Advanced shadowing: keep up with fast speech

Advanced shadowing involves following a speaker’s delivery while keeping the words intelligible. Choose a challenging passage you understand and compare your phrasing and pauses with the original recording.

Try one line nowListen to one short line, record your take, then play it beside the original. Free, with no account.

What makes these hard

Speed: 13 of these talks run at 180 words a minute or faster.
Length: Patrick Winston’s MIT lecture is an hour long, and Conan O’Brien’s commencement speech mixes jokes with long stretches of story.
Reduced words: at this speed, small words shrink and join together. See connected speech practice.

The talks, slowest to fastest

Talk	Level	Length	Speed	Try a line
Patrick Winston (MIT) How to Speak	C1	64 min	139 wpm	PATRICK WINSTON: The Uniform Code of Military Justice
Conan O’Brien Dartmouth Commencement Address (2011)	C1	24 min	140 wpm	I've been living in Los Angeles for 2 years and I've never been this cold in my
Robert Waldinger What Actually Makes a Good Life, According to 85 Years of Data	B2–C1	17 min	141 wpm	- I started out as an intern in pediatrics and I would see one ear infection after another,
Adam Grant How to Stop Languishing and Start Finding Flow	B2–C1	16 min	149 wpm	I know you all have long to-do lists, but I hate wasting time so much that I have a to-don't list.
Malcolm Gladwell The Unheard Story of David and Goliath	B2–C1	16 min	165 wpm	So I wanted to tell a story that really obsessed me when I was writing my new book,
Adam Grant What Frogs in Hot Water Can Teach Us About Thinking Again	B2–C1	16 min	173 wpm	You might have heard that if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will jump out right away,
Derek Sivers How to Start a Movement	B1	6 min	182 wpm	Ladies and gentlemen, at TED we talk a lot about leadership and how to make a movement.
Elizabeth Gilbert Your Elusive Creative Genius	B2	19 min	184 wpm	Writing books is my profession but it's more than that, of course.
Cameron Russell Looks Aren’t Everything. Believe Me, I’m a Model.	B1	10 min	184 wpm	and for the last little while, I've been a model.
Derek Sivers Keep Your Goals to Yourself	B1–B2	4 min	185 wpm	Everyone, please think of your biggest personal goal.
Daniel Levitin How to Stay Calm When You Know You’ll Be Stressed	B1	12 min	186 wpm	A few years ago, I broke into my own house.
Ivan Joseph The Skill of Self Confidence	B1	13 min	186 wpm	In my past life as a soccer coach,
Adam Grant Are You a Giver or a Taker?	B2	13 min	186 wpm	I want you to look around the room for a minute and try to find the most paranoid person here --
Derek Sivers Why You Need to Fail	B2	5 min	189 wpm	...six months ago, and I emailed asking if I can please come.
Terri Trespicio Stop Searching for Your Passion	B2	11 min	191 wpm	The day I got laid off from my job at Martha Stewart, I was relieved.
Dan Gilbert Why We Make Bad Decisions	C1	34 min	195 wpm	We all make decisions every day; we want to know what the right thing is to do -- in domains from the financial
Derek Sivers Weird, or Just Different?	B2–C1	3 min	205 wpm	So, imagine you're standing on a street anywhere in America and a Japanese man comes up to you and says,
Shawn Achor The Happy Secret to Better Work	B2–C1	12 min	210 wpm	When I was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were playing on top of a bunk bed.
Elizabeth Gilbert Success, Failure and the Drive to Keep Creating	B2–C1	7 min	210 wpm	So, a few years ago I was at JFK Airport about to get on a flight,

Levels are our own estimate from vocabulary, sentence length and speed, not an official CEFR rating. Speed is measured across the talk’s full captions.

Find your level

Beginners: short captioned lines you understand, repeated after the speaker.
B1: 36 talks with clear speakers and everyday words, slowest first.
B2: 43 talks at natural speed, with longer sentences and humour.
Advanced C1 (this page): the C1 talks and every talk at 180 words a minute or faster.

How to practise at this level

Open an exercise from this guide. Choose a captioned video for this guide’s topic and a line whose meaning you understand.
Listen and read the caption, then say the line after the speaker in Repeat mode.
Try saying the line with the speaker in Shadow mode, following the rhythm and pauses.
Record a take, then open Compare and play your recording and the original. Review words and timing; Sada does not grade individual sounds.
Repeat the line while focusing on one difference you heard, then move to another line.

Questions people ask

What is advanced shadowing?

Saying fast, natural speech along with the speaker in real time, without slowing it down or reading. The aim is to keep up, not only to say the words.

How fast is the fastest talk here?

Elizabeth Gilbert’s, at about 210 words a minute, measured across its full captions.

Start practising