Shadowing Practice: Ultimate Gemini Tutorial: How to Use Gemini AI For Beginners in 2026 - Learn English Speaking with Video
Choose a practice mode
Each mode opens a full-screen practice room.
278 sentences
If sentences are too short or too long, click Edit to adjust them.
1
Gemini updated a lot this summer.
2
The models changed, the drop -down changed, and the pricing shifted right along with them.
3
I'm covering the one you'll actually open today.
4
That starts with your very first login and ends with picking the right model for the job in front of you.
5
By the end, you'll go from zero to running this thing like a pro instead of guessing at settings nobody explains.
6
Open Gemini in the same browser where you're signed into Gmail and you're already signed in,
7
go to the gear icon in the bottom left and open the settings.
8
There are a lot of switches in there.
9
Most of them don't matter.
10
The path from here is identical on free and unpaid, so open the section called personal intelligence because that's the door everything else sits behind.
11
The first thing inside it is instructions for Gemini,
12
and that's where you tell it how you want to be talked to and what it should remember about you permanently.
13
Click add and start writing.
14
Mine starts with something boring.
15
I prefer detailed answers with examples and analogies, and that one line changes the shape of every response I get.
16
Then I added what I actually work on, and what hardware I'm on, an iPhone and a MacBook.
17
That second one sounds pointless until you're troubleshooting something.
18
It stops handing me
19
Windows instructions I can't use.
20
The more you put in here, the less you re -explain later, so treat it like onboarding an assistant instead of filling out a form.
21
Back out one level and you'll see personal intelligence is more than that instruction list.
22
It bundles three things.
23
The first is your past chats, which lets Gemini search what you already ask instead of starting cold every time.
24
The second is the instruction list you just wrote now with an on -off toggle.
25
The third is connected apps and that one does the heavy lifting
26
because it's what pulls a real answer out of your Gmail or your calendar instead of guessing at one.
27
Same three sections on both plans.
28
What changes is how well they talk to each other.
29
So turn the connected apps on right now, all of them.
30
Switch on Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Photos, and YouTube, or whatever you actually live in.
31
On free, the answers come back correct, but literal, so you have to point at the app you want inside the prompt.
32
On a paid account, it connects those dots by itself, pulling from your past chats, your instructions, and your apps in one answer without being asked.
33
That gap is the strongest argument for paying anything at all.
34
Five minutes in here makes everything after it better.
35
Navigation takes about a minute to learn.
36
The Gemini logo in the top left always takes you home.
37
The three lines on the left expand the menu and clicking them again collapses it.
38
Inside there you get a new chat button, your save stuff, your gems, and your full chat history with a search box on top.
39
Any chat can be pinned, renamed, deleted, or shared from the three dots next to it.
40
That's the whole map.
41
The one item worth explaining is temporary chat, which is basically incognito.
42
Nothing you type there lands in your history, nothing feeds personal intelligence, and nothing gets used for model training.
43
That last part matters because Gemini doesn't give you a clean opt -out of training the way some competitors do.
44
There is a setting for it, but Flippantite also stops saving your chats, which guts the entire product.
45
So use temporary chat for the sensitive stuff and leave the rest on.
46
Below the text box, there's a microphone and I turn it on before anything else.
47
Click it once, allow the permission for the site, and now you talk instead of type.
48
I talk maybe three times faster than I type and long prompts are where model quality actually comes from.
49
That's it for the furniture.
50
Everything past this point is where the real difference between an underwhelming Gemini and a great one lives.
51
So this week, my team and I spent three hours figuring out which AI tool to actually use for which task.
52
And that alone cut our manual work by 70%.
53
And this is becoming a real advantage.
54
There are people running entire companies solo, 5X -ing their revenue, even double their salaries simply because they know which tool to reach for and when.
55
Because in 2026, AI isn't coming for your job.
56
The person who knows exactly which tool to use and when might.
57
Outskill's three -hour AI tools workshop,
58
the same one I sat through with my team and I'm already using the learnings in my day -to -day work.
59
It's happening live again this Saturday, 10 a .m.
60
EST and they've made it completely free for my audience.
61
So in case you want to attend, links in the description.
62
Till now, over 12 million people worldwide have attended and you'll be learning straight from people who've worked at Microsoft,
63
Google, Amazon and NVIDIA.
64
By the end, you'll know exactly which AI tool to use for what, how to build agents that plan and report for you,
65
and how to connect tools like
66
Sheets and Notion.
