Shadowing Practice: Why I Chose a Life with Books - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Why I chose a life with books.
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That's the name of this video today.
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I think it's going to be something fairly interesting to talk about.
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You know, not everybody chooses a life with books or falls into a life with books, but I did, and I'm glad that I did.
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It has had its costs, but it's got, you know, it's like anything else.
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It's got its pros and cons, and I want to talk about both of those in this video.
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My name is Randy Wright.
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This channel is called The Literate Texan.
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I'm the host here.
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We talk about books and literature, highbrow, lowbrow, and everything in between.
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We definitely avoid being snobbish about what we're reading and literature here and stuff,
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and we certainly don't have any prejudices against specific genres
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but uh what inspired this video i was reminiscing i was thinking about this i most people know
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that i have a college degree in english literature
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and to get a college degree in english literature one of
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the things you do is take a course on shakespeare you take a whole course on shakespeare and my professor,
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I took Shakespeare probably in 1990, 1991, something like that.
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My professor and I ran into each other on Facebook probably 15 years ago, maybe 20 years ago.
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We hadn't spoken since I had him as a teacher, but we were catching up.
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This is what I've been doing.
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This is what he's doing.
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He retired from teaching and started writing and self-publishing mystery novels, which I thought was pretty cool.
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Anyway, he was a good professor, and I enjoyed his Shakespeare class, and I told him as much, and told him about the bookstore.
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At the time, I owned and operated a small bookstore, and he told me, I think it's wonderful that you found a way to live a life filled with books,
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and I've been thinking about that, and there's a word there that I want to take a little bit of issue with
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and we were just having a conversation
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so you know I don't like to nitpick words
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when you're just having a conversation
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but in this particular instance I didn't find a life with
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books I chose a life with books I chose to be surrounded by books all my life
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and I have my reasons for
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that I'm gonna talk about them in this video um but yeah this wasn't just something I
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lucked into this whole being a reader thing, okay?
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This was the culmination of a lot of decisions.
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One reason that I've had a life surrounded by books, or that I've chosen a life surrounded by books, is my attitude about books has been changing.
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As you've watched this channel, you'll notice that my attitude about books has been changing too.
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There was a time when I saw the number of books I'd read as a trophy or some kind of scorecard.
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There was an annual goal to hit, and it was a big deal whether or not I actually reached that goal.
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Now I think of books less as trophies or achievements when there's nothing wrong with thinking about them that way.
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But now I think of books as my companions.
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They're my friends.
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There's an Arthur Conan Doyle book where he talks about his library, and he explains, or he's making the point that,
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you know, we've got access to the greatest thoughts, the greatest minds of history.
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And if we had the opportunity to have dinner with these people, if we had the opportunity to have dinner with Shakespeare and Montaigne and Henry David Thoreau,
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among others, you know, we wouldn't hesitate.
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We'd be thrilled to have an opportunity to sit down and talk with Charles Dickens, for example.
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But guess what?
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The best things that Charles Dickens ever thought or said, he wrote down.
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We can talk to them or at least listen to them across the space of years.
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That's an incredibly attractive idea to me that I can engage in conversations with people who have been dead for sometimes centuries,
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but at least dozens of years in a lot of cases.
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And it's really wonderful to have that kind of, well, I'll put it this way, okay?
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So I have a sister who doesn't read, okay?
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I love her to death.
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And she's a smart lady, but she just doesn't read.
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She's not a reader and never has been.
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And I feel like her life is very narrow compared to mine
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because I've done a lot of reading on a lot of different subjects
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and I feel like I've lived a thousand different lives, okay?
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Now, have I really lived a thousand different lives?
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No, but it kind of feels that way because I've experienced things through reading these books,
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telepathically reading as a form of telepathy.
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And so, you know, I have experiences as a police detective
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and as a firefighter and as a werewolf hunter and as a knight of the round table.
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I have these experiences that I wouldn't have ever had if I hadn't been a reader.
