How to choose a good video for shadowing

What to look for

• One speaker at a time. Interviews with people talking over each other are hard to copy.
• Clean sound, with no music under the voice and little echo.
• Subtitles written by a person. Automatic captions have no punctuation and often contain mistakes, so sentences are split in odd places.
• A speed you can keep up with. Around 130–150 words a minute is comfortable for most learners; above 165 is fast.
• A topic you would watch anyway. You will hear these sentences many times.

Match the level to yourself

A useful test: listen to thirty seconds without subtitles. If you catch most of it, the video is at the right level. If you catch almost nothing, keep it for later; if you catch every word with no effort, choose something a little harder.

Lessons here carry a level on the CEFR scale (A1 to C2), estimated from the vocabulary and the speaking speed. For speaking practice, pick a level at or slightly below your reading level. Your mouth is usually a step behind your eyes.

Good sources

• News and programmes made for learners: slow, clear and carefully written. A good first step.
• Talks, explainers and lectures: the speaker has prepared what to say and pauses between ideas.
• Speeches: slower still, with strong rhythm, though the language can be formal.
• Conversational channels, vlogs and comedy: closest to everyday English, and best once the basics feel easy.

Films and series are tempting, but dialogue is short, fast and often spoken over music. They are better for listening than for shadowing.

Choosing an accent

Pick one accent as your main model and stay with it for a while, so the sounds you practise are consistent. Choose it for a practical reason: where you live or plan to live, who you work with, or simply the voice you like best.

No accent is more correct than another. Listening to several is valuable for understanding; you simply do not need to copy all of them.

Length

Short is better. Five minutes of video is more than a week of material if you work sentence by sentence. With a long video, choose a passage of a minute or two and treat that as your lesson.

Using your own video

If there is a speaker you would like to sound like, you can paste the YouTube link on the "Practise with your own video" page. Three things make it work well:

• The video has English subtitles, ideally written by a person. Look for "English" rather than "English (auto-generated)" in the subtitle menu on YouTube.
• The owner allows the video to be played on other websites. Most do; music videos often do not.
• The speech is continuous. Videos that are mostly music, silence or on-screen text leave little to repeat.

Videos to avoid, for now

• Several people talking at once, or a noisy street behind the speaker.
• Songs. Singing stretches and bends the natural rhythm of speech.
• Very technical talks in a field you do not know: you will spend the session in the dictionary.
• Anything you find dull. Motivation is part of the method.

When to change video

Stay with one passage until you can shadow it at full speed with the text hidden. That usually takes four or five short sessions. Changing earlier feels productive, but most of the benefit comes from the later repetitions, when you stop thinking about the words and start hearing the music of the sentence.