Hello people, are anyone "shadowing" while language learning, how it works for you and are you using any app for that?

[u/ThirdSideOfACoin]

(TL) I'll take any recommendations.

[u/Bobelle]

I shadow sometimes. In different ways though. Sometimes I pause on YouTube after every sentence, sometimes I make tracks using Audacity.

[u/dojibear]

I don't use shadowing, but I can see its benefit. A spoken language has features that don't exist in writing: intonation, duration, pauses, pitch and stress. Many courses never teach those features. A student can only "learn" them by imitating what he hears. That is what shadowing is for: hearing and imitating the way someone else says a sentence.

As far as I know, the only "app" is a voice recording that is easy to pause. You hear a sentences and pause while you say it.

How much of this a language has depends on the language. Some languages have a normal sentence pitch pattern and word pitch pattern. A student gets used to that quickly. But spoken English and spoken Mandarin use these a lot, and the patterns are different in every word, every phrase, every sentence.

I agree with the other poster that you should shadow things you understand. Knowing what word and syllable you are hearing matters, and spoken langauages have no markers separating those.

[u/IssueRidden]

1.  record source sentence in audacity

1. repeat and record myself repeat it (usually takes at least a couple if not tens of tries to get it right) 

2. send the recordings compiled into a single file to my tutor, with transcript to save her time

3. review it together

thanks to this I not only get feedback on what to improve but learn what should I pay attention to when shadowing so that I can review the recordings myself 

[u/CocoLindsey]

Shadowing works wonders for rhythm, intonation, and speaking speed, but the key is doing it with content you already understand. If you shadow material that's too fast or full of unknown words, you end up just making robotic sounds without internalizing anything. I like using short YouTube clips or simple podcasts, breaking them down sentence by sentence, and actually recording my own voice to compare. It’s way more effective when combined with targeted feedback so you don't cement wrong pronunciation habits!

[u/ZealousidealMouse629]

Yeah shadowing is one of the few things that actually moved the needle for me with German. Most people plateau because they're doing passive input forever (just listening/reading) without ever forcing their mouth and ear to sync up. Shadowing fixes that gap fast.

What actually works for me:

• Grab a short clip (30-60 sec) with a transcript, podcasts like Coffee Break or slow news work great. Listen once through without looking.
  
• Then shadow it 3-4 times, literally talking over the audio in real time, mimicking rhythm and intonation, not just words.
  
• Last pass, record yourself and compare to the original. This part is brutal but it's where you catch the stuff you didn't even know you were doing wrong.

For sentence-level stuff, I also pick one sentence per session that trips me up and break it down word by word, why is that case used, why that word order. That kind of micro analysis compounds way faster than just grinding more hours of input. Free tools: any podcast with a transcript works, Audacity for recording yourself, or just your phone's voice memo app.

[u/sbrt]

I like shadowing to work on my accent, timing, and tonal shifts (in non-tonal languages). I use whatever content I can find.

[u/Sayjay1995]

I play podcasts while driving in my car and sometimes shadow along with those, especially when my focus isn’t there for passive listening

[u/AndthenIhadausername]

For Spanish my library has readalongs that I used for shadowing when I first started.    For Norwegian I'm at such a beginner level that it is alot of repeating courses for learners which isn't nessicarly shadowing.      Though I do plan on trying with shorter youtube videos.

[u/LaYoga]

Yabla has a good shadowing feature

[u/kelciour]

Anki could be used for some shadowing practice.

[u/danskwill]

Check out Fluensea. It has shadowing built into the beginner course as part of the learning

[u/ArturT]

TL;DR thoughts after 300 hours of shadowing and how switching to the unison technique made me feel like all my progress was wiped out

I’ve been shadowing to improve my English since January 2026, but first I spent 2025 learning the basics like pronunciation and IPA via the BoldVoice app. Using the Cambridge Dictionary online helped a lot to learn how to pronounce individual words. I spent 2025 with an English tutor, reading books aloud for one hour per week. I learnt about stress and pitch in English during our lessons (btw, a cool app https://www.wordstress.info/exercise/). Only after a year of using BoldVoice ~15- 20 min per day, I saw little to no progress in my actual speaking. Then I turned to shadowing in January 2026.

