YouTube Shadowing in Any Language: Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese and More

Shadowing works in every language, but every language has its own sound: tones in Chinese, liaison in French, the steady beat of Japanese. And the best videos to shadow are rarely the ones you find by searching in English. Here is what to search for on YouTube in ten popular languages, and what to focus on when you shadow each one.

Search YouTube in the Language You Are Learning

If you search in English ("Spanish listening practice"), you mostly find lessons about the language. If you search in the language itself, you find videos made for native speakers: real interviews, vlogs and podcasts. Combine a search word with a topic you like, such as "entrevista fútbol" or "vlog cocina".

Then follow the usual rules from How to Choose the Right Videos for Shadowing: one clear speaker, little background music, and a level you can follow once you have read the text.

What to Focus On, Language by Language

English

English is stress-timed: stressed syllables come at a fairly regular beat, and the small words in between (to, of, a, can) shrink into quick, weak forms. Learners often sound unnatural because they give every word equal weight. When you shadow, copy the beat and let the small words go quiet. Shadowing for Pronunciation explains rhythm and stress in more detail.

Spanish

Spanish has an even, syllable-by-syllable rhythm and five clear vowels. Words run together when one ends in a vowel and the next begins with one, so "va a ir" sounds almost like a single word. Shadowing helps you keep up with this flow. Pick one accent, from Spain or a Latin American country, and stay with it for a while.

French

French is full of sounds that are written but not said, and words that join together: liaison (les‿amis) and enchaînement, where a final consonant moves onto the next word. Stress falls on the last syllable of each group of words, not on each word. Shadowing with the text hidden is the best way to learn to hear where one word ends and the next begins.

German

German stress usually falls on the first syllable of the word stem, and long compound words carry their main stress on the first part. Consonants at the end of a word are pronounced without voice, so "Hund" ends with a t sound. Shadow long words slowly first, then at full speed.

Italian

Italian is very melodic, and double consonants matter: "pala" and "palla" are different words, and the double consonant is held longer. Shadowing makes you feel that extra length. Copy the rise and fall of the speaker's voice, which carries a lot of the meaning.

Portuguese

Brazilian and European Portuguese sound very different, so choose one before you start. European Portuguese swallows many unstressed vowels, which makes it hard to follow at first; Brazilian Portuguese keeps them clearer. Both have nasal vowels (as in "não") that are best learned by copying a speaker.

Japanese

Japanese timing is based on the mora, a beat that is roughly equal in length: "Tōkyō" has four beats, not two. Long vowels and double consonants (the small っ) each take a full beat, and getting them wrong can change the word. Japanese also uses pitch rather than stress. Shadowing at slow speed is ideal for feeling the beats before speeding up.

Korean

Korean has no strong word stress, so shadow the melody of the whole phrase. A consonant at the end of a syllable often carries over into the next syllable when it starts with a vowel, which makes written and spoken Korean look and sound quite different. Listening with the text, then without it, trains your ear for this.

Chinese (Mandarin)

Mandarin has four tones plus a neutral tone, and tones change in context: two third tones in a row, for example, become a second tone followed by a third. Shadowing whole sentences teaches tones as they are really spoken, not as they appear in a dictionary. Slow the audio down and copy the pitch of every syllable.

Arabic

Decide first whether you want Modern Standard Arabic, used in news and formal talks, or a spoken dialect such as Egyptian or Levantine Arabic, used in most vlogs and everyday conversation. Then shadow speakers of that variety. Pay attention to the emphatic and throat consonants, which are hard to learn from text alone.

Languages With Different Writing Systems

• No spaces between words. In Japanese, Chinese and Thai, LingoLevel finds the word boundaries, so you can still click any word to translate it and save it to your dictionary.
• Right-to-left scripts. Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Urdu transcripts and translations are shown right to left.
• Translations. Add a translation under every sentence when the script is still slow for you to read. See sentence translations and your dictionary.

Choosing the Video Language

When you paste a YouTube link, you can choose the language spoken in the video or leave it on auto. Choosing it helps when the video's title or captions are in another language. Either way, LingoLevel listens to the audio to check the language, and if what it hears differs from your choice, it asks you which one to use before preparing the transcript.

All 50 Languages

The language menu currently lists English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Korean, Turkish, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, Czech, Romanian, Hungarian, Finnish, Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovak, Indonesian, Malay, Persian, Bengali, Urdu, Tamil, Tagalog, Serbian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Slovenian, Albanian, Icelandic, Afrikaans, Swahili, Irish, Welsh, Azerbaijani and Georgian.

Find a video in your language and turn it into shadowing practice. New to the technique? Start with What Is Shadowing?