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Shadowing vs Echoing | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7247 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes  | Message 9 of 24 29 June 2005 at 7:39pm | IP Logged |
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After reading this 2nd article, I see that Tolman's echoing and my shadowing are synonyms for the same practice. There is no important distinction between the two, so my earlier equation of "echoing = listen and then repeat" was wrong.
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| axe02 Triglot Groupie Joined 7212 days ago 71 posts - 73 votes Speaks: English*, Portuguese, French | Message 10 of 24 09 July 2005 at 2:39pm | IP Logged |
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I have a question that's slightly off the topic. I tried shadowing, but I could not keep up with the pace of the recording (I tried shadowing without reading along with the text). I could easily understand the audio segment, but even with things I could understand, I don't see how it's possible for me to keep pace with the speaker without drowning out the next portion of the speech and completely losing the thread.
Has anyone else had this problem? I'm wondering if this is really a big deal or not because I understood the speakers very well without using the script. I doubt I would even be able to shadow well in my mother tongue or the other foreign language I have learned, let alone the one I'm trying to improve right now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ElComadreja Senior Member Philippines bibletranslatio Joined 7229 days ago 683 posts - 757 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Cebuano, French, Tagalog | Message 11 of 24 09 July 2005 at 3:33pm | IP Logged |
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I know exactly what you're talking about. I've got about 5 minutes of news that I can read no problem, but I can't for the life of me understand it all spoken at once.
Shadowing seems impossible since they talk so terribly fast. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Shusaku Senior Member United States Joined 7091 days ago 145 posts - 157 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese | Message 12 of 24 09 July 2005 at 9:07pm | IP Logged |
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I also have this problem. In the past I've "shadowed" in my head but recently I decided to try to use the more active approach described here where you actually speak out loud. Thus far I've only been able to successfully shadow dialogues that I've already memorized. In fact, I tried shadowing speech in my native language and had the same problem. It seems like there needs to be a short gap after each sentence in order for me to avoid speaking on top of the next part of the conversation.
Shadowing seems like a really promising idea and I'd love to improve my ability with using this technique. Does it just take a lot of practice, or is there something I'm doing wrong? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Edited by Shusaku on 09 July 2005 at 9:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| omicron Senior Member United States Joined 7112 days ago 125 posts - 132 votes Speaks: English* | Message 13 of 24 09 July 2005 at 10:23pm | IP Logged |
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I took a hint from advice on the net for playing scales on guitar - you get faster more quickly by going slowly without mistakes. It makes sense, since as well as training your brain, you have to train your tongue. Or fingers, if you're playing an instrument.
What I was doing first was when I hit a passage that I couldn't say well is to slow down and pronounce each word (hopefully) perfectly, until I can say the entire sentence or phrase correctly. Then I'd say it faster, and faster. What I do now is to read each new lesson (Assimil) out loud slowly and correctly, and not worry about it so much. Then when I go back and do one of the earlier lessons for the 'second wave', after I've done the English to French translation, I read the French out loud at a rapid pace. Seems to work pretty well, and my accent has gotten better, and my 'slow' pace for each successive lesson seems to be speeding up. And while I still suck at guitar, I don't suck nearly as badly as before. Edited by omicron on 09 July 2005 at 10:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Shusaku Senior Member United States Joined 7091 days ago 145 posts - 157 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese | Message 14 of 24 10 July 2005 at 11:20am | IP Logged |
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Omicron, what you said makes sense when you can practice the same dialog over and over again until it is memorized. In fact this is the only way I've been able to successfully utilize the shadowing technique so far, and I think that it does help. But from what I've been able to gather, the idea is to be able to shadow natural speech that you may not have memorized (and without having the text in front of you to read.)
I remember Ardaschir writing about shadowing audiobooks in the target language. I'm curious if he has any insight on how to accomplish this. At this point I can't even imagine being able to do that myself. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| omicron Senior Member United States Joined 7112 days ago 125 posts - 132 votes Speaks: English* | Message 15 of 24 10 July 2005 at 3:53pm | IP Logged |
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Shusaku, you're correct. I reread my post, and it doesn't really make the point I was trying to make very well. It's more a self-prescription on repairing my speaking problems than it is a description of 'how to do shadowing'. I'm more concerned with trying to repair years of pronunciation mistakes. In the past, I have had trouble with VERY simple phrases: "Avez-vous fait" has come out of my mouth as "Allez-vous fait". "Voulez-vous" would often come out sounding like "Voulez-vu". And "Tu" could just as easily sound like "tout", and vice versa. It has been especially irksome, since when I read French silently, my subvocalized 'mental' voice knows exactly how everything is pronounced, but I've not been able to get my tongue to behave. The way I see it, I created some really sloppy and inconsistent neuron pathways that control how my tongue moves, and now I'm repairing them.
Before I started concentrating on 'going slow', and getting the pronunciation perfect, I couldn't shadow any kind of new material if the pace was even slightly rapid. And I couldn't shadow old material with any kind of consistency, even if I had memorized it. (I don't generally memorize texts.) When I first started 'going slow' to get everything correct, and then tried to push the speed right away, my speed would initially increased, but my pronunciation would quite soon take a severe beating and I'd start making lots of mistakes. Shadowing older material, which no one could objectively call 'fast', was still difficult, though not as bad as before. Now that I've switched to concentrating on getting it CORRECT, with NO MISTAKES on new material, and not trying to push it, I've found that I can shadow older material pretty easily. Usually no mistakes. This is withoug looking at the text. And the speed I can use to read new material aloud, mistake-free, has been increasing as well. I have recently found that if I read a text mistake-free a couple times in the morning, I can usually successfully Shadow the recording in the evening. Before, I could have spent half an hour trying to get 'up to speed', and still would not have been able to shadow the text consistently. So I no longer have to repeat things over and over as I did before. This mirrors my experience with the guitar. When I tried for speed, my technique fell apart, and stayed bad. When I switched to concentrating on technique, my speed started increasing relatively painlessly. At least for me, mistakes seem to compound and perpetuate mistakes. Beyond shadowing a lesson once in the evening, I don't really put much effort into it as a method right now. For many of the earlier Assimil lessons, I can now read or translate them aloud faster than I could shadow the recording. When I'm at a point where I figure I've gotten my speaking neuron pathways sufficiently fixed, I'm going to spend more time on 'official' shadowing. To be fair to Ardaschir's method, I have to point out that I didn't really try Shadowing until I was already working with (somewhat) rapid material, and I already had years of ingrained bad habits and sloppiness. If I had started Shadowing from the beginning, with slowly spoken texts, I might not have had so many difficulties, and my self-prescription of 'going slow and perfect' might well not have come up at all. When I move on to another language after I've gotten French under control, I expect to use shadowing a lot more. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ducr Newbie Canada Joined 7085 days ago 16 posts - 16 votes Speaks: French | Message 16 of 24 10 July 2005 at 4:05pm | IP Logged |
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I, too, find the pace of most audio material to be too fast to keep up with for shadowing purposes. For me, this is true even in my native tongue. However, using GoldWave, I can reduce the playback rate enough to make shadowing much easier. This has proven to be an effective technique to help improve my speaking ability.
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