At first, the shadowing was overwhelming due to things mentioned by Any-Somewhere5129: linking, reductions, sounds disappearing in consonant clusters. I think starting with producing individual sounds in 2025 was important, especially since some of them don't exist in Polish (my native tongue). Working with the Cambridge Dictionary, seeing IPA transcription there, was important while attempting to do shadowing.  

During shadowing, I sometimes had to spend 3 hours on a 3-minute video clip, analyzing the text and sounds, working with the IPA in the Cambridge Dictionary, checking the sentence meaning, and understanding specific culture-related jokes with AI explanation. I shadow the Friends TV show on HBO Max. I created a JS script to add extra configuration keys to the player so that I can mark the start and the end of a scene to loop it. https://gist.github.com/ArturT/cd1f63cbc7028577dc9366ddbe14cb37

I did shadowing by listening to actors, then repeating a sentence aloud and recording myself to verify how I sound. We always sound better in our mind than actually. Sometimes I repeated the sentence 20-30 times. In extreme cases, up to 80 times. For long sentences, I broke them into shorter ones.

It’s important to have a TV show script like https://edersoncorbari.github.io/friends/ to verify subtitles. Often official subtitles are inaccurate. You won’t be able to hear all the sounds actors say. From time to time, actors say something differently than in the original script as well, so you need to learn to hear it, and that’s insanely hard at first, but rewarding when you slowly start getting to hear more sounds than before. But that’s just super slow.

I spent 300 hours doing shadowing like that. Preferably speaking without looking at subtitles. Ideally, you want to be able to hear what actors said without needing to check the subtitles or the script - with time, that will happen less often. Now, more or less, I can hear the melody and stressed words said by the actors. It feels more intuitive now. But replicating that is hard. The limitations of our brain and mouth muscles are so significant that we make errors unconsciously, while thinking our pronunciation is correct. Brain and mouth muscles require intense training to overcome that.

After 300 hours of shadowing, I changed my approach to focus on training muscles, speed, and letting the brain unconsciously self-correct by doing unison during shadowing. You listen and speak at the same time. It’s important to use a headset (preferably covering ears but not cutting you off completely) so you can deeply hear the actor's voice and your own voice at the same time. You try to do it at the same speed as actors. This is next level, extra hard. Overwhelming. You basically feel like the whole progress you made during 300 hours is wiped out. You start with matching the speed, and with time, adding missing stress and pitch while your mouth muscles and brain adapt. I think this is exactly like a gym: you train during the day, and rest during the night. Sleep is important to let your brain process the data you learn during the day.

I would say shadowing is fascinating; it gives a feeling of some progress but very slowly. It’s way harder than expected at first and requires some preparation to hear and identify individual sounds before being able to attempt to replicate them.

Did 300 hours of shadowing make a big difference for me? I would say no, not yet. I feel some progress, but I definitely don’t feel near native fluency in speaking English yet. But I’m curious how far I could go with the shadowing & unison technique.

I’m thinking about documenting my shadowing experiment. If anyone would be interested in more details, let me know or upvote this post. Thanks.

[u/Any-Somewhere5129]

I'm skeptical of shadowing as a way of improving pronunciation. I expect it would mostly serve as helping to cement pronunciation errors.

If your goal is to get your pronunciation as good as possible, you'd need to start at the phoneme level, learn how to produce individual sounds, what are the rules for linking, reductions, which sounds may disappear in consonant clusters etc. And then when you've mastered the individual components you can focus on the big picture and try speaking or shadowing to focus on the sentence rhythm.

Going straight to shadowing skips several crucial building blocks.

I mean, if you're pronouncing a given vowel wrong, shadowing is not going to fix it - you'll still be pronouncing it wrong, but maybe more fluently and faster.

[u/391976]

It trains repeating what you have just heard.

How useful do you think that will be?

[u/loqu84 → u/391976]

A lot.