跟读练习: Ocean Vuong: The NEW Waterstones Interview - 通过YouTube学习英语口语
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Ocean, it's great to see you again.
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Ocean, it's great to see you again.
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Good to see you again, Will.
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Always a pleasure.
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Thank you for giving me some time to talk to you about your new novel,
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The Emperor of Gladness.
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I had that experience, which I think your readers will be very used to,
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which is when you start a book of yours,
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immediately there's this fantastic language that does an amazing job of describing a place,
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a time, and a person often.
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And it's very distinctive at the beginning when you're setting scenes.
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It seems that you have an almost hyper-realistic detail to your writing.
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Can you tell me a little bit about that?
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Do you make a real effort in those sort of scene setting bits
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and then moving on with the rest of the book?
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I think they're all modes.
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This book, I was deeply interested in allowing the town,
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East Gladness, to be its own character.
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And I think you earn your moves for me.
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And as a debut novelist,
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I couldn't have really done that.
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I think, you know, you want to get on with the story.
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But I felt like I wanted to show that a book can be built patiently,
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that a place can come through,
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and that specificity becomes a universal symbol because a reader will always map themselves.
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When you say, even when I say railroad tracks,
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right, a reader in Manchester will see a different railroad tracks than I do in Massachusetts or another one in South Africa.
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And so it's impossible because as writers,
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we're working with a medium that is not complete even once the book is finished.
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Because this is just text.
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It is only activated in the reader's mind once they read it.
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And no other art is like this, right? music,
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film, sculpture, all of it is finished.
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You can have endless interpretations of those things,
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but it doesn't need activation in the way text does.
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And so that mode of activation,
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to me, is a sacred space.
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I don't mind being romantic about it because it takes a lot for someone to say,
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I will commit my time and body and imagination to this place.
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Because the text signals ideas and images,
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which is a displacement of the reader.
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So when you're reading a book,
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you're saying, I'm going to forego my life for this life.
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And I think setting the tone thoroughly is an act of care.
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And I've never been able to write a good sentence carelessly,
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as much as I like to.
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I think it was Sontag who says,
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there's no luck in writing.
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And I think it's interesting because we have a lot of child prodigies in music and sculpture and paint,
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but no prodigies, no true prodigies in literature.
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Because literature, you can write a good sentence,
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you can know language, but then you have to be able to empathize.
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You have to talk to hundreds of people,
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know sorrow, know how to pull back from sorrow, balance it out.
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And unfortunately or fortunately, it takes thorough,
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thorough observation
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and living with a kind of faith even in how human beings interact with each other to write with care and purpose.
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And that's what I, the first book gave me the privilege of writing even more carefully in the second book.
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As you mentioned, the gladness of the title is a place,
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it's a location, in a post-industrial town in Connecticut.
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And we meet first a 19-year-old boy called Hai,
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who is ready to throw themselves off a bridge into the river to commit suicide.
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Could you tell us a little bit about Hai,
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and I suppose what has brought him up to the point where we meet him?
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I think like a lot of youth in America,
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this book takes place in the Obama era.
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We were told that the next age of hope would come.
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And there was a political movement that would speak for our voices that will concern the working class.
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And within months, that administration bailed out corporations that were quote unquote too big to fail.
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And I saw my peers absolutely bereft of purpose and life.
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I've, you know, suicide has touched my own life with my friends and my family.
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And for the Asian American community,
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it's a major blight on the youth.
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We have suicide rates that,
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you know, some of the highest among youth in America.
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And it's a dramatic moment that often novels lead to.
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And for me, I wanted to start there and to say,
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well, if you're starting at the brink,
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what would happen if you pull back?
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What is life in the aftermath of that decision?
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And I think I sympathize greatly with that character.
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I think that character is also a summation of an era,
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the post 9-11 era that I'm obsessed with and I write about often.
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the hopelessness of those times where there was no,
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you get a job working in fast food or you go to college,
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you get a degree, and there's still no hope.
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You get a decent wage job and you still can't pay your bills.