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I also want to make it clear, though, that this life of books, this life surrounded with books, was not part of some kind of master plan that I had.
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Yes, I did start reading at a very young age, but I didn't sit down and say, okay, I'm going to go become the best, the most well-read man in America.
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And thank goodness, because if that were my goal, I'd fail miserably, because I'm not nearly as well-read as I would like to be.
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I have ideas about what being well-read means, but that's the subject of another video that I'll come out with someday.
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But, yeah, so...
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So, I've just gradually over time accumulated books and read more books.
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Lots of little decisions.
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You know, am I going to watch a movie tonight or am I going to read a book?
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You know, I've chosen movies a lot of times, but I've chosen books often enough that I've become,
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if not well-read, at least I'm a reader.
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I've, yeah, video games don't appeal to me.
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I don't spend a lot of time scrolling up and down social media because while I'm doing that, I could be reading Great Expectations or Hamlet again.
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To me, there's no contest.
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Books have also changed my way of thinking.
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They've changed how my mind works.
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And I think books have changed the way my mind works in ways that I'm really happy about, okay?
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For example, I have a longer attention span than most people.
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Most people's attention spans, I remember in college, you know, one of my professors was complaining
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that it used to be they would have to change subjects
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or switch gears every eight minutes or so while they were teaching class.
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Because eight minutes was the amount of time that passed on television before another commercial showed up.
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But that in recent years it had changed and now there were only seven minutes between commercials.
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And I don't know what the time is now, but yeah, that certainly had the effect of lowering the attention span of the viewers of these TV shows, but it's gotten even worse.
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You know, now, you know, you've got videos that are, you know, less than a minute long or two minutes long
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or three minutes long on some social media app called TalkTick or something like that.
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And I don't, I don't know.
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I want to have a long attention span.
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I want to think about things over the long term.
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I don't want little instant shots of dopamine repeatedly throughout the day.
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You know, that's just, it's not my cup of tea.
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So luckily my brain doesn't work that way anymore.
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And that's because I've trained it by reading books for a long time.
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You know, I've got a kind of patience for things to develop in real life
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that I wouldn't have if I weren't a reader.
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I'm absolutely convinced of it.
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So that's another reason that I chose a life full of books.
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i did promise at the beginning of this video
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that i was going to be honest with you about a
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life filled with books there are costs involved um it's not
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free for one thing um books cost money most most people i know
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that are readers buy books now you can be a serious reader
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and never pay for a book in your entire life we have a wonderful public library system in this country
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but but most people i know that are readers they they do even
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if they read from the library some of the times they also buy books too.
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They have their own book collection.
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So yeah, I've spent money on that, money that's not going to come back.
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In fact, I've spent more money on books than most people because, you know, I bought the stock of a bookstore and yeah,
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so I bought a lot of books all at one time
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and I bought a lot of books over the time period that I ran the bookstore and was unable to sell them.
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So eventually I sold them, but I sold them for less than I paid for them.
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Would I take that experience back?
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It's really hard for me to say.
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On one hand, it adds to the overall bookish arc of my life, which I don't really want to change.
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You know, I think when I die and people remember me, they're going to remember, hey, Randy was a cool guy.
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He sure did read a lot.
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You know, I like that people are going to remember me that way because that's how I like to think about myself.
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I like to think of myself as someone who, man, I sure do read a lot.
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But yeah, So there was that cost, but also, you know, reading a book means spending time alone.
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You know, I've spent more time alone than some people my age have because I was reading a book instead of socializing.
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But I did for a while, Lead Only Lifestyle, where I went to the bar every night.
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And that was my lifestyle.
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And I did not read as much in those days.
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I still got some reading in, but not like I do now.
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For one thing, if you go to the bar every night you're you're probably going to be buzzed every night
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when you get home and
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and reading when you're under the influence is not the same experience as reading
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when you're stone cold sober i can promise you
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that also you know being a reader i'm in touch with other decades
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and centuries in a way that other people are not people
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that aren't readers aren't as in touch with them
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but the drawback to that is sometimes i'm a little out of step with current trends and fads.
