Shadowing works

Today I reviewed once again the validity to listen to and work with the long daily version of the Nikkei Podcast 聞く日経. Voiced over newspaper articles is not the way people talk in daily life, but the content is extremely vocabulary rich. I also gave a new chance to the 読売 podcast. The formulaic voice is even worse here, just like the lady on a radio program advertising chocolate cookies. But I was surprised that after reading the news headlines, the BGM totally vanished. One of my major discomfort with the Nikkei podcast is the constant BGM. I sort of remember that the Yomiuri too was smeared by BGM all the way through. If such was really the case, then let's call this a progress. Something I noticed while listening and shadowing the Nikkei podcast is that I could hear mostly everything and shadow between 85 and 95% of the voice trail on average. I started shadowing at least a year ago and never as regularly as I pledged I would. I remember using for a while slowdowning software not to be discouraged by loosing too much. Then a few months later, I quit slowdowning and using the dedicated softwares. I can testify that shadowing works, first at better listening, second at delivering better prosody. Shadowing must be a de facto tool in advanced learning for any language and even earlier. At our interpreters meeting last week, I asked who was doing shadowing. I was the only one. I. the only veteran in the room, humorously said that shadowing made him nervous and tired. Tired, certainly. Nervous? Not me. There's actually some pleasure doing it.