌʃ/, occasionally /əˈkeɪʒənəli/, consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/, expedition /ɛkspəˈdɪʃən/, initiation /ɪˌnɪʃ.iˈeɪ.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: indigenous /ɪnˈdɪd͡ʒənəs/, supernatural /ˌsu.pəɹˈnæ.tʃə.ɹəl/, physiology /ˌfɪziˈɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/, occasionally /əˈkeɪʒənəli/, miserable /ˈmɪz(ə)ɹəbəl/
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 tiger, connect, knee.
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.