📺 Method — answering a reader
A reader wrote in. Somebody had told him television was good for pronunciation, so he had spent several months on Friends, speaking along with every line, long ones and short ones alike — and at some point he no longer knew what he was doing. The long sentences lost their meaning halfway through and left only rhythm behind. Looking up the words he did not know, one episode was taking him two weeks. Should he go back and redo grammar, he asked, or find an easier cartoon? Neither, as it turns out. Two checks give you the answer, and they are the same two whatever language you are learning and whatever show you picked.
Watch a stretch once with the subtitles off and put a number on how much of it came through. Below about 60%, that material is not yours yet. There is a reason for drawing the line there. You need a bit more than half of it arriving before you can patch the gaps from what sits either side of them; go under that and there is nothing to patch with, so the whole thing lands as noise. It is food you cannot digest. When the number comes out low, the answer is not a different method — it is dropping a level or two in the material.
Our reader described himself as doing this “while looking up the words”. If that was the shape of the session, most of those months were reading, not shadowing. Shadowing means speaking along almost at the same time as the voice, so it does not get off the ground unless the listening is already working ([[what-is-shadowing]]). When it is not working, people open the script — and at that instant the drill has turned into reading aloud ([[fake-shadowing]]). That is far and away the commonest route to months of practice with listening sitting exactly where it started. Reading aloud is worth real time of its own; it is simply a different exercise ([[reading-aloud-brain]]).
Television is made for adults who already speak the language, for their entertainment. It gets used as a course book because it is enjoyable, but nobody ever set its difficulty against a learner. Enjoyable and appropriate are two different axes, and a show is only ever graded on the first one.
Roughly 80% of what is spoken across the whole run of Friends comes from about 350 words, out of the 15,000 or so different words the series uses in total ([[standard-english-not-native]]). Turn that around and it tells you where the months went: into the hard 20%. Do not try to shadow the whole episode. Pick out the short lines that keep coming back and run those, over and over. Skip the long ones. Skipping is not giving up, it is the design — and every language does this, so the same arithmetic holds whichever one you are watching.
Neither redoing grammar nor switching to cartoons was the answer.
There is real value in chewing slowly through a script. It is only that what grew in those hours was vocabulary and reading, not hearing. Know precisely which one is growing and this stops being a failure and becomes a question of budget — how many of your hours go to each.
Source
Reworked from an actual message sent to the author’s blog in December 2021, with the quoted wording tidied within the sender’s consent. The vocabulary figures are the ones used across this library: about 15,000 different words across the whole run of Friends, with roughly 80% of what is spoken coming from about 350 of them ([[standard-english-not-native]]). On the trap in check two see [[fake-shadowing]]; on what shadowing is in the first place, [[what-is-shadowing]]; on why voicing a line is a different act from reading it, [[reading-aloud-brain]]. — Not carried over from the Korean edition: the original post’s hundredfold “AlphaGo learning method” and its line about Harvard listening at sixteen times speed, neither of which we could trace to a primary source, and its two Korean-language links. The comprehension cut-off was given as 60–70% in the original; we settled on the lower figure and put the reason in the article.
※ This article summarizes and restructures the key points of the source above.
🗣 Shadowing · 5 more on this