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Alexander Arguelles’ Shadowing technique | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6682 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 37 11 December 2009 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
I can try. I have been working with recordings from the "David and Helen" textbook. The recording of the text of each lesson is typically 3 to 4 minutes long. The first time with a new lesson I sit down and shadow chunks of 2 to 3 seconds over and over. Each chunk is shadowed several dozen times. I find I can shadow a 2 to 3 second chunk, repeated continuously, for 2 to 3 minutes, then I need a two minute rest, and then I do another 2 minutes or so. After working through two or three consecutive 2 second chunks like this I combine them into chunks of maby 4 to 6 seconds duration, and attack those in the same manner. When that sequence starts flowing naturally I move on to the next bit of the recording etc. After about an hour, or an hour and a half on some days, of this I have gotten through approximately 30 seconds' worth of audio material. The next day, when I come back to the recording, I can often go for the 6 second chunks directly, but sometimes it proves too difficult and I have to revert to the individual 2 second segments for a little while. Now I will get through the first 30 seconds of the recording in maybe half an hour, and dedicate the remainder of the one hour session to the 30-45 second interval in the recording. Day three I go through the 0-30 second interval a little faster again, sometimes combining to even longer chunks, and the same with the 30-45 second interval and I can advance a bit further into the recording. After four days, with one(plus)-hour shadowing sessions each day, I am usually past the one-minute mark in the recording, and so it goes on. I set myself a pace of advancing one textbook lesson every two weeks, the idea being to thoroughly shadow through the complete recording in that time, apart from reading and writing exercises, grammar exercises etc. Quite often I never reached the end of the 3 minute recording, but I didn't want to be stuck forever so I would carry on with the next lesson anyway. At this point, stage two kicks in: Let's say I was shadowing the recording of lesson 7 as explained above. Two weeks have gone by, and I am now starting the process over with lesson 8. But at the same time, I now prepare what I call a "10x" repeat recording of lesson 7, where the audio is split into approx. 20-second chunks, each repeated ten times. The 3 to 4 minute lesson now becomes a 10x recording of 30 to 45 minutes duration. I load this 10x-lesson file into my mp3 player, and keep shadowing that every day during long walks. By now I have shadowed the early parts of the recording several hundred times, and gotten so used to it that a 20 second sequence flows by fairly smoothly. The parts towards the end of the recording have received less attention and are not necessarily as smooth. I kept this up for something like 9 months, covering up to lesson 16 in the book. But all the time I had the feeling that I would have needed about twice that time for each lesson, to shadow through it thoroughly and get the pronunciation flowing in a really natural way. Summing it all up, what I referred to as "enormous amounts" above, works out as approximately 6 - 8 hours of shadowing work on each minute of audio material. And twice as much is what I really felt I would have needed. Edited by Hencke on 11 December 2009 at 5:08pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6571 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 10 of 37 11 December 2009 at 5:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks Hencke, that sounds really interesting. I'm a little surprised you decided to split it up into such small parts, if it were me I might think to myself something like "I really ought to be able to do bigger parts at a time". A pride thing probably. But what you're doing sounds more useful.
I take it since you're doing so much work on this that you found Mandarin very difficult to pronounce? What about "easier" languages, have you applied the same there? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6682 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 37 11 December 2009 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
It wasn't a decision so much as something arrived at by experimentation. I was continuously trying different lengths, and shortened them if they felt too difficult, until I was reasonably comfortable pronouncing them and got an acceptable result as well. By "acceptable" I mean "perfect" in this case, or at least close enough that I can't detect any difference between my own pronunciation and the recording. For many other languages I am certain I'd be able to start off with longer chunks. I also found that once I reach the point where I can reproduce the native pronunciation at a near-perfect level, the work is only half done. At that point I can do it, but it still takes an effort. The next stage is to keep banging away and repeating it to get it flowing more and more naturally, with less and less effort. It's still just the same "acceptable" result, but with less effort each time. I don't consider the work done until I can get a near-perfect pronunciation in a relaxed and effortless way. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5309 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 12 of 37 11 December 2009 at 10:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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That really is an enormous amount of work Hencke. But HOW do you do it, in Audacity? Or have you prepared a chopped up version and put it in your ipod? It would be interesting to hear the result of you efforts, is it really worth the trouble?
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| delta910 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5663 days ago 267 posts - 313 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, German | Message 13 of 37 12 December 2009 at 12:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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I thought I would put in a bit of my own input.
I did shadowing for a good month with Spanish. I liked it at first but after a while I got really tired. This was mostly due to because I would put in long days and come home and shadow. The one thing that made it hard for me to do it was because of the rapid passe of the audio I was using. The first 14 lessons of Ultimate Spanish were at a nice passe but once it hit 15-16 it was ridiculous. Thus, I was not able to continue. I stopped mostly because I was trying it out for a good month to see what it was like, and I stopped because the speed of the speakers was way to fast and I would mumble or slur my words, which I knew if I kept doing that I would have a really bad accent and speaking ability later on. In reality, it just wasn't my style of learning. Not to say it wouldn't work for someone else. I would rather do an hour of reciting texts I have than do shadowing. It just isn't for everyone I guess. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6697 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 37 12 December 2009 at 1:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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To me, this sounds more like the chorusing that maxb has been doing than the shadowing of ProfArguelles. When you're speaking along with a newscast in real-time you're following the voice like a shadow.
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| Al-Irelandi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5323 days ago 111 posts - 177 votes Speaks: English* | Message 15 of 37 18 March 2010 at 7:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I find shadowing a short conversational dialogue (e.g from Colloquial Japanese for Beginners) over and over again a good way to memorize basic structures and phrases etc. This then becomes internalized within myself and I then can utilise the target language better afterwards.
So in short I use shadowing for memorization and attaining a better accent. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| psy88 Senior Member United States Joined 5379 days ago 469 posts - 882 votes Studies: Spanish*, Japanese, Latin, French | Message 16 of 37 19 March 2010 at 2:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have found that shadowing helps to get my mouth muscles and tongue accustomed to the movement necessary to speak in a fluid, more natural(i.e. more like a native) manner and at a more normal conversational pace.
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