Hey, what's up Stefanie the English coach here from englishfulltime.com Today I have a really fun exercise for you to help you improve your English. We are going to do shadowing. This is something that I wrote, it's actually an email that I sent my email subscribers uh I don't know like a week ago I'll show it to you but it's a story it's a personal story about something that I went through. Something really embarrassing actually and here's what we're gonna do. I'm going to read it for you and then you can actually go check a link in the description and download the story so you can follow along and I'm going to include another link where you can listen to just the audio because right now we're gonna have the story audio mixed in with my YouTube video and if you just want to analyze this story then and just the audio which I highly recommend you can go download that but what we're doing here is a shadowing exercise. We're gonna help you practice your speaking, your pronunciation, reading out loud, but the best way I believe to do this is to first listen to somebody read something right, and then analyze the way that they read it. Listen, listen, listen, listen again, listen a lot, really get your ears adjusted to all of the different sounds and how the words link together, and then practice reading yourself and when you practice you want to try to match the way that the person read whatever they read. If you're doing the shadowing exercise the way it should be done you want to match the intonation, you want to match the rhythm, you want your reading to sound as close to my reading as possible. Now this is an exercise that my students have done so many times in all of my online courses and it's so cool because sometimes they literally sound exactly like me by the time they finish doing the exercise and some students have even trained themselves to do this by being blindfolded which I thought that was a really incredible way of learning how to imitate somebody right they would blindfold themselves so that they weren't actually looking at the words but they were just listening really focusing on hearing everything accurately and when the students did that oh my goodness like the way they were able to read and recite whatever it was that we were studying they sounded exactly like me. So, anyways I thought this would be really fun it's kind of personal, it's different, we haven't tried something like this on my channel yet, so I guess just listen to the story first and then you can download everything and get to work, okay? So here we go. Remember this is an email that I sent that now I'm using here as content for us to study so it starts off like this. Did I ever tell you my super embarrassing ballet story? It happened when I was in 12th grade. First of all I don't know if you know this but ballet is super difficult. Professionals make it look easy but it takes years and years of training to get good. I guess I didn't know that when I was 17 years old though, because I thought I could totally skip ballet one and jump to a ballet 2 class despite never having taken a single dance class in my life. In my mind the idea of taking ballet one with a bunch of children was boring and beneath me. I wanted something "difficult". I wanted a challenge. So I asked the teacher if I could skip ballet one and join the ballet 2 class. Actually I insisted.