跟读练习: What 30 Years in the "Real World" Taught Me About Happiness - 通过视频学习英语口语
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Growing old is supposed to make you more wise, more worldly-wise, perhaps, more streetwise.
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But the cost of that is the wisdom of a child who knows everything.
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Children have a wisdom of innocence that we slowly grow out of; we forget.
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I want to grow young again.
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I want to stay as young as I can be.
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At least, if not physically, at least mentally, emotionally, psychologically.
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My little granddaughter Leah, she makes me feel young.
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She just keeps me with a smile on my face.
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Playing is a form of wisdom and it’s one that we tend to forget.
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I’ve often felt awkward about the phrase ‘the real world’.
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People say, ‘Oh, join the real world.’ ‘You’re not in the real world.’ By which they usually mean something like labouring and struggling through a job and commuting...
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all of these things - that’s the ‘real world’.
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But it’s not.
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Leah and little kids like her, they are the real world.
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The life she’s living, the joy she takes in everything that’s going on around her.
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And that transmits itself to me.
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That’s what I love, that’s what I love.
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To get swept up in other people’s dreams, to feel that I had to fulfil other people’s goals rather than my own, that was easy for me to do because it was what was expected.
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Everything we go through as we grow older as children is aimed towards success in life.
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It’s aimed towards making money and doing the things that everybody else expects of you.
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Societal pressure, even peer pressure, push you towards those kinds of things, pushed me towards those kinds of things.
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And I spent thirty-odd years as a member of what you might call the establishment.
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But all the time I was doing this I felt the urge to be a poet.
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I was a poet, but I didn’t dare tell anybody.
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I couldn’t, because you just didn’t.
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‘C’mon, get back to the real world.’ ‘That’s not the real world.’ ‘That’s fanciful, that’s dream world.’ It was only when I retired from teaching eventually that I suddenly realised this is what I’ve been wanting to do all along.
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This is what fulfils me.
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I did write something about that.
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Let’s see if I can find it and read it to you.
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Making It. There comes a day, we think, when everything falls into place, when troubles die, the sun shines constantly, debts fade and life makes sense.
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And does it matter then that we are not what everyone expects of us?
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And do we learn to please ourselves at last, and find ambitions lie in living here and now?
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At thirty, forty, fifty and beyond we dream of making it, achieving, of a day when we’ll sit back in wisdom and congratulate ourselves on our success.
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We’ll have the car, the mortgage paid, the kids established in their own careers.
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The problem is that we must waste our days discovering the truth instead of just accepting from the start we have it all.
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The opening of eyes upon the world is so much fantasy and we believe the dream that dreaming is a myth: we can’t (or can we, if we really try?) respect the intuition of the child and grow from old to young, from death to birth again.
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That’s Making It.
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My father and I had an awkward relationship.
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And it was based on his looking for what fulfilled him.
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And I remember one weekend I had gone to visit him.
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And we’d sit down comfortably and he’d say, ‘Hey, let’s have a nectar.’ But when he had a few drinks inside him, suddenly he became more focused on his disappointment in me for not having fulfilled my potential as the eldest.
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And he got a little bit upset with me.
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In fact he got more than upset with me, he’d start telling me things that I’d done wrong.
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And I just got to the point where I said, ‘I’ve got to go, I can’t take this.’ And I left the room and went upstairs to the bedroom.
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And I was seething, I was seething.
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But when I got up there, I realised I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep like this.
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So I went back down the stairs into the room and he was still sitting in his chair where I’d left him five or ten minutes before.
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He still had his little glass there.
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And he looked sad.
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And I walked into the room and said, ‘Dad, I can’t sleep.’ ‘I can’t go to bed with you hating me like this.’ And he just looked up slowly and he said, ‘I don’t hate you.’ ‘I’ve never hated you.’ ‘You’re my son, how could I hate you?’ And then he levered himself slowly out of the chair, came towards me, and we just hugged, hugged.
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I was just choked; there were tears running down my face.
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I don’t know how he felt, but I suspect he felt similarly.
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And then I said, ‘OK, good night then.’ And he sat down again and I went up to bed and I slept well.
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That was wonderful, that was a point where we met one another for the first time in years.
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I’m so happy now when I think of my family, my father particularly; at the end, he was my friend.
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We were friends.
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And for a long, long time it was hard to see that.
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But that love, despite everything else, remained.
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If you disagree with somebody, it doesn’t mean that you can’t be friends.
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And I think loving somebody with whom you disagree is normal.
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I’d almost argue that it’s necessary.
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Real friendship comes from understanding one another.
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It comes from realising that there are things we disagree on, there are things we might disagree on profoundly, but we still love one another.
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And that will never change.
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The arguments we have, the disagreements we have, they will come and go but the love remains.
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Are we a mosaic of people who have loved us?
