What am I going to do today is I'm going to do some shadowing in
Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, and Persian.
Hi, Steve Kaufmann here to talk about shadowing, a language learning technique.
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So shadowing is a language learning technique that I believe was developed by
professor Argüelles, alexander Argüelles, and you can Google for him, shadowing
Alexander Argüelles or Argüelles.
And you'll find a number of videos that he's put out on the subject.
The gist of it is that as a means of improving your pronunciation and preparing
for output you can, while listening to something, you can try to speak along like
imitate what you hear, copy what you hear.
Even if you drop the odd word or the odd syllable, and this is a
practice in, I guess, focusing in on what you're listening to
imitating their pronunciation.
And I have tried it in the past and I found that it was not something
that I was able to continue with.
I just wasn't motivated to do it.
I preferred, you know, the more relaxed approach of either, you know, at, at an
early stage, in my learning, listening to repetitive material, like the mini
stories or as I progressed to things of more interest to me, I would focus in
on the content, what I was listening to.
And I wasn't really that keen on sort of almost interrupting the
flow of listening to whatever I was listening to by trying to, uh, say,
you know, to imitate what I heard.
However, uh, I'm willing to try anything, uh, if it's
effective for language learning.
And I thought that, you know, A.
I thought I will do a video on shadowing and then I said to myself,
well, you were kind of negative on shadowing because you haven't done it.
So maybe you should perhaps put more effort into trying to use this technique
and then see if it's effective.
And in other words, be a little more open-minded.
So what I want to do today is I'm going to do some shadowing in
Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, and Persian.
Uh, and, but I thought to myself, and of course, uh, if you follow Alexander
Argüelles, he suggests that we do the shadowing while walking briskly.
And there's even a video of him doing this.
He's shadowing in Chinese while walking at a brisk pace.
Um, I'm not going to do that.
Certainly for the demonstration, I've got no one who could film
me walking at a brisk pace.
It's a little more difficult to arrange.
And also I thought to myself, if I'm going to record myself, Imitating
someone then I think there would be benefit in listening to myself.
And I think even Argüelles suggests this, that this is a way of noticing
where your pronunciation say strays from the, uh, the native speaker.
So what I want to do is I'm going to record myself, uh, and I'm going
to be listening to the, uh, the, uh, lessons, these are LingQ lessons.
So listening to it on my iPad, but in my Air Pods while
trying to imitate what I hear.
And, uh, but, uh, and I'm going to do it in the two languages.
And then beyond that, I'm going to do it a little bit more over the
next little period, and then see if listening to, you know, my own
voice, trying to imitate what I hear.
If that improves my pronunciation, improves my comprehension, prepares
me for speaking, because up until now, my main strategy has been
a lot of listening and reading.
And then when ready, more and more speaking so that I practice my output
while speaking with my tutor and I work, continue to work on my comprehension
because even if I understand my tutor well, I often find, for example, in
Farsi or even an Arabic, if I meet someone in a store and they start on
a subject that's not familiar to me, um, it's more difficult than when
speaking to my tutor because it's kind of, I can't really anticipate
what the person is going to say.
So I've tended to want to focus on comprehension, but maybe, you know,
shadowing helps on comprehension.
I'm going to experiment.
So without further ado, let me try to set this up now
... Okay.
So that was Egyptian Arabic.
I am familiar with these contents and even professor Argüelles recommends
that he says that's a good thing because you're used to the cadence and you're
familiar with the content because the objective is to try to imitate
what you hear, even if you stumble.
... I'm in the middle of this lesson here, by the way.
... okay.
So that was a demonstration.
So I'm listening and I'm trying to say what I hear as I'm
listening at the same time.
So that's shadowing.
I maybe don't do it justice, but you can look up, uh, Alexander Argüelles
and find out more about this technique.
But what I'm interested in doing, I don't know how much the actual
shadowing itself helps, if it helps.
I don't know.
Again, I've only got so much time to spend, so am I going to spend
the time doing that or reading or listening to things of interest.
I don't know, by the way, I don't need these anymore...
uh, but what I want to experiment with is I think in particular, if I can do
enough of this I get, um, some audio files, like say I do the whole lesson,
lesson 20, any of the mini stories.
That's five minutes.
And each one of these episodes of Iranian history is about five, six minutes.
And if I do the shadowing for the whole lesson, and then I listened
to myself, Is that sort of going to help me develop my speaking
ability or improve my pronunciation?
That's what I'm going to experiment with.
And maybe in a few weeks, I'll do another video and I can report back to you.
And I'm also interested of course, in hearing, uh, your
own experiences with shadowing.
So thank you for listening, bye for now.
And I'll leave you a couple of videos on output that I've done in the past.
You may find those interesting.