Prática de Shadowing: How do some languages not have tense? - Aprenda a falar inglês com vídeo

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If I asked you to explain the difference between I ate dinner and I was eating dinner,
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you'd probably tell me they both happened in the past, and you'd be right.
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In linguistics, we call the when of a sentence tense.
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But there's a second, much more subtle layer of meaning hidden in those sentences
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that English speakers use every day without ever realizing it.
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Bernard Comrie still has the classic definition of it from his 1976 sequel to his high-stakes nail-biting thriller,
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Tense, where he explains it simply as the internal temporal constituency of a situation.
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And some languages use it without ever using tense at all.
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In plain English, it's called aspect.
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If you're new to the channel, welcome.
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I'm Dr. Taylor Jones.
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I've got a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania.
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And on the channel, I discuss everything relating to language, linguistics, language learning, and culture.
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If you're into those topics, be sure to subscribe and ring the bell for notifications.
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Today, we're talking about what's weirdly one of the hardest concepts for people to get.
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This is Language Jones.
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I bought Airfare to Italy last month, and my old move would have been to just not look at my accounts for a while.
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Instead, I opened Monarch.
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One clean dashboard.
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Accounts, spending, net worth, debt payoff progress, recurring bills, all in one view.
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No hopping between four banking apps to piece it all together.
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Setup was fast.
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Monarch syncs with over 13,000 institutions, so my banks, credit cards, and brokerage all connected securely in one sitting.
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What I actually needed to know was whether that purchase set me back.
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Monarch's AI pulled from my real financial data and explained what changed.
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Two minutes, no spreadsheet.
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The budgeting's flexible, not rigid.
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Fixed versus flexible spending, my own rules and categories.
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And if you're managing money with a partner, you both see the same picture.
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No ads, no selling my data.
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I'm the customer, not the product.
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And it's the same experience on web and mobile.
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Monarch.com in the description, use my promo code or scan the QR code on screen.
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Now back to the video.
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Okay, so what the fuck is Aspect?
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As with most linguistics jargon, the name sounds kind of made up.
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While tense tells you when something happened, past, present, or future, aspect tells you how that event occupies mental time.
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Is it a single completed point?
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Is it an ongoing process?
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Is it a habit that happens over and over?
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Today, we're going to look at the two core kinds of aspects that languages, from English to Russian to Mandarin, have to deal with.
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The perfective and the imperfective.
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To visualize this, imagine you're looking at a parade.
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If you're standing on a skyscraper, looking down at the entire parade route from start to finish, you see the parade as a single complete event.
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If you're looking down from the space station, the whole thing is an undisentanglable dot.
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This is the perfective aspect.
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You aren't interested in the individual dancers, the specific timing of the drums.
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You're not interested in who's going by right now.
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That question doesn't even make sense.
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Instead, you're looking at the event as an unanalyzable black box or a single dot on a timeline.
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In English, we usually show this with a simple past.
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I wrote the book.
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I read the book.
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I ate the book.
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It's done.
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The concept's a whole.
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But now imagine you're standing on the sidewalk right in the middle of the noise of that parade.
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You see the floats passing by, you see the movement, and you're right in the thick of the action.
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You don't see the beginning or the end necessarily.
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You see the internal constituency, the internal texture of the event.
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This is the imperfective aspect.
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In English, we often use the ing form for this.
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I was writing the book.
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I was eating the book.
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This distinction is the foundation of almost everything we do with verbs.
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But where it gets really interesting is how different languages choose to mark these categories.
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In English, we're actually a bit of a strange outlier.
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We love the progressive aspect, that am doing or was doing construction.
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We use it constantly to show that an action is currently unfolding.
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By the way, see how am doing is the present tense and was doing is the past tense?
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This stuff is distinct from tense and can overlap with, interact with, or totally ignore tense.
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Some languages like
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Mandarin don't even have tenses at all.
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If you want to say when something happened, you legit just say when it happened or will happen, but the aspect marker doesn't change.
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All you students of Mandarin out there, le is not a past tense marker.
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But also there's a conceptual reason we might think of one as related to the other.
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Perfective aspect for things that are done
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and dusted is just statistically more likely to co-occur with things
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that happened in the past than things that will happen to completion in the future.