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And so I wanted to put all of that social
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and economic pressure onto one symbolic character and then let him meet an older woman,
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Grigina, 82 years old.
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The beautiful thing I found about the very young and the very old is that they're both closest to nothing.
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And they're both on the outskirts of society.
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This book takes place on the outskirts of a city.
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And they're both, one is,
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you know, Hai is deemed inadequate because he's too young.
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He doesn't have qualifications, experience.
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Grazina is deemed defunct by society.
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She no longer contributes productively.
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And so commerce have evacuated these two characters from the center.
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But in fact, it's that evacuation that allows them to see each other because there's nothing for them to do.
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And I insist that we kind of replace human connection with progress.
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How many times have we forsaken time spent with our loved ones to get a better job,
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to work the extra hours, to improve our lives.
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It's a very human gesture.
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But these people can't even do that.
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They don't even have that possibility.
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So in a way, all they have is each other.
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And I actually think the young and the old have a lot in common
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because there's a kind of deep isolation and loneliness that comes from being pushed out of the center of my society.
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have a very interesting bond,
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Hai and Grzina, as you say.
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She hails from Lithuania and she is losing her mind to dementia and is being plagued by these dreams,
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nightmares that come back from from wartime.
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And Hai becomes effectively her carer.
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So that there is this thing that's bonding them together.
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But it's a complex relationship because there are elements of exploitation there in a way
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because high is somebody who is not perfect and can see that there's an opportunity there.
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That's quite a complicated relationship to write.
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So I'm presuming that was quite a hard thing to negotiate,
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to get right, I suppose.
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It's a beautiful question.
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And it's the heart of what I think I'm most interested in is what is goodness?
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I'm always somehow always interested in goodness,
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whether it's real or not.
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I've always felt that the people around me in my life,
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my brother, my partner, my friends,
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in some ways, I feel like they were born with this moral compass of goodness.
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Maybe they're not perfect.
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Everyone has sides, but I don't think I had that.
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I had to learn how to be good.
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It wasn't clear to me.
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And so I think I'm deeply in awe of that.
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And I wanted to see how goodness functions.
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It's easy to be good when you have the means to do so,
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to give, to be kind.
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It's very hard to be kind when you can't eat,
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when your home is leaking,
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you can't pay the bills,
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when you're strapped down and out of luck.
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It's very hard to be kind.
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And I wanted to ask myself,
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of how can these characters deceive each other benevolently?
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Is deception always bad?
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Is the chameleon always the demon or the devil, as we've often said?
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Anything that deceives is corrupt.
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And here, I wanted to showcase deception as an innovative mechanism towards care, towards equal exchange.
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When I was an undergraduate at Brooklyn College,
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I had the great luck of having a professor teach a class on the Iliad.
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And he was a classicist,
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and he started the class by saying,
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I know you know this is a book about war.
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There's a lot of blood and a lot of battles,
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and sure, sure, sure, sure.
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But I'm going to present to you something that's the most important thing about this book.
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It's really a book about reciprocal bonds and civic duty and the breaking and the cohesion of those bonds.
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Everyone owes each other something and everyone guilt trips each other to go to pay the debts.
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And I was just so enamored of that concept of this,
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the idea that an ecosystem is moved by volunteering your most precious commodity,
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which is your body, to move towards care and what you owe each other.
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And I've always wanted to write a novel that centered an entanglement,
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a moral entanglement of reciprocal bonds.
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And so you're absolutely right.
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Every character both wants to give something to another,
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but they also want to take something from another.
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boy is that not humanity.
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You know, I mean, I,
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you know, everywhere I look,
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it's like that even the most benevolent,
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innocuous places in the world,
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there is that idea of what can I do for you?
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And we're also what do I owe you?
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And so when you have that pressure,
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the next greatest question is,
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what will I give you for free?
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What will I give you without asking anything back?
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And so that set up allows moments where these characters can finally give themselves out of pure love,
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which sounds, you know, saccharine to me,
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but I wrote the book to find out if it is feasible.
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You know, I don't know.
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You write, you send these characters off and you say,
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will you sacrifice yourself purely for another person based on your relationships?
