Practice

What is shadowing, and why does it work?

Shadowing is a speaking exercise where you listen to a sentence from a native speaker and say it back straight away, copying the sounds, stress, rhythm and intonation. Instead of memorising pronunciation rules, you borrow the way a real person speaks and repeat it until it feels natural.

It works because it trains your ears and your mouth at the same time. Having to repeat immediately forces you to hear every final sound, every linked word and every reduced syllable, the things you miss when you only listen passively. Repetition also moves common phrases into long-term memory, so you respond faster in real conversations.

Shadowing on Shadowing Studio

• The video pauses after each sentence; repeat it 1–3 times and slow it down to 0.5×.
• IPA under every word, a yellow underline for stressed words, a dotted line for reduced words, and ‖ where the speaker pauses for breath.
• Record yourself and get Accuracy, Fluency and Completeness scores; wrong sounds are underlined in red so you know what to fix.
• A pitch chart shows how your voice rises and falls compared with the original.

How long should I practise each day?

Fifteen to twenty minutes a day is enough to see progress within a few weeks. Choose short videos at your level, and practise regularly rather than for a long time. When a sentence scores 80 or more, move on; come back to the hard ones the next day.