Practice Speaking & Reading Out Loud With This English Shadowing Exercise

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.  

She, being the professional that she was,  graciously obliged. "Come to class on Monday with  

the ballet 2 student, Stefanie," she said. "You  can give it a shot and we'll go from there." I was  

so excited. But then Monday came and I will never  forget the humiliation of trying to keep up with  

an advanced class that I was totally unprepared  for. The music was too fast, my feet were too  

stiff, and my muscles were too weak. At that point  I didn't need the teacher or anyone else to tell  

me what was so readily apparent. I clearly was  not ready for ballet 2 and it was naive of me to  

ever think I could skip the fundamentals. I still  cringe to this day when I remember that story but  

I learned something I will never forget, and  that's this. It doesn't matter how much of a  

hard-working overachiever you are, if you want to  master a skill you cannot skip the fundamentals.  

Mastering the basics gives you a solid foundation  on which you can build. And then as you learn  

practice and train diligently advancing becomes  natural and inevitable. Every expert was once  

a beginner. Every skilled craftsman was once an  apprentice. Every great artist was once a novice.  

And yet... I often see so many English students  wanting to practice fast connected speech in  

English when they still haven't mastered their  vowel sounds in English, or the TH or the R.  

That's unwise and impractical, because poor  pronunciation strung together quickly in a  

sentence will simply result in spoken English that  is difficult to decipher or simply unintelligible.  

So here's my advice: take the time you need to  completely master every sound of the English  

language according to the accent you aim to  master. Once you achieve this, your English will  

shine with clarity and your eyes will beam with  confidence. If you would like me to help you with  

this go here to see what I have for you. Wishing  you all the success in the world, Stefanie.  

This was an email actually that I wrote to  promote one of our courses. This is my Amazing  

American Accent Sound Bank course where I  go in depth into every single sound of my  

American accent so if you're still struggling  with sounds in English and you want to improve  

your pronunciation, this course would be  great for you but anyways back to the email.  

This is the email. I hope you enjoyed this story  I hope you enjoyed hearing about my embarrassing  

ballet experience that was actually a really crazy  experience because I really did think that I was  

such a hard worker and I would be able to do it  you know so I begged and asked that teacher can  

I please skip the ballet one class go to ballet  2 like I wanted something hard I wanted something  

difficult and she was so nice and so just like  okay and sometimes it takes going through an  

experience to learn, like you won't always learn  just if somebody tells you the truth sometimes  

you actually have to go through an experience to  learn yourself and that's exactly what happened  

to me when I did the ballet 2 class. I was like  whoa I do not belong here like and it also gave  

me so much respect for people who do ballet and  dance and all kinds of things that I had never  

done before like people that are good at something  they make it look easy but that doesn't mean that  

it is easy and that also doesn't mean that they  didn't put hours and hours, and hours and years  

and years of hard work and effort, blood,  sweat and tears into what they have done,  

right? When you see somebody make something look  easy that is how you know they are really good at  

it okay so anyways here's what you can do again  go to the link in the description download this  

this document so you can read it so you can  study the vocabulary and then I'm also going  

to attach a file where you can listen an audio  file where you can listen to the story and then  

I want you to practice listening and reading out  loud yourself and if you want you can come back to  

this video to the part where I read out loud here  and you can slow it down you can use the features  

inside YouTube the settings or you can add an  extension to your browser that will allow you  

to slow down the story so you can really hear how  I'm connecting those words but this is an exercise  

in just listening okay you have to listen you  have to do the work I'm not going to break every  

little last thing down. I've taught a lot about  connected speech in my other videos so now it's  

time for you to to get analytical and really  try this on your own. Let me know how it goes  

in the comments. Let me know if you enjoy this  exercise. I really hope you do, yeah hopefully  

you enjoy the material that we're working with too  because it's about me and it's kind of personal  

but anyways that's not the point. The point  is just listening and shadowing and imitating  

and just trying to have some fun here with your  English, okay? So that's it oh I will also leave  

a link to the Amazing American Accent Sound Bank  course in the description in case anybody wants  

to check that out and of course if you have any  questions about it or anything you can always  

email me or just hit me up in the comments.  I will talk to you later. Take care, bye.