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That's how Hebrew switched from a spectral system in Biblical Hebrew to a tense system in Modern Hebrew,
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starting sometime maybe in the Mishinaic period and running to completion sometime around the 1500s, but definitely before what we think of as Modern Hebrew.
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There's a lot of weird conspiracy theories online that are totally unhinged, so if you want a rundown of the history of Hebrew,
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check out my video on that, link in the description.
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Anyway, if you look at a language like Russian, aspect is the absolute king of the grammar system.
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Forget case marking.
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Slavic aspect is the final boss.
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Almost every verb in Russian comes in a pair, except verbs of motion which come in even more groupings.
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Some say too many.
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But for those pairs, there's a perfective version and an imperfective version.
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You can't even say the word to eat without first deciding
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if you're talking about the process of eating or the result of having finished the meal.
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And then there's the habitual aspect.
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This is a subtype of the imperfective.
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If I say I used to walk to work, I'm not talking about one specific walk.
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I'm talking about a pattern of behavior that's stretched across time.
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In those days, I walked to work.
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Does the same thing with the simple past, but it adds a phrase that gives you the right reading.
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Used to is just a grammatical structure that encodes the habituality.
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Some languages have a specific piece of morphology, a little prefix or suffix that they stick onto the verb solely to signal,
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hey, this isn't a one-time thing.
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It's a habit.
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In African American English, it's been argued for almost 60 years that one function of so-called invariant B, as in he be working every week,
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is as a habituality marker in the present tense by analogy with like used to.
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Although I just read a fantastic 2019 dissertation that makes a very interesting argument for a different interpretation.
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I've got a video on that.
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Link is in the description.
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And I'll link at the end too.
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Be sure to check it out.
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Now, why does this matter?
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Why did Comrie and other linguists spend hundreds of pages and decades of their careers obsessing over this?
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One answer is because aspect allows us to zoom in and zoom out on life.
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Think about how we tell stories.
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We use the imperfective to set the scene, the background of the movie.
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The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and I was drinking my coffee.
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These are ongoing states.
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Then we use the perfective to trigger the action or the foreground.
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Suddenly, the phone rang.
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By switching aspects, you're telling the listener's brain which information is just the background and which information is the plot moving forward.
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Without aspect, our stories would be just a flat list of facts with no rhythm or depth.
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What always messed me up at first was the fact that basically anything can be either, depending on your framing.
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So when I said, suddenly the phone rang, I can continue, the phone was ringing when I dropped my coffee.
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It's the same event in the world, the same instance of the phone ringing,
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but I choose how to represent it in terms of duration and relationship to other events.
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One of the trickiest things about learning a new language is realizing
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that they don't all draw the lines in the same place.
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Some languages, like
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Mandarin Chinese, don't use tense at all.
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They don't change the verb for past or future.
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Instead, they rely entirely on aspect particles like le or zhe to tell you if an action is completed or ongoing.
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They care way more about the shape of the event than the date on the calendar.
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And by care, I mean encode in the grammar.
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You can absolutely just tell somebody the date on the calendar or use a deictic term like yesterday or tomorrow.
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That's what people actually do.
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So the next time you're writing a text or telling a story, pay attention to your verbs.
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Are you looking at the parade from the sidewalk or from the skyscraper?
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Did I just help you ace high school Spanish?
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Probably.
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Once you start seeing aspect, you realize that language is constantly shifting focus to show us how life actually feels as it unfolds.
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That's what we're using language to do.
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And the reason people like Comrie study it is
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that there's a lot to be learned from how languages choose to encode some information and not other information.
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How they force us to attend to certain aspects of our actions and our lives, pun very much intended.
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Which language's aspect system has been the hardest for you to wrap your head around, and why is it Russian?
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For me, it's always the Slavic perfective pairs,
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especially once you get into verbs of motion where it matters whether everybody is going in the same direction
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or whether it's one-way trip or a two-way trip.
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Let me know in the comments below.
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Hit the like button if you learned something new about your own speech today.
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And don't forget to subscribe.
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If you like what I'm doing with the channel,
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you can always support it right here on YouTube with super thanks or over on Patreon at patreon.com slash languagejones.
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Please leave me a comment.
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They are great for the algorithm.
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And until next time, happy learning.