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I don't know that answer,
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but writing the book, you find out.
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One of the other fascinating things of this book is,
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I suppose, it's about labour.
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It's about working for a living, basically.
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And this book is very much,
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as you said, about people who live on the margins,
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the working class in America.
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And it's a very complex topic.
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But what's interesting for Hai is he gets a job working in a restaurant called Home Market,
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where every day is Thanksgiving.
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And there is something, I suppose there is a nobility to that labour,
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which they go through every day.
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But there's an amazing scene where in order to make some extra money,
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they go to slaughter pigs.
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And it's a really, really grim reading experience, that whole thing.
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But there's some fascinating stuff in there,
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which I guess brings us to the emperor of the title.
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You mentioned the emperor hog,
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which is this amazing pig,
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but it's not called the emperor because it is an amazing animal.
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It is there to feed the real person in power,
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which is the emperor.
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And I suppose in many ways,
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you seem to be depicting the working class in America as people who are there to feed
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and fatten and enrich a different class of people,
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the people who are at the top of the money tree,
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if you like, in a capitalist society.
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So there's this mixture of the nobility of the labor,
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but the fact that they are being exploited by a system which they maybe don't realize is exploiting them so much.
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Is that a fair summation of,
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I suppose, your worldview of labor?
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I believe so.
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And the Hamlet epigraph helps me there in the beginning of the book.
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we fat all creatures else to fat us and we fat ourselves for maggots.
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And ultimately, death is the ultimate ending for all of this exploitation.
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And, you know, when I started to want to be a writer,
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I read the craft books.
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I've never taken a fiction workshop,
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so I can't speak on that.
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But I read, I love being a student.
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The truth is I like to learn more than I like to make.
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My excuse for writing books is I can just research and learn.
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Some people call that procrastination, I guess.
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So to me, when I was studying the craft fiction,
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which in the books that were available to me was this,
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you know, Western canonical movement and coming from Aristotle's decree
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that there should be catharsis at the end of the story to relieve the audience.
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So right away you have a very commercial negotiation.
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How do I please the audience?
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And a lot of fiction works this way.
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Well, you will find the killer.
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There will be the body.
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You will go from rags to riches.
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You will have a windfall.
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You'll get the girl, you get the guy, what have you.
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So there's a kind of reversal of fates, as Aristotle says.
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And it's very satisfying.
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I don't knock those stories.
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But it felt like a great lie to the American life that I was living.
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I don't know people like that in my community.
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My aunt works at FedEx.
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She's been doing that for 15 years.
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My brother works at Dick's Sporting Goods.
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My stepdad worked in Standardine Car Factory, car parts.
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My mother worked in a nail salon for 25 years.
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The people in my family drive the same car for 20 years.
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In other words, so much of American life is actually stasis.
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But in fiction, we think stasis is death, imaginative death.
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You must change.
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And I wanted to kind of be, to resist that.
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And I wanted to write a story where there is transformation without change.
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I hope it's not a spoiler,
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but nobody gets a better job.
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Nobody's position in life is altered,
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but they are altered by the relationships they have.
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And ultimately, is people who live lives in which they can't improve,
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which is beyond their capacity,
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beyond the system that doesn't allow them to improve, are they just worthless?
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Are they living meaningless lives?
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Of course the answer is no. I'm inspired by films like Kiss.
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And that film is so beautiful because it's all about a place that does not change.
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But the people and the love and the tenderness and the heartbreak is what makes that.
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So by divesting the novel from the plot of change,
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what I gain is the people.
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And ultimately, I think, if nothing else, I write about people.
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To finish off, I wanted to bring us back to the writing.
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There are a lot of amazing quotes in the book about writing.
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Hai has been somebody who has been interested in writing and has,
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I guess, lost faith in it as a means of expression.
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But there's a moment where Guzina says to him,
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you want to be a writer and you want to jump off a bridge.
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That's pretty much the same thing though.
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A writer just takes longer to hit the water.
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So I want to ask,
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first of all, are you okay?
