How to Use Shadowing to Improve Your French

First off, what is shadowing? When simultaneous interpreters interpret, they interpret a few seconds after a speaker speaks. This is similar to that but instead of interpreting what the speaker is saying, you are just repeating exactly what they say to the best of your ability.

The reason I use this shadowing technique is because I want to improve both my listening comprehension and speaking fluency. This method trains your pronunciation because you are exercising the muscles involved in speech production. The important thing is that you do not have to repeat exactly what the speaker is saying. You can start by listening and repeating words or phrases as the audio is playing. Try not to pause the audio so that the speech continues naturally because one of the goals here is to improve listening comprehension. As you get used to the phonemes that differ between French and English, you will start to hear more and more of what the speaker is saying. Although vocabulary building involves other exercises, the goal of shadowing will allow you to hear what the word is aloud with little difficulty.

Here are some resources that I use to shadow in French:

1. The InnerFrench Podcast–This podcast is on Spotify and is such a great intermediate resource because Hugo speaks in clear, standard french. Each episode goes over an interesting topic so that you have a variety of material to listen to. Also, if he notices that there might be some difficulty with vocabulary, he explains what they are in different ways in French and that is a great way to learn what words mean without directly translating them into English!
2. News in Slow French–You can listen to two reporters talk about world events entirely in French. Contrary to the InnerFrench Podcast, they do not offer explanations of words, so you can tap on critical vocabulary words related to the topic within the app itself. Because you are listening to a conversation, you are not being lectured, but rather more listening as a person on the side. The sentence structure is a little more complex which will improve your listening comprehension and build your inventory of French phrases.
3. Easy French–This is the best audio/visual to improve your everyday fluency because the reporters ask people on the street questions over a certain topic. They have a variety of videos on YouTube so you will definitely never get bored. When watching these videos, I tend to focus more on the sentence fillers such as bah, ben, euh, quoi, du coup, etc. and where to add them to your speech whenever you are thinking about what to say. There are closed captions within the video, and I sometimes use this to better understand what is going on, and I try to avoid them whenever I am doing a shadowing activity so that I can focus on the audio. However, you can definitely use the text to add to your vocabulary list so that you practice them some other time.

This is not an exhaustive list, so I am sure that there are plenty of resources out there for you to listen to including music! These are the three that I recommend using because of their level of difficulty, and you can start here before you look for others. The internet is such a powerful tool to figure stuff out so get out there and find material that suits your needs. Building confidence in one language will help you find the courage to start learning a third or maybe even a fourth one. I hope you can incorporate shadowing into your French learning journey, and eventually apply this method to other languages on your to-do list!