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Vocabulário e dicas de fala para esta lição

Esta aula de conversação usa o vídeo “How do some languages not have tense?”. As palavras que mais se repetem: aspect, language, tense, verb, event. Este vídeo tem 154 frases e 1769 palavras para praticar shadowing. A fala dura 8:56. O falante fala rápido, cerca de 198 palavras por minuto, então espere sons ligados e reduzidos. Apenas 81% das palavras estão entre as 3.000 mais comuns do inglês, por isso o vocabulário é exigente.

Vocabulário principal deste vídeo

15 palavras do vídeo que vale a pena aprender, com pronúncia e significado:

PalavraPronúnciaSignificado
aspect substantivo/ˈæspɛkt/aspeto, aspecto
tense substantivo/tɛns/tempo
verb substantivo/vɝb/verbo
parade substantivo/pəˈrɑd/parada, desfile
ongoing adjetivo/ɒnˈɡəʊ.ɪŋ/contínuo, em curso
marker substantivo/ˈmɑː(ɹ)kə(ɹ)/marcador
calendar substantivo/ˈkæl.ən.də/calendário
habit substantivo/ˈhæb.ɪt/hábito, costume
completion substantivo/kəmˈpliː.ʃən/completamento, completação
grammar substantivo/ˈɡɹæm.ə(ɹ)/gramática
sometime advérbio/ˈsʌmˌtaɪm/algum dia
flexible adjetivo/ˈflɛk.sɪ.bəl/flexível
subscribe verbo/səbˈskɹaɪb/assinar
zoom verbo/zuːm/zumbir
constituency substantivo/kənˈstɪt͡ʃu.ənsi/círculo eleitoral, distrito eleitoral

Phrasal verbs que você vai ouvir

PalavraPronúnciaSignificado
check out verboverificar, sacar só
make up verbo/ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/compensar
move forward verboadiantar

Frases que vale a pena repetir

Frases curtas e completas do vídeo que você pode usar na conversa do dia a dia:

  • If you're new to the channel, welcome.
  • I'm the customer, not the product.
  • To visualize this, imagine you're looking at a parade.
  • You're not interested in who's going by right now.
  • You don't see the beginning or the end necessarily.

Gramática neste vídeo

As estruturas que o falante mais usa, com as palavras exatas do vídeo:

EstruturaNo vídeo
“Used to” used to + verbo — um hábito ou estado do passado que não é mais verdadeused to walk · Used to is
Voz passiva be + particípio passado — o foco está no que acontece, não em quem fazare done · been argued · is completed
Present perfect have/has + particípio passado — uma ação passada que ainda importa agorait's been argued · has been

Pronúncia para ficar de olho

O falante usa 38 contrações e formas reduzidas, como you're, don't, I'm. Diga-as na forma curta, do jeito que você ouve.

  • Os sons de “th”: thick /θɪk/, rhythm /ˈɹɪð.əm/, algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/, thriller /ˈθɹɪ.lə/
  • Os sons de “sh” e “zh”: completion /kəmˈpliː.ʃən/, institution /ˌɪn.stɪˈtʃuː.ʃən/, interpretation /ɪnˌtɜːpɹəˈteɪʃən/, shine /ʃaɪn/, duration /dʒʊˈɹeɪ.ʃən/
  • Palavras longas — acerte a sílaba tônica: constituency /kənˈstɪt͡ʃu.ənsi/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, institution /ˌɪn.stɪˈtʃuː.ʃən/, conspiracy /kənˈspɪɹəsi/, interpretation /ɪnˌtɜːpɹəˈteɪʃən/

Sons difíceis para falantes de português:

  • Consoante final — sem acrescentar um “i” depois: aspect /ˈæspɛkt/, verb /vɝb/, parade /pəˈrɑd/, habit /ˈhæb.ɪt/, subscribe /səbˈskɹaɪb/
  • /l/ final — a língua toca o céu da boca, não vira “u”: flexible /ˈflɛk.sɪ.bəl/, meal /ˈmiːl/, nail /neɪl/, subtle /ˈsʌtəl/, sequel /ˈsiːkwəl/
  • /h/ — um sopro suave, diferente do “r”: habit /ˈhæb.ɪt/, hop /hɒp/, habitual /həˈbɪ.t͡ʃʊ.əl/, unhinge /ʌnˈhɪnd͡ʒ/

Como praticar com este vídeo

  1. Ouça o vídeo inteiro uma vez sem falar e anote as palavras que você não conhece.
  2. Comece na velocidade 0,75×, faça shadowing frase por frase e volte à velocidade normal quando ficar fácil.
  3. Grave a sua voz e compare com o original, prestando atenção a palavras como aspect, tense, verb.

O que é a Técnica de Shadowing?

Shadowing é uma técnica de aprendizado de idiomas com base científica, originalmente desenvolvida para o treinamento de intérpretes profissionais. O método é simples, mas poderoso: você ouve áudio em inglês nativo e repete imediatamente em voz alta — como uma sombra seguindo o falante com 1-2 segundos de atraso. Pesquisas mostram melhora significativa na precisão da pronúncia, entonação, ritmo, sons conectados, compreensão auditiva e fluência na fala.

Técnica de shadowing: leia o guia completo passo a passo →