Shadowing Practice: What Are You? - Learn English Speaking with Video
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80 sentences
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1
Are you your body?
2
Well, kind of, right?
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But is there a line where this stops being true?
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How much of yourself can you remove before you stop being you?
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And does the question even make sense?
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Your physical existence is cells.
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trillions of them, at least 10 times more than there are stars in the Milky Way.
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A cell is a living being, a machine made of up to 50,000 different proteins.
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It has no consciousness, no will, no purpose, it just is.
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But it is still an individual.
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Together, your cells form huge structures for jobs like preparing food, gathering resources, transporting stuff around, scanning the environment, and so on.
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If you extract cells from your body and put them in the right environment, they will continue to stay alive for a while.
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So your cells can exist without you.
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But you can't exist without them.
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If we take all the cells away, there is no you anymore.
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Is there a line where a pile of your cells stops being you?
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For example, if you donate an organ, billions of your cells will continue to live on inside someone else.
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Does this mean that a part of you became a part of another person?
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Or is this other body keeping a part of you alive?
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Or let us imagine an experiment.
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You and a random person from the street exchange cells.
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One at a time, your body gets one of their cells, their body gets one of your cells, at which point would they become you?
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Would they ever, or is this just a very slow and gross way to teleport you?
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Let's make this more complicated.
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The image of ourselves as a static thing is untenable.
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Almost all of your cells have to die during your lifetime.
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250 million have died since the beginning of this video alone.
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Between 1 and 3 million per second.
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In a 7 year period, most of your cells are replaced at least once.
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Every time your cell setup changes, you are slightly different than before.
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So a part of you is dying constantly.
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If you are lucky enough to become old, you would have cycled through roughly a million billion cells.
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So what you consider yourself is really just a snapshot.
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But sometimes, cells are broken and don't want to die, questioning the very nature of the unity of our bodies.
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We call them cancer.
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They cancel the biological social contract and become basically immortal.
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Cancer is not an outside invader, it's a part of you that puts its own survival over yours.
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But you could also argue that a cancer cell becomes another entity inside us, another being that just wants to thrive and survive.
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Can we blame it for that?
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A chilling cell story is that of Henrietta Lacks, a young cancer patient who died in 1951.
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Usually, cells only survived for a few days in the lab, making research very hard.
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Henrietta's cancer cells were immortal.
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Over the decades, they were multiplied over and over again and used for countless research projects, saving countless lives.
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Henrietta's cells are still alive and overall have been grown to at least 20 tons of biomass.
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So there are living parts around the world from someone who has been considered dead for decades.
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How much of Henrietta is in these cells?
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What makes one of your cells you anyway?
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Maybe the information contained in it?
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Your DNA.
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Until recently, it was believed that all the cells in your body had basically the same genetic code.
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But it turns out this is wrong.
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Your genome is mobile, changing over time through mutations and environmental influences.
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This is especially the case in your brain.
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According to recent discoveries, a single neuron in an adult brain has more than 1,000 mutations in its genetic code
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that are not present in the cells surrounding it.
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But how much you is your DNA really?
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About 8% of the human genome is made up of viruses that once infected our ancestors and merged with us.
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Mitochondria, power plants of the cell, once were bacteria that merged with the ancestors of your cells.
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They still have their own DNA.
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An average cell has hundreds of them.
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Hundreds of little things that are not really human, but they still kind of are.
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It is confusing.
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Let's backtrack a bit.
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We know that you're made up of trillions of little things, made from more little things that are constantly changing.
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Together, all those little things are not static, but dynamic.
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Their composition and condition is changing constantly.
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So we might just be a self-sustaining pattern, without clear borders, that gained self-awareness at some point,
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and now has the ability to think about itself through time and space, really only exists in this exact very moment.
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Where did this pattern start?
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With your conception?
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When the first human arose?
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When life first began conquering our small planet?
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Or when the elements that make up your body were forged in a star?
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Our human brains evolved to deal with absolutes.
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The fuzzy borders that make up reality are hard to grasp.
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Maybe ideas like beginning and end, life and death, you and me, are really not absolute, but ideas belonging to a fluent pattern,
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a pattern that is lost in this strange and beautiful universe.
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The problem of who we are isn't just a question of ourselves, but it's also a question of our minds.
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Just as our cells can be divided and separated from us, so can our very brains be divided and separated from us while still in the skull.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “What Are You?”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: cell, cancer, pattern, brain. This video has 80 sentences and 943 words to shadow. The speech runs for 6:12. The speaker talks at a natural 152 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 86% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start. 20 of its 80 sentences are questions, so it is good practice for question intonation and short answers.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| ancestor noun | /ˈæn.sɛs.tɚ/ | One from whom a person is descended, whether on the father's or mother's side, at any distance of time; a progenitor; a forefather; a forebear. |
| mutation noun | /mjuˈteɪʃən/ | Any alteration or change. |
| genome noun | /ˈd͡ʒiː.noʊm/ | The complete genetic information (either DNA or, in some viruses, RNA) of an organism. |
| merge verb | /mɝd͡ʒ/ | To combine into a whole. |
| immortal adjective | /ɪˈmɔɹtəl/ | Not susceptible to death; living forever; never dying. |
| countless adjective | /ˈkaʊntləs/ | Synonym of uncountable. |
| static adjective | /ˈstæt.ɪk/ | Unchanging; that cannot or does not change. |
| backtrack verb | /ˈbæk.tɹæk/ | To retrace one's steps. |
| bacterium noun | /bækˈtɪəɹ.ɪəm/ | A single-celled organism with cell walls but no nucleus or organelles. |
| biomass noun | /ˈbaɪoʊˌmæs/ | The total mass of a living thing or a part thereof (such as a cell). |
| infect verb | /ɪnˈfɛkt/ | To bring (the body or part of it) into contact with a substance that causes illness (a pathogen), so that the pathogen begins to act on the body; (of a… |
| invader noun | /ɪnˈveɪ.də(ɹ)/ | One who invades a region. |
| mitochondrion noun | /ˌmaɪtəˈkɑndɹiən/ | A spherical or ovoid organelle found in the cytoplasm of eukaryotic cells and containing genetic material separate from that of the host; it is responsible for… |
| multiply verb | /ˈmʌltɪplaɪ/ | To increase the amount, degree or number of (something). |
| neuron noun | /ˈn(j)ʊɹɑn/ | A cell of the nervous system, which conducts nerve impulses; consisting of an axon and several dendrites. Neurons are connected by synapses. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| make up verb | /ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/ | To constitute, to compose. |
| turn out verb | To end up; to result. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Are you your body?
- How much of yourself can you remove before you stop being you?
- Can we blame it for that?
- What makes one of your cells you anyway?
- When life first began conquering our small planet?
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 | are replaced · are broken · were multiplied |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have died · have been grown · has been considered |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 4 contractions and reduced forms, such as can't, don't, isn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: mutation /mjuˈteɪʃən/, snapshot /ˈsnæpʃɒt/, conception /kənˈsɛpʃən/
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 ancestor, mutation, genome.
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.