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You know, a friend of mine told me one time, he said, man, you were just, you're just born in the wrong decade, man.
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He said, I've never met anybody who preferred so much old stuff to so much new stuff.
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You'd rather, you'd literally rather watch a movie from the 1940s than a movie from the 1990s or from the 2020s.
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So, you know, but so yeah, so that's a cost.
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The fact that I'm a little bit out of step.
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Would I gladly pay all those costs again if I had it to do over again.
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Absolutely.
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I love my little bookish life and I've really enjoyed it.
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Yeah, books broaden my thinking.
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I had a boss one time at, I worked at Hotels.com for years, 10 years.
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I worked there from 1996 to the year 2005
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and one of the owners of the company was a man named David Litman.
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Brilliant man, wonderful, wonderful boss.
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Would do almost anything for him to this day.
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He was really terrific and really loyal.
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But David was a reader too, and he loved it that I was a reader.
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And we talked about books on a fairly regular basis.
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And he told me one time, he said, every time you read a book, it's like you've built an addition onto your home, your mind being the home.
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And every book is like an extra room that you're building in your home of your mind.
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And I always thought that was just such a lovely way to look at
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And it's almost the opposite of what Sherlock Holmes is trying
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to tell Dr. Watson at the beginning of a study in Scarlet about how, you know, my mind's like an attic and I don't want to put too much furniture in there.
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I won't be able to find the furniture that I need when I need it.
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and yeah, that's not the kind of mind that I want to have.
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That almost seems stoic in principle and we all know already, if you watch the channel very much,
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you know how I feel about stoicism compared with Epicureanism or maybe you don't.
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If that's the case, you know, stick around for a while.
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You'll see me talk about it at some point but at this point, I want to thank you for watching.
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I've really enjoyed my life with books.
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do you consider yourself to have a life full of books
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and if not are you planning to change that is
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that why you watch this video or or if
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so you know do you have any regrets related to living a life surrounded by books
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or with books let me know in the comments down below
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and uh thanks for watching stay sexy folks and stay hydrated
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About This Lesson
In this lesson, you’ll practice English speaking and listening using a warm, conversational video about choosing a life with books. You’ll follow along with a natural dialogue that mixes personal stories, reflections, and literary references—perfect for improving your ability to understand and mimic real-world speech. Whether you’re working on fluency, pronunciation, or just want to learn how to talk about your own passions, this video is a great tool. Let’s dive in!
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Nitpick: To criticize small, unimportant details. Example: “I don’t like to nitpick, but the date was wrong.”
- Culmination: The final result of a process. Example: “His degree was the culmination of years of hard work.”
- Trophy (used metaphorically): Something seen as a sign of success. Example: “She viewed her promotion as a trophy.”
- Engage in conversations: To talk and interact with others. Example: “I love engaging in conversations about art.”
- Reminiscing: Thinking about past events. Example: “We spent the evening reminiscing about our childhood.”
Practice Tips
This video has a relaxed, storytelling tone—perfect for practicing the shadowing technique! Here’s how to make the most of it: First, listen to a 10-second clip and repeat it immediately, copying the speaker’s speed, intonation, and pauses. Notice how he emphasizes words like “chose” and “companions” to show emotion—try to mirror that. Since the speech is conversational (not too fast), it’s ideal for beginners to intermediate learners. For english speaking practice, pause the video after each sentence and rephrase it in your own words. This helps you internalize new phrases. Remember, shadowing isn’t about perfection—it’s about training your mouth and ears to work together. Use this video as a shadowing site to build confidence in speaking naturally, just like a native. You’ve got this!
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | I've been doing · I've been thinking · has been changing |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has had · I've had · you've watched |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is called · be surrounded · be thrilled |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who have · anybody who preferred |
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.