67
into systems that just run while you sleep.
68
And the best part, there are bonus sessions
69
that keep unlocking new tools plus extras like an AI prompt library
70
and a personalized AI toolbox builder worth $5 ,000 completely free.
71
Three hours can change the next three years.
72
Links in the description, scan the QR and get into the WhatsApp community before seats close.
73
First thing worth breaking down what models actually exist here, how they're different from each other and which one you personally need.
74
The drop -down now gives you three models directly.
75
No more digging through settings to find them.
76
Flashlight sits at the top, built for the fastest answers on questions that barely need any reasoning.
77
Flash is the all -around option, the one you'll probably leave selected most days.
78
Pro is the heaviest of the three, built for advanced reasoning, and most people will genuinely never need it as their default.
79
Below those three sits a separate toggle called Extended Thinking.
80
It doesn't replace your model choice, it stacks on top of it.
81
Turn it on with Flash selected, you get a fast model that now pauses to reason through the problem before it answers.
82
Watch what this looks like in practice.
83
I'll ask the same question on Flash with Extended Thinking off.
84
The answer starts appearing basically as I let go of the key.
85
Now I turn
86
Extended Thinking on for the same prompt.
87
You can see it sit there for a few seconds first,
88
and what comes back is more structured and catches a nuance the fast version missed entirely.
89
Your limits depend on your plan, and this is where the free tier bites.
90
Free gets you basic access to all three models, plus extended thinking layered on top.
91
Google stopped publishing a fixed daily number for any of it.
92
The allowance is measured in compute, and it refreshes every few hours.
93
Burn through it, and Gemini quietly drops you to a lighter model until the reset.
94
I hit that wall twice.
95
So on free, stick with flashlight or flash for everyday questions and save extended thinking for the prompts that actually matter.
96
On a paid account, I leave extended thinking on permanently, and that alone is worth more to me than any headline feature.
97
The number in front of each name is the generation, and that's where the real capability jumps happen.
98
A 3 .8 flash is not the same engine as whatever ships after it, even though the name flash sticks around.
99
Google keeps improving the model behind each label, and the version number is your signal for how recent that engine actually is.
100
The jump between generations is where you feel it.
101
Bigger context windows, better multi -step reasoning, better handling of images and video in the same prompt.
102
Right as I'm filming this, Google rolled out a new model called Gemini 3 .8 Flash.
103
It's the small cheap model, but on one long horizon coding benchmark, it scores within a point of Claude's Opus 5.
104
And it's noticeably faster.
105
It's also cheaper to run per request than Opus 5.
106
That's the real story with Gemini right now.
107
Google keeps closing the gap with a cheap model instead of waiting on the next flagship.
108
That question I just spent a whole section on, which model do I actually pick, has a ceiling inside Gemini.
109
You can choose Flashlight, Flash, or Pro, and all three of them are Google.
110
When the task actually matters to me, I want to see what Claude does with the same prompt and what GPT does with it,
111
and then decide.
112
Gemini will never show me that.
113
No setting in here fix it.
114
That's the reason I built AI Master, and yes, it's my own platform and a paid product of mine.
115
So treat the next two minutes as an ad from the guy who owns the thing.
116
I'd rather say that out loud than bury it.
117
I'm plugging this prompt into the AI Master chat.
118
Next, I pick the model from this drop down right here.
119
ChatGPT, Grok, Claude and Gemini all sit in literally one subscription.
120
Watch what I do.
121
I run the answer on Gemini,
122
then run it again on ChatGPT and put the two next to each other to see which one actually understood the question.
123
That's the comparison you physically cannot do inside Gemini
124
and it takes about 15 seconds here and per token it lands cheaper than paying each of those companies separately.
125
The chat is only the front door.
126
Image generation, voiceover and video generation all live in the same place on the same subscription and they're cheaper per token too,
127
which is normally three separate tools and three separate bills.
128
Then there's the part that matters more than I expected it to.
129
There's an academy in there too, 200 plus lessons and roughly 30 hours of material.
130
And on the site, you'll find the results section with real case screenshots, plus demo videos of actual members saying what the platform did for them.
131
Go look at those before you take my word for any of this.
132
The path in is short, and I'll click through it on screen so you can see the whole thing.
133
You land on the page, you pick the annual subscription with the discount on it, you fill in your details,
134
and the confirmation email shows up while you're still sitting on the tab.
135
Then you're inside the account and working.
136
On top of that, there is a seven -day money -back guarantee.