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Yes. And they include in their own mosaic something that we’ve offered them.
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It doesn’t matter if somebody dies, because what they leave behind, their effect upon you, is profound; it’s profound.
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The people I’ve lost to death over the years I am what I am now, for good or for ill, largely because of them.
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In many ways Dave was who I am.
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He’s my younger brother.
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But when we were growing up he was the one who would question the things we were told we had to be and had to do.
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And I followed in his footsteps.
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He was always available to me.
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He was always someone who would be there.
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And that changed me.
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In some of the most difficult times of my life he was actually physically there, standing at my side.
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When we knew that Dave was dying, the opportunity came for me to travel there and to spend time with him.
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And it was a sad time because we knew why I was there.
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But it was a wonderful time because I was able to say things to Dave that I’d never said before.
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We both said, for example, that we loved one another.
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I’d never told him that before.
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Of course he knew it, I knew it.
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But the saying of it, that was something that was very important.
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When we just held one another and said how much we regarded the other, how much we loved the other, that was so important, so important.
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And he wasn’t just my brother, he was my friend, friend.
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Very special.
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Brother David.
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He was, and is, a leader, a head, a heart, a father’s son but ever himself: teacher, learner, a man of a better world than this.
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Here, now, in the present tense, one to walk at another’s side, to be there, to stand, to know that questions are all we are, and this is exactly as it should be.
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A brother, a real one.
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Say it loud.
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David, Dave, now we provision you.
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And you ain’t heavy – you’re our brother.
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Friends are not necessarily humans.
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I have friends who are mountains.
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I have friends who are trees.
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I have friends who are streams of water.
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I go out and I talk to nature.
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Nature talks back to me, with a voice that is instinctual, that you simply hear inside you.
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The trees are wondrous in their colours at the moment.
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But those wondrous colours signify death, the death of that particular life cycle.
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They fall down in beauty to the earth and give back to the earth what they’ve taken out.
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This is the life my brother and I have lived, him showing the way as ever, as now.
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Blessing is empathy, being aware that forest, that earth and air – these are us.
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Can they know it? Is their awareness ours?
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Isn’t this how each knows the other as kin?
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A first leaf of autumn falls brown and dry to the grass, shaped as David, while above, yellow and deepening green, his tree stirs in the breeze, smiles a quickening name.
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Springtime.
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It’s autumn and the leaves are falling.
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But they have to do that in order for us to experience springtime.
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They have to.
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The cycle will continue; it always continues.
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And that’s the wonder of life.
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If you’re going to die with any sense of fulfilment at all, you have to feel the fulfilment of knowing that what you’re doing is right.
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It’s just the way things are.
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And you’re going back to what gave you life in the first place.
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I think it’s necessary to come to terms with an accommodation with the earth, with the natural world that we’re part of.
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If I can find that I will go gentle into that good night.
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And I’ll be happy to do it.
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To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
为什么要通过这个视频练习口语?
在这段视频中,讲者反思了他在现实生活中的经验,并分享了重要的人生哲理。这不仅使听众能够吸收有价值的思想,还为学习英语的学生提供了练习口语的绝佳机会。通过模仿讲者的语调和情感,学生们可以提高自己的表达能力,并使他们在现实语境中的交流变得更加自信和自然。借助于英语影子跟读的方法,学生可以在与视频内容的互动中,提升他们的发音和语调技巧,从而在日常生活中更流畅地交流。
语法与表达在语境中的使用
在视频中,讲者使用了一些关键的表达结构,涵盖了情感和反思的主题:
- 人们说:“加入现实世界。” - 这个表达展示了社会对成功的压力,使用了“加入”和“现实世界”的对比,用以强调个人与社会期望之间的矛盾。
- “这才是我一直想做的。” - 这种表达突出了讲者自身的愿望和追求,带有强烈的主动性和自我认知。
- “我不能带着你讨厌我的情绪去睡觉。” - 这个片段中表达了情感的冲突,使用了“情绪”和“睡觉”的结合,展示了内心的挣扎与渴望和解。
这些结构鼓励学生思考如何在不同情境下表达复杂的情感,并通过模仿实现口语流利度的提升。
常见的发音陷阱
在视频中,讲者的语音和腔调有趣且富有感情,但也存在一些可能的发音难点:
- 单词“real”(真实)在快速对话中可能被误读为“reel”(卷轴),学生需要关注清晰发音。
- 短语“stay as young as I can be”中,“young”和“can”间的连读有时会让学习者困惑,注意连音的发音可以提高流利度。
- 讲者提到的“happiness”(快乐)在某些口音中可能会有不同的重音,学生应多加练习,以确保能听懂和说清。
通过关注这些发音问题,学生可以在shadow speech的练习中,逐步克服障碍,让自己的交流更加自然顺畅。
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。