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What is "shadowing" ? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| scootermclean Diglot Groupie United States scottmclean.net Joined 6256 days ago 69 posts - 70 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), Basque | Message 17 of 35 21 April 2008 at 9:22am | IP Logged | ||
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I have been reading all the posts I can about shadowing, and I still fail to understand how it helps you learn the language, outside of pronunciation and whatever vocabulary you might pickup (although, i suppose the vocabulary learning is probably an entirely separate activity than shadowing as you have to dedicate time to looking it up in a dictionary, so perhaps this cant even be included in the benefits of shadowing.)
From what I understand, shadowing is just listening to recording of a native speaker of a given text, reading that text, and speaking it all simultaneously. Do so until you have memorized whatever passage you may be studying until you can say it in random with the speaker on the recording. I do not understand how you can learn grammar, improve your spontaneous conversation skills, etc, from memorization. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6328 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 18 of 35 21 April 2008 at 10:57am | IP Logged | ||
Are these things not enough for you? Nobody is saying that it's the only thing one needs to do to learn a language. Nor are they saying that it's required in order to become fluent. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6217 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 19 of 35 21 April 2008 at 1:06pm | IP Logged | ||
How you can learn grammar: humans are reasonably good at inferring grammar, under some conditions (and poor under others). Small children do it. I don't know why inferring grammar via shadowing a text repeatedly works, but I find it does. Anything I can say about internalizing forms and structures, using them as templates, etc, is guesswork. As for improving your spontaneous conversational skills: again, I don't know why, but shadowing does. It's nowhere near a magic bullet, but it helps. In this case, my guess is that it has something to do with being used to producing correct speech at a (roughly) natural pace (at least for me, this lowers my hesitancy in using a language somewhat), and internalizing a variety of useful structures. I find it to also be a fairly effective way of pulling together various bits and pieces which are academically known, but not internalized well enough to use in conversation (having to explicitly think about grammar and structure makes everything too slow and stilted). With bilingual texts (such as those in Assimil, Linguaphone, or a variety of texts for native speakers), you rarely, if ever, need to use a dictionary for vocabulary for understanding what you're shadowing. It's much more time-efficient. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| freakyqi Newbie United States Joined 5908 days ago 32 posts - 43 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 20 of 35 22 April 2008 at 1:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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Cool, I never understood what shadowing meant until now either. Now I want to find something for my mp3 player to shadow on the way home from work. :)
If there's physical movement involved, then that helps. The more senses/faculties are involved in a process, the better you'll remember it, especially if it's repetitive; that's just how our brains work I guess. People naturally sometimes hum a tune while doing some mindless physical labor, right? It's.... natural. Ever notice how if you forget something, you can maybe remember if you go back and do what you were doing at the time you first thought of it earlier? Our bodies and minds work together as one. Maybe even better! haha... dance around a bit while shadowing, then for a new text change to a different kind of dance, ha! I bet it'd work. Little kids learn language from songs, which is a form of shadowing, and they often repetitively bob their heads or something. Just my thoughts. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ixtok Newbie Australia Joined 6075 days ago 29 posts - 24 votes Speaks: English* | Message 21 of 35 25 April 2008 at 5:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Is shadowing speaking in unison with the recording, or is it repeating the sentence or phrase at the end of that sentence or phrase?
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 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6687 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 35 25 April 2008 at 6:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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In unison (or, as close to unison as you can manage):
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=5640 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emma Reese Triglot Newbie United States emmareese.blogspot.c Joined 5814 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: Japanese*, English, Welsh | Message 23 of 35 16 May 2008 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello, I've just joined this forum because I'm curious about this method of shadowing and this forum seems to be
for serious language learners. I'm learning Welsh mostly by myself. Actually I've been doing a similar thing, that is, walking while listening to a CD, but I say sentences in Welsh after the speaker says them in English. So it's not shadowing. I've tried shadowing but I don't know how I can keep up with a native speaker who's speaking at a natural speed even if I look at a book. Moreover, if you do this while walking, you need to almost memorize what it's said. Am I doing it wrong? I try my best to write correctly but I may make mistakes since English is my second language. (I'm from Japan living in the States.) Edited by Emma Reese on 16 May 2008 at 3:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6687 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 24 of 35 16 May 2008 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Professor Arguelles (who probably is the one who first mentioned the method here on the forum some years ago) uses shadowing to get accustomed to the sounds of language during the initial stages of learning. Shadowing "blindly" (i.e. without a script, or any memorization) is a good exercise to get "up to speed", to decipher what is what in a sentence, where the sentences start and end - even if you yet don't understand a single word. Of course, it is a good exercise even if you DO know what is being said, or for that matter, have memorized the text.
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