137
So if it turns out not to be for you, you take your money back and walk away.
138
Back to Gemini.
139
Click upgrade in the sidebar and you get four tiers.
140
Free, plus, pro, and ultra.
141
Ultra is for the top 1 % of power users, and I'd ignore it unless you already know exactly why you want it.
142
Start free because most people can live there for months.
143
The tier I'd actually pay for is pro, And the reason isn't a feature list, it's personal intelligence, generous access to extended thinking,
144
and video generation in the same subscription.
145
Prices change often enough that any number I say today is wrong by the time you watch this.
146
So check the page yourself.
147
What I can tell you is where the value cliff sits.
148
Free to pro is a genuine jump in what the product can do.
149
Pro to ultra is a jump in how much of it you can use.
150
If you're a normal person using this for work, email, and learning, that first jump is the one that pays for itself.
151
Through this video, I'll flag which account I'm on, because some of what I'm about to show you simply isn't there on free.
152
Click Tools under the chat box, and the first one is Deep Research.
153
On free, you get a handful of runs a month, unpaid a lot more.
154
It goes away for several minutes and comes back with a genuinely enormous report, complete with charts and tables.
155
Here's one I ran just now.
156
Look at the language in it.
157
It opens with the words geopolitical and operational security assessment, which tells you exactly who this was written for.
158
It wasn't written for you.
159
Deep research is impressive and mostly overkill.
160
If you're doing academic work, a market study, or a competitive analysis you have to defend in a meeting,
161
it's excellent and it will save you a day.
162
For a normal question, it hands you 15 pages when you needed a paragraph and you end up skimming your own report.
163
I turn it off and leave it off.
164
When I do need it, I know before I open the app.
165
Create Images is in that same menu and you can ignore the button entirely.
166
Just say create an image and describe what you want.
167
Gemini figures out the intent on its own and the same is true of the Create Videos tool on Pay Plans.
168
Most of these toggles are shortcuts for something you can trigger with plain language, which is a pattern worth internalizing.
169
One quick note on Canvas, turn it on and Gemini stops writing inside the chat.
170
It opens a document panel next to it instead, so long emails, essays, or code stay editable in one place instead of buried in scroll history.
171
Guided learning is the tool I'd hand to any student.
172
You turn it on and describe what you're trying to learn.
173
So I'll say I'm studying for the bar exam and I need help with New York contract law.
174
Instead of dumping an essay on me, it talks like a tutor and asks which part I want to work on first.
175
I pick breach, performance, and remedies, and it introduces the concept and then quizzes me on it before moving to the next piece.
176
That back and forth is the difference between reading about something and actually retaining it.
177
Down at the bottom of the chat box is add files and it's more flexible than it looks.
178
Images, screenshots, screenshots, PDFs, Word documents all go in.
179
You can pull anything straight out of Google Drive or Photos without downloading it first.
180
And you can attach a Notebook LM notebook, which is the part most people never notice.
181
Notebook LM is Google's research tool, and you get to it from the same menu.
182
Each notebook is a bucket for one topic, holding whatever sources you dumped in there.
183
I have dozens of them.
184
Two on this account, but dozens on the one I actually work in.
185
That connection is the workflow I'd steal if I were you.
186
Keep your reference material organized in Notebook LM by topic, then attach the relevant notebook whenever you start a serious chat in Gemini.
187
I did it with a training notebook and asked for a program to get me to a one -armed pull -up.
188
It wrote the plan off my sources instead of off the general internet, which is the whole difference between a generic answer and a useful one.
189
Gems live in the left menu and they're the closest thing Gemini has to a superpower.
190
There are two kinds, the ones you build yourself and the ones
191
Labs lets you generate.
192
Start with your own.
193
Scroll to my gems and click new gem.
194
The use case is stupidly simple.
195
If you catch yourself pasting the same instructions into a fresh chat every Monday, that's a gem.
196
Mine is called email helper and the description field is just for me, so I wrote helps me with emails and moved on.
197
The name and description change nothing about the behavior.
198
The instructions box is where the whole thing lives because those instructions apply to every chat you ever open inside that gym.
199
Writing, help me with my emails, does nothing for you.
200
You want tone, length, what to never do, how to sign off, who you're usually writing to.
201
If you're staring at a blank box, there's an expand button that takes your one -liner and inflates it into a full instruction set.
202
Use it as a first draft and then edit it line by line, because it will confidently add rules you didn't ask for.
