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.