Start "Shadowing" in Phase 4

Shadowing in Phase 4 & Beyond

We talked about shadowing in Pronunciation Mastery, but how should we apply it to Phase 4 and beyond? First, a recap:

Shadowing is the technique of listening to the recording of a text, while simultaneously reading the transcript and speaking along with the speaker. It has been made famous by hyperglot Professor Alexander Arguelles, although it has been around in various forms since the 1950s.

General Guidelines:

• Listen & Speak with a slight delay while looking at the transcript.
• Do this over & over until it gets boring…you’d be surprised how many times that might be, because it is satisfying to get better and better and speaking these words.
• WALK while shadowing! Why? Walking while speaking allows you to get used to speaking the language in different and varying environments, and while you are doing other activities. You don’t always talk when you are sitting quietly in a room, so you need to practice in different environments
• Walking outside is excellent (if you are not too self-conscious) because there is no artificial echo.
• Retain a very straight and proper posture, thus increasing oxygen flow to the brain and promoting retention. This once again causes you to have to maintain focus on more than one activity, and can, therefore, make you a more confident speaker.
• ARTICULATE with a LOUD & CLEAR voice. If this is too hard, then you either need to listen through the text a few more times or pick a more accessible text.
• According to Social Psychologist Amy Cuddy, confident and robust posture along with a loud and clear voice can “trick” your brain into thinking that what you are learning is particularly important.

How to Do It with MBM Materials?

Step 1: Shadow the Asterisk* Sentences While Reviewing Anki

1. For each sentence that has an asterisk* next to it, listen to the audio recording in your Anki cards and repeat after the speaker, not at the same time (yet).
2. Keep going back and forth until you feel you are saying it in the exact same way as the recording. To replay the audio on mobile, press the play button directly on the card. On the desktop version of Anki, press the "r" key.
3. Once you are confident you are saying the text correctly press replay and try to speak at the exact same time as the recording. 

Step 2: Shadow the Unlocked Paragraphs

1. When you arrive at a "New Opinion Unlocked," "New Conversation Unlocked" or "New Story Unlocked" lesson, you'll receive a link to a shared Google Slide with the text and embedded audio files (you can also download the audio files in the sidebar). They are broken into male, female, 80% speed & native speed categories.
2. Listen to the 80% speed recording of either the male or female voice while reading the transcript on the page. All of the sentences you already practiced in Step 1, so you can try listening and repeating the whole paragraph right away.
3. After you feel bored listening and repeating, try to listen, read and speak at the same time.
4. (Optional) After shadowing the 80% speed audio file to perfection, repeat the same process with the native speed audio file.

Note: We chose 80% speed as the alternate audio speed because that's about as slow as you can speak without annoying your conversation partner. Speaking as quickly as a native is far less important than speaking accurately, but you don't want to speak so slowly that the person you are talking to gets bored. 

A Shadowing Challenge to You!

After you are confident that you can read a paragraph of text as well as the audio recording, send it to us for critiquing! Simply take a smartphone video of yourself reading the text out loud (you don't have to shadow, but rather read it after having shadowed the paragraph many times) and send it to [email protected]. We'll then critique your pronunciation on our weekly podcast.

Member Comments from 2019-mid-2020

Do you also want to leave a comment? You can do so below！

Ric Santos

I sent a recording of “我的爸爸” which I read and practiced like 3x a day for 4 days at 80% speed or so I thought. At first I read very slowly and then gradually sped it up. I thought it was already good so I sent a recording as a baseline to know my level. I thought I made about 5 mistakes and left it like that, mainly because I was drained. However, Luke gave a critique of it on 5 major pronunciation initials namely the X, SH, R, ZH that were repeatedly mispronounced throughout the text. After the shocking face off with reality, I immediately went back to review the PM course again. After that I listened again to my recording and noticed 38 mistakes more on just the pronunciations alone. Somebody has to point out my mistakes objectively because I need to know where and when I was doing the mistakes, and what were the factors and nearby circumstances facilitating the mistakes. My ears are very forgiving to my pronunciations and my brain auto-corrects and agrees with my ears. Luke stops another attempt to a new emerging dialect (known only to myself ! ) Now more than ever, I am AWARE of the Xs, SHs etc more than ever. It was good the specific mistakes were pointed out so that they will not SOLIDIFY into a bad habit. Before moving to shadow faster, I should be objectively accurate with the pronunciations and do more accurate practice everyday. - 以 为 I thought I was doing OK . Thank you very much Luke. I look forward to another challenging critique after 3(?) weeks or so.