203
Below that you pick default tools, and those fire automatically every time.
204
For an email gem, I turn canvas on, so every draft opens in the editing panel instead of the chat.
205
Then comes knowledge, which is the other real reason to build a gem you upload files once and they're permanently attached.
206
Say your company has a PDF style guide for how emails go out.
207
Load it in and every email this gem writes already follows it.
208
If you do customer support, load the product documentation and the help guides and you've built yourself a support agent in about four minutes.
209
From then on, it's one click.
210
Open gems, click email helper, paste the email and it runs with my instructions, my knowledge files and Candace already on.
211
Editing later happens through the three dots next to the gem.
212
Above your own gems, there might be a section called Gems Made by Labs.
213
And this one genuinely surprised me.
214
These aren't prompts.
215
They're small apps you build inside Gemini.
216
So I clicked
217
New Gem and asked for a task management app built specifically for YouTubers.
218
Under a minute later, it was running.
219
I clicked Start and it worked.
220
And what makes these different from a normal little app is
221
that Gemini is the engine underneath so the app can actually reason instead of just sorting rows in a table.
222
If something bugs you while you're testing it, you don't go find the settings panel.
223
You tell Gemini on the left to change it and it rebuilds the app.
224
This is another one I could spend a whole video on.
225
I've switched to my pro account for this next part mostly because I burned through my extended thinking limit on free again.
226
Image editing does work on free but it works noticeably better with extended thinking on, so it's worth the switch.
227
I upload a photo of myself and ask it to turn this into a professional LinkedIn -ready profile photo.
228
Notice I never touch the create image button.
229
Gemini reads the intent, sees the attached photo, and understands it's an edit rather than a new generation.
230
What comes back is genuinely usable.
231
Video generation is paid only, and the limits are tight enough that you need a strategy.
232
Here's mine.
233
Don't ask for a video first because if you don't like it, you just burned one of your few generations on a bad idea.
234
Generate the still image first.
235
Iterate on it for free until the frame is exactly right.
236
Then copy that image into a new chat, turn on create videos, and tell it to use this as the start frame.
237
I did a dog skydiving.
238
the last web feature is scheduled actions
239
and it's paid only this one turns gemini from something you visit into something
240
that runs without you you don't dig through a settings page to set
241
it up either you just say it in a chat
242
i told it every day at 6 a .m mountain time
243
look for the latest ai news from the past 24 hours it confirmed the schedule immediately
244
and now that task sits in the scheduled actions panel where I can edit it with the pencil icon
245
or toggle it off when I get sick of it.
246
Each run pings me in the mobile app.
247
Most of the phone app mirrors the web, so there's not much to relearn.
248
Three things are genuinely different and the first is the camera.
249
Point it at something, take the photo, and ask what is this.
250
It's the fastest way I know to identify an object you don't have words for.
251
It's also quietly excellent for travel
252
because you can shoot a sign in a language you don't read and get the translation back in a couple of seconds.
253
That's a use case I didn't expect to lean on as much as I do.
254
The second thing is inside the tools menu on a paid plan.
255
There's a template section for video which gives you preset styles instead of starting from a blank prompt.
256
It's fun and I'd call it a toy rather than a workflow, mainly because your daily video limit disappears in about four taps.
257
Use it if you want to see what the model can do stylistically.
258
Don't build anything around it.
259
The third one is the reason I keep the app on my home screen.
260
There is a button that opens a real -time voice conversation with Gemini, and it's the closest thing to talking with someone who's read everything.
261
I use it while driving, on walks, and constantly while cooking.
262
No typing, no screen, no waiting for a page to load.
263
Then it gets better, because mid -conversation you can turn the camera on and it keeps talking.
264
I pointed it at a deck of cards on my desk and asked, what is this and what do I use it for?
265
It identified them as a deck of playing cards without breaking the flow of the conversation.
266
When you end the session, everything you discussed is saved as a normal chat you can scroll back through.
267
That combination of voice plus live camera is the single feature I'd miss most.
268
if Google pulled it tomorrow.
269
Here's my honest scoring after living in both accounts.
270
Personal intelligence and gems are the two things that made Gemini a daily tool for me, instead of a tab I open twice a week,
271
and live voice chat with the camera is the one I'd pay for on its own.
272
Deep research is a beautifully built feature I almost never need.
273
One reminder before you go, everything I showed you today lives inside Google's ecosystem.
274
And when you want to run the same task across Claude, GPT and Grok in one window, that's what AM Master is for.
