Use speech shadowing to improve your Chinese listening and speaking skills!
Speech Shadowing is a magical technique for practice listening and speaking skills when you’re learning a new language, any language.
Here, I’ve made it easier for you to practice the technique for learning Chinese. Learn to speak Chinese by speech shadowing with Peppa Pig!!
This is a second article of my “learn to speak Chinese” series of articles. Last time, I tried to convince you that a simple technique for learning to speak a new language is to repeat after native speech.
In my four-step method, I kept asking you to repeat. I did not specifically say how you should it. Well, you can do it however you want, as long as you repeat after native speech (Chinese speaking Peppa Pig or my own voice recordings).
In this article, I will discuss a specific method, speech shadowing, show you how it’s done with an example, and how you can benefit from the technique, using material on Learn Chinese with Peppa Pig!
Practice speech shadowing using Peppa Pig Chinese Dub
I picked a random part S01E46 Part 1. Here is a recording of me performing the speech shadowing. You can listen to it to get an idea.
I may be a bit biased: Peppa Pig is the perfect show to practice speech shadowing with. It’s generally quite slow, and you can hear the words quite clearly.
Here at Learn Chinese with Peppa Pig, I carefully segmented the one hour long video clips into episodes and into parts that are only less than a minute long. It’d be perfect for getting started with speech shadowing!
Speech shadowing with transcripts
You can follow along the pinyin or Chinese characters to read aloud as the video clips are playing.
If you are following the pinyin, try to map the sound to pinyin. That will help you learn pinyin.
Again, don’t try to read pinyin yourself without hearing native speech first, because you will almost certainly get it wrong.
If you know the Chinese characters, feel free to read along the Chinese characters. Once you can do that, you can do speech shadowing with any show you like with subtitles.
However, what I really recommend is perform speech shadowing without transcripts.
Speech shadowing without transcripts
Just make the video clips full-screen to avoid getting distracted by the transcripts.
Speech shadowing without transcripts is one of the best ways to practice active listening!
The only better way I can think of is to transcribe the show yourself. Different from transcribing, speech shadowing also encourages you to practice speaking!
If you are new to the Chinese language, doing speech shadowing without transcripts can set you up for pronunciation success for the long run. Try to mimic as much as you can. You don’t have to know what the words or sentences mean.
For more experienced learners, speech shadowing without transcripts can really train your ears for the Chinese language. And if you also study the sentence structures and vocabularies in the show notes, that’s even better – You will learn how to speak Chinese.
To learn to speak Chinese, start shadowing with Peppa Pig!
I didn’t come up with speech shadowing myself but I’ve used the technique before for learning English.
I believe speech shadowing with Peppa Pig will be effective for anybody who wants to improve their Chinese pronunciation and mastery of Chinese tones. It can also improve your listening comprehension and speaking skills if you also study the show notes.
You can do speech shadowing yourself, right here on Learn Chinese with Peppa Pig!
Practice everyday and you will be rewarded.