MB Team

Here's the link to where Phil and Luke talked about this comment in the Mandarin Blueprint Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TJ823JyK0g&t=1661s

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William Beeman

Thanks for this useful advice. I wanted to second what you are saying. A lot of people think that language learning is primarily cognitive. Some go as far as understanding that you have to exercise and involve vocal apparatus. But language is, in fact, extremely kinesthesic.

When we use language we are always using it in context, and we are using our whole bodies, not just our brain, lips and tongue. We are moving, gesturing, directing our gaze, feeling the environment, and engaging all our senses (think Proust and his madeleines).

I should tell you that I am a trained opera singer. My great coaches insisted that when learning our roles, we should be moving as we sing. Body movement tends to concretize the learning. So when you get on stage, you don't forget your long opera roles because your memory is tied to body movement--gesture, and of course interaction with other performers and the physical stage set. This is just a long way of saying I think you are suggesting an extremely effective technique that has resonance in many other memorization and routinization learning tasks.

Mandarin Blueprint

Thanks, William!

MB Team

This is where Luke and Phil talked about your question in the Mandarin Blueprint Podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KugS7ZxUyg4&t=1136s

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Georg Lohrer

Ah, now we're coming to the real thing. Shadowing is great. Already used it with ChinesePod-stories. I downloaded the MP3s, cutted them with audacity, copied phrases 100 times after another (of course with some gap) and then "go". It's amazing. After 20-30 times I started to make my tongue no longer flipping around like a maniac. And after 50 times, I started to sound more like the native. Well, I directly started with 100% which is sometimes quite challenging, as one is not familiar with special tongue and mouth movements that fast. But everything is learnable. I here and then also recorded myself and did a curve analysis. That's the ultimate proof whether pace, intonation and volume are similar (not equal of course).
You guys did/do a great work with this course.

MB Team

Here's the link to where Phil & Luke talked about this comment in the Mandarin Blueprint Podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86aqw4g8EOE&t=2386s

Christine

Hi Georg
I hope you see this message!
I would be interested in doing the type of curve analysis that you are talking about. I was just wondering if there are any specific tools that you used to do this.
I do have Audacity and have used it a bit but was wondering what you did specifically to do the 'curve analysis' that you are talking about?
Thanks
Christine

Georg Lohrer

Hi Christine,
luckily you get mail-notifications if you're replied by someone.
Well, "analysis" is a big word. It is more a comparison. Of course you could make Fourier-Transformation of the given template and your recorded voice. And then compare the frequency samples. However that's a bit over-the-top. Especially as the frequencies will be not equivalent. My voice and the speaker's voice are usually not on the same pitch-level. Which is no problem. Chinese is a tonal language, but what's your 1st tone pitch is up to your regular voice-pitch.
Most important is my speed and rythm as well as intonation and volume.
What I have done is, I loaded the speaker's voice into one track.
Then I recorded (with audacity and my regular audio equipment) my own voice into a second track.
Now you have both tracks one upon the other.
You can clearly see whether your speed and rythm is correct.
In addition, if you normalize both tracks (-3 db) you also see whether your volume is correct.
What I could clearly see was that I was making wrong pace at certain locations. That i needed to weave some parts together hence separating each others more clearly. I also saw that my volume of certain syllables was not in sync.
If you do that a few times repetitively you detect how your phrase changes and you get closer to the template.
BTW, what I regularly use is the repetitive play: select what you want to play, then press Shift and the Play-button (with mouse-pointer). This command repeats the marked sequence indefinitly.

Christine

Hi Georg,
Thanks for the info!
Here is another tip to repay the info: To do shadowing and listening practice 'on the go' using my phone, I installed the JetAudio MP3 player on my phone. Then I copy the tracks that I want to listen to or want to shadow into a folder on my phone. JetAudio has the option where you can add a pause after each track - you can choose the number of seconds. You can also choose to repeat a track. So you can play a whole folder of selected tracks (e.g taken from the Anki cards or other sources), and repeat a track (single phrase) indefinitely, with a few seconds of silence in between. When you are happy with understanding/shadowing, you can go to the next phrase (you can use your headphones control button to do this or the controls on your phone) and repeat the process. Just a tip though - Jetaudio gets confused with the silence period wait times when your phone goes into sleep mode. It has a setting for 'never go into sleep mode' - you need to select that. This app is for Android though, not iPhone. So this means you don't need to use Audacity to string together a long track with repeating the phrase - if you want to do shadowing practice on your (Android) phone. Of course for recording and comparing the voice patterns, Audacity is the best.
Happy practice!
Christine

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Jamie Miller

Great idea on the shadowing - but was wondering if you guys or anyone else had any pointers for where to acquire material for this stage of the course?

Mandarin Blueprint

Here's the link to where Phil & Luke talked about this comment in the Mandarin Blueprint Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP6HnaJ7tJA&t=2548s