How to practise language shadowing with YouTube videos

Shadowing is simple to describe: play a native speaker and speak along with them, a split second behind, copying the rhythm, the stress and the melody of the sentence as well as the words. Done regularly, it's one of the most direct ways to sound less like a textbook.

YouTube has an endless supply of natural speech to shadow. What it lacks is a way to repeat one sentence without reaching for the mouse every few seconds. Here is how to set it up.

Choose a video worth shadowing

• One clear speaker. Interviews with overlapping voices and videos with music under the speech are hard to copy.
• Natural speech, a little above your level. Vlogs, talks and interviews beat scripted lessons, because that's how people actually talk.
• Captions written by a person. Auto-generated captions are labelled “(auto-generated)” in the captions menu and get words wrong, which is the last thing you want to memorise.
• Short sections. You'll spend ten minutes on thirty seconds of video, so the video's length matters less than finding good sentences in it.

Loop one sentence

Shadowing works sentence by sentence, so you need a sentence on repeat. YouTube can loop a whole video but not a part of one. A clip extension can: with YTMark, pause just before the sentence and press X.

1. A clip starts at the playhead and loops straight away.
2. Drag its ends to fit the sentence. Select an end and use the arrow keys to nudge it by a second, or a tenth of a second with Shift held, so you don't clip the first syllable.
3. Leave half a second of silence before the sentence. That gap is when you get ready to speak.
4. Press Enter to keep it, or Esc once you're done with it.

A five-step routine for each sentence

1. Listen to the loop three times with captions on (C). Just listen.
2. Read along under your breath until you know every word.
3. Shadow with captions on, speaking with the speaker, not after them.
4. Turn captions off with C and shadow from sound alone.
5. Shadow at full speed until you can match the speaker's rhythm, then move to the next sentence.

If a sentence is too fast, Shift + , slows it down one step without changing the speaker's pitch. Don't stay slow for long, though: at 0.75x the rhythm is still recognisable, but at half speed you're practising a different sentence. Work back up with Shift + ..

Use the transcript to find good sentences

On a computer, expand the video's description and click Show transcript. The whole script appears beside the video, and clicking a line jumps straight to it. It's the fastest way to scan a video for sentences worth shadowing, such as a phrase you'd actually use or a sound you find hard.

While captions are on, + and − make them bigger or smaller. The captions menu under the settings gear lets you choose the language, and on many videos offers an auto-translated track in your own language when you need a meaning check.

Keep the sentences worth keeping

Save the clips of the sentences you want to come back to, with the sentence or its translation as the note. Saved clips play in your YTMark library on repeat, in any browser where you're signed in, phones included, which makes a queue of sentences to shadow on a walk.

For single words and phrases to look up later, a bookmark is lighter: press B as you hear it and add the word as the note. How to take notes on YouTube courses covers the habit of marking now and writing later, and it works just as well for languages.