Shadowing Practice: Why Does Time Feel Faster As We Get Older?｜全英Talk：长大之后，时间越过越快？如何应对时间贫困？ - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Do you feel time moves faster when you get older?
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I actually do feel that.
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When I'm writing a journal, I unconsciously write down the year 2016.
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I was like, oh my god, why is my memory still stuck there?
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And every year when I have my birthday, I feel like I was a teenager not that long ago.
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And my memories from my childhood and teenage years seem to be more vivid.
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Now I'm more than 30 years old, I feel like time moves even faster.
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Why does this happen?
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One reason is that our perception of time changes as we get older.
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When we are 10 years old, one year is just 10% of the life we've already lived.
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And when you are 31 years old, like me, one year is just 3% of your life so far.
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And another factor is that as you get older, your life becomes more stable and repetitive.
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You enter the job market, you stay in the same position for several years, you get along with the same co-workers or friends, and you do the similar things over and over again.
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So there's nothing new in your life.
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But when you were a teenager, there are so many firsts.
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You probably remember your first trip, your first day at a new school, your first birthday party, your first kiss,
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and the first time experiences tend to leave more memories than the repetitive ones.
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There have also been several moments in my life where I felt time really stopped.
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I think that is related to the overloads of information and emotions.
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You know, when you are experiencing very strong emotions like fear, nervousness, excitement, or happiness, time tends to slow down.
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I still remember one experience I didn't expect it to happen at all.
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I was in a very serious car accident.
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I still remember the moment when I was sitting in a car and two trucks hit my car from the back.
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and I remember how the windows were shattered.
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So that also reminded me that when you go through extremely emotional and traumatic events,
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your brain automatically flashes back to them vividly.
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Anyway, our time perception and memories are related to the strengths of emotions that we experience at particular moments.
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I'm not asking you to do anything extreme, but I'm saying that maybe sometimes you can bring some novelty into your life, Maybe take a new project,
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find a new job, meet new people, and try new foods or try a new kind of coffee.
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These little changes may make you feel like your life is not just one repetitive routine.
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But it doesn't matter how many new experiences we create for ourselves, how exciting our life is, how wonderful the world is.
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We all face the same dilemma.
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We don't feel we have enough time for life.
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This problem is often described as time poverty.
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While modern society contributes to the problem, I think it has more to do with the nature of being human.
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No matter where you live, where you come from, and how much money you have, we have to face the brutal fact, which is our life is finite.
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I always remember a good point from the book, 4,000 Weeks.
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As human beings, we are given the gift of creativity, imagination, and all kinds of capabilities.
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But we also seem to have infinite ambitions, and our ambitions seem to always exceed the limits of time we we have omers.
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So there's always a fundamental contradiction between our physical limits and our imagination.
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And as intelligent creatures, we have to endure the pain of time limits.
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So this reminded me of ancient Chinese wisdom.
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爱无生之事,互相长江之无穷
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It translates into we grieve over the brevity of our own lives while looking at the endless flow of the Yangtze River.
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And the modern society makes this contradiction even stronger as it offers
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so many opportunities and so many new things for us to try.
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There's so many books I want to read, so many hobbies I want to develop, so many songs I want to sing, and so many new things I want to learn,
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but there's simply not enough time for all of them.
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Even now, I am very lucky to have a flexible job as an entrepreneur and content creator.
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I still constantly feel that I don't have enough time for everything I want to do in my life.
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You know, brainstorming, researching, writing books, creating videos, and creating courses, all of these things take a large amount of time.
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If I spend more time on a productive work, I have less time for my personal hobbies like drawing, singing, playing the piano, etc. We have to admit
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that time is one of few things that is fundamentally limited for every one of us.
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I don't think the ultimate solution is to become more productive.
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You will find that even if you are super productive, you will always have more tasks to complete.
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You will always have more ambitious desires and things you want to do, and you still end up with a full to-do list.
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So you can always maximize your productivity, but you will always hit a ceiling.
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So we have to ask ourselves a more fundamental question.
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How do we spend our limited time on earth on the things that really matter?
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So sometimes we don't need addition, we need subtraction.
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There's research suggesting that having two to five hours of discretionary time every day is associated with higher well-being.
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If you are too busy, you will feel stressed out, anxious.
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If you have too much free time, you will feel you lack a sense of purpose and you feel unmotivated.
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So maybe give yourself some space in your day.
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Give yourself two hours to do the things that are unrelated to your work.
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Take a walk, walk your dog, draw, sing, meditate, anything you like.
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We don't have eternal life, we are human beings.
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Maybe we have to learn to accept the limits and work within them.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “Why Does Time Feel Faster As We Get Older?｜全英Talk：长大之后，时间越过越快？如何应对时间贫困？”. This video has 67 sentences and 1009 words to shadow. The speech runs for 6:05. The speaker talks at a natural 166 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.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| repetitive adjective | /ɹɪˈpɛtɪtɪv/ | Happening many times in a similar way; containing repetition; repeating. |
| emotion noun | /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/ | A person's internal state of being and involuntary physiological response to an object or a situation, based on or tied to physical state and sensory data. |
| contradiction noun | /ˌkɑːntɹəˈdɪkʃən/ | The act of contradicting. |
| ambition noun | /æmˈbɪʃ.ən/ | Eager or inordinate desire for some object that confers distinction, as preferment, honor, superiority, political power, or fame; desire to distinguish one's… |
| hobby noun | /ˈhɑ.bi/ | An activity that one enjoys doing in one's spare time. |
| teenager noun | /ˈtiːnˌeɪ̯d͡ʒə/ | A person between thirteen and nineteen years old (inclusive). |
| perception noun | /pɚˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/ | The organisation, identification and interpretation of sensory information. |
| brainstorming noun | A method of problem solving in which members of a group contribute ideas spontaneously. | |
| brevity noun | /ˈbɹɛvɪti/ | The quality of being brief in duration. |
| discretionary adjective | /dɪsˈkɹɛʃəˌnɛɹi/ | Available at one's discretion; able to be used as one chooses; left to or regulated by one's own discretion or judgment. |
| excite verb | /ɪkˈsaɪt/ | To stir the emotions of; to cause to feel excitement. |
| grieve verb | /ɡɹiːv/ | To cause sorrow or distress to. |
| meditate verb | /ˈmɛ.dɪˌteɪt/ | To contemplate; to keep the mind fixed upon something; to study. |
| nervousness noun | The state or quality of being nervous. | |
| overload verb | /ˌəʊvəˈləʊd/ | To load excessively. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. |
| slow down verb | To decelerate. |
| stress out verb | To become stressed. |
| write down verb | To produce or set (something) down in writing; to record something. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Do you feel time moves faster when you get older?
- We don't feel we have enough time for life.
- We don't have eternal life, we are human beings.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if you are super productive, you will always · If you are too busy, you will feel |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is related · were shattered · are related |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | we've already lived · have also been |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 12 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, I'm, didn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/, contradiction /ˌkɑːntɹəˈdɪkʃən/, ambition /æmˈbɪʃ.ən/, perception /pɚˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/, discretionary /dɪsˈkɹɛʃəˌnɛɹi/
- Long words — get the stress right: repetitive /ɹɪˈpɛtɪtɪv/, contradiction /ˌkɑːntɹəˈdɪkʃən/, discretionary /dɪsˈkɹɛʃəˌnɛɹi/, unconsciously /ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəsli/, entrepreneur /ˌɑn.tɹə.pɹəˈnɝ/
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 repetitive, emotion, contradiction.
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.