275
Same as I demoed earlier.
276
Go set up your instructions and connected apps first though.
277
Five minutes there beats any tip in this video.
278
See you in the next one.
Download App
Everything you need to speak fluently
AI PronunciationScore every sentence
IPA PracticeMaster every sound
VocabularyBuild your word bank
Vocab GameLearn while playing
Same Channel
FOR YOU
Recommend Video
B21
227 sentences
How to Use Google Gemini Al (Full Tutorial)
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B21
28 sentences
Gemma 4 Just Released - Whats In? In 2026!
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
123 sentences
Google Just Dropped NEW AI Updates!🔥
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B21
206 sentences
8 Things I Did to Stop Wasting My Evenings After Work
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B22
193 sentences
How I would learn English if I started now - 2024
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B21
456 sentences
You're Not Late (Yet): Learn 98% of Gemini in Under 26 Minutes
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B24
167 sentences
introvert diary 🎧 productive days in my life, tech internship, cooking & pharm rotation results
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B21
366 sentences
ChatGPT + Podcasts = English Fluency? Try These 12 Prompts!
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
49 sentences
Gemini Escapes Simulated Environment During Security Test - DTH
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B283 sentences
Ray-Ban Meta Glasses Tips and Tricks You Need To Know!
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B21
124 sentences
How to Build AI ChatBot with Custom Knowledge Base in 10 mins
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Ultimate Gemini Tutorial: How to Use Gemini AI For Beginners in 2026”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: gemini, chat, model, tool. This video has 278 sentences and 3746 words to shadow. The speech runs for 20:34. The speaker talks fast, about 182 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 82% 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 |
|---|---|---|
| instruction noun | /ɪnˈstɹʌkʃən/ | The act of instructing, teaching, or providing with information or knowledge. |
| prompt verb | /pɹɑmpt/ | To lead (someone) toward what they should say or do. |
| flash verb | /flæʃ/ | To cause to shine briefly or intermittently. |
| gem noun | /d͡ʒɛm/ | A precious stone, usually of substantial monetary value or prized for its beauty or shine. |
| notebook noun | /ˈnoʊtˌbʊk/ | A book (physical or digital) in which notes or memoranda are written. |
| edit verb | /ˈɛdɪt/ | To change a text, or a document. |
| menu noun | /ˈmɛn.juː/ | The details of the food to be served at a banquet; a bill of fare. |
| genuinely adverb | /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/ | In a genuine manner; truthfully, truly. |
| subscription noun | /səbˈskɹɪpʃən/ | Access to a resource for a period of time, generally for payment. |
| ultra noun | /ˈʌltɹə/ | A political extremist, in particular |
| permanently adverb | /ˈpɜː.mə.nənt.li/ | In a permanent manner; lastingly. |
| dot noun | /dɑt/ | A small, round spot. |
| scroll noun | /skɹoʊl/ | A roll of paper or parchment; a writing formed into a roll. |
| screenshot noun | /ˈskriːn.ʃɑt/ | An image of computer or smartphone screen output at a given moment in time. |
| topic noun | /ˈtɑpɪk/ | A subject; a theme; a category or general area of interest. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| come back verb | To return to a place. | |
| drop down verb | To sail, move, or row down a coast, or down a river to the sea. | |
| burn through verb | To use up in a hasty or destructive manner. | |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| back out verb | To reverse (a vehicle) from a confined space. | |
| break down verb | To stop functioning. | |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| fill out verb | /fɪl ˈaʊt/ | To complete a form or questionnaire with requested information. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- I'm covering the one you'll actually open today.
- That second one sounds pointless until you're troubleshooting something.
- Windows instructions I can't use.
- I'd rather say that out loud than bury it.
- Then you're inside the account and working.
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 | be talked · is connected · being asked |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | chat, which is · person who knows · guy who owns |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | they've made · have attended · you've built |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 65 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, I'd. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: instruction /ɪnˈstɹʌkʃən/, flash /flæʃ/, subscription /səbˈskɹɪpʃən/, screenshot /ˈskriːn.ʃɑt/, sheet /ʃit/
- Long words — get the stress right: genuinely /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/, permanently /ˈpɜː.mə.nənt.li/, temporary /ˈtɛmp(əˌɹ)ɛɹi/, examination /ɪɡˌzæm.ɪˈneɪ.ʃən/, operational /ˌɑ.pəˈɹeɪ.ʃə.nəl/
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 instruction, prompt, flash.
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.