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And B, what does that mean?
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Halfway down.
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Yeah.
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What do you mean by that?
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Or rather, what does she mean by that?
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And how does it apply to you as a writer?
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I'm always thinking and being informed by deaf,
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which I think is a little strange.
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Perhaps it's a Buddhist concept that a meditation on deaf is actually not so dark,
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but it's a reminder that all the petty,
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you know, bristling that we feel in life,
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all the vexations of the everyday goes away when we realize that we're all heading there.
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If we're very lucky, we'll have a deathbed.
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Many people don't have that luck.
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And so, you know, when we're on our deathbed,
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the way I saw my own mother's deathbed in I mean,
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all the fights we had,
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all the annoyances we had about life and our daily living felt so minuscule as to almost be myths.
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They were just so non-present.
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And I think for me,
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writing and thinking about death is ultimately an illumination about life.
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I think that's why I wanted to start this book with a meditation on death or near death,
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and to ask of these characters,
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if you're about to give it all up and you're one step away,
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what will the life look like when you decide to step back into the world?
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And I think that's a thesis I will forever be thinking about.
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And if I'm a very lucky writer,
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I will never find a finite answer to that.
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A fantastic note on which to end, Ocean.
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Thank you so much for giving the time to talk about the book.
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It's a pleasure.
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Like I said, I need to write books faster so I can talk to you more.
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No one's going to be complaining about that.
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Thank you so much.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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Take care.
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为什么要用这个视频练习口语？
在这个视频中，海洋·沃昂（Ocean Vuong）以其独特的方式讲述了他的新小说《快乐帝王》的创作过程。他的叙述充满了细腻的细节和具体的场景，这为练习英语口语提供了极好的范例。通过模仿他的语气和表达，学习者可以提高他们的口语流利度和语言自信，将自己的想象力与文本结合起来。
通过影子跟读（shadowspeak），学习者能够有效提高英语发音（提高英语发音）水平，感受作者在叙述中对情感和空间的把握。视频内容的深度和作者的个人风格将有助于提高雅思口语练习（雅思口语练习）的能力，让学习者能够更好地理解如何在现实生活中运用语言。
语法与表达在语境中的运用
在视频中，海洋·沃昂使用了几种值得注意的语法结构和表达方式：
- 感叹句：通过使用感叹句，沃昂传达了对创作过程的激情，这种语气对提升口语表达非常有效。
- 比喻和象征：他说：“一个地方可以成为一个角色”，这种比喻增强了叙述的生动性，同时激发了读者的想象力。
- 条件句：沃昂提到的“不仅仅是文字，而是要在读者心中激活”，这种表达引导学习者理解语境的重要性。
- 强调句：他强调“设置基调是一种关怀”，这个表达反映了他对文字的细致打磨，适合在口语中使用。
常见发音误区
在视频中有一些词汇和重音可能会对学习者造成发音上的困惑。以下是几个常见的发音陷阱：
- 具体（specific）: 确保发音清晰，强调"SPE"的发音，以免音节混淆。
- 象征（symbol）: 特别注意“SY”部分，避免将其发音成“sim”。
- 细腻（nuance）: 学习如何将语调与情感结合，尤其是在表达复杂情感时。
- 文学（literature）: 注意调音，确保每个音节都很准确，这将提升整体表达水平。
通过关注这些发音细节，学习者能更好地掌握英语影子跟读（英语影子跟读）的方法，提高他们的语言能力和自信心，让每次口语练习都充满成效。
什么是跟读法？
跟读法 (Shadowing) 是一种有科学依据的语言学习技巧，最初开发用于专业口译员的培训，并由多语言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。这个方法简单而强大：您在听英语母语原声的同时立即大声重复——就像是一个延迟1-2秒紧跟说话者的影子。与被动听力或语法练习不同，跟读法强迫您的大脑和口腔肌肉同时处理并模仿真实的讲话模式。研究表明它能显着提高发音准确性，语调，节奏，连读，听力理解和口语流利度——使其成为雅思口语备考和真实英语交流